Description: Social media campaign, website news dissemination

Description: Examples of activities: dedicated research, event, and communication campaign across social media, digital platforms, and print channels

Description: The activity we would like to propose involves communication with citizens to raise awareness about the proper collection of WEEE. In 2018, we made the cartoon RAEEMAN, starring the recycling superhero, which helps children and adults understand what WEEE is and encourages them to follow him in good collection practices to avoid harming the environment. The story of the superhero who fights WEEE abandonment is told also in comic form in the magazine "The Adventures of RAEEMAN," produced both in color and coloring versions and designed for primary and middle schools. The material is in Italian.

Description: E-cycle is the first consortium created with the sole purpose of offering integrated solutions for the management of waste from electrical and electronic equipment, batteries, and accumulators, with a particular focus on the end of life of solar panels. We are a collective system founded by a group of organizations based in Italy and abroad, including waste electrical and electronic equipment (WEEE) managers, manufacturers and importers of photovoltaic panels, batteries and accumulators, traders and intermediaries of new and used modules, as well as operators active in logistics, consulting firms, technical and legal firms specialising in services and activities related to sustainable energy supply chains

Description:

In recent days, Futuredata has shared on social media examples of closed mines across Europe, reminding us that natural resources are  never-ending. 
On October 14, we’ll show that urban mines are different — they constantly regenerate through the WEEE produced by our cities.
The challenge is to recover these materials far more efficiently than we do today.

That’s why Futuredata has developed Ariadne, a Data-Driven Material Recovery System that connects electronics manufacturers and WEEE treatment plants, fostering collaboration for a truly circular and sustainable use of resources.

Description:

Together with Chiara Magrini, the PhD candidate I am supervising, we will take part in Ricicla Tech, a live-streamed talk on Ricicla.tv dedicated to innovation and sustainability in technology.

Our discussion will focus on our informal project “mobi” (microbial ore bioleaching), which tackles one of the most urgent environmental challenges of our time: electronic waste, the fastest growing waste stream globally, with 62 million tonnes generated in 2022 and only 22.3% formally recycled.

mobi explores biotechnologies as low impact methods for extracting critical metals from end of life smartphones, an emblematic symbol of overconsumption in consumer electronics. The project develops microbial processes where naturally occurring microorganisms ferment industrial and agro industrial effluents to produce organic acids that act as biolixiviants, natural reagents capable of solubilizing metals such as copper, gold, nickel, tin, and zinc, achieving extraction yields of around 25% without the use of harsh chemicals typical of hydrometallurgy.

Within mobi, waste is not the end but the beginning, a new resource and a new story where microorganisms become allies in transforming what we discard into value.

Open to the public and accessible online, the talk will invite the viewers to rethink the materials hidden inside our devices, the potential of microbes to unlock a truly circular future for technology, and above all to question what we truly consider waste

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The project is carried out within a PhD in Environmental, Land and Infrastructure Engineering (DIATI) at the Polytechnic University of Turin, co-funded by the PNRR iEntrance project and developed in collaboration with the Center for Sustainable Future Technologies (CSFT@Polito) of the Italian Institute of Technology (IIT).