Launched last year, the ten-year Forestami project will see 300,000 trees planted each year, with over a quarter of million planted already.

“To this day [end of September 2021] we’ve planted 281,160 trees,” said a spokesperson for Forestami. “The 200 trees at the Supersalone are waiting to be planted in the next few weeks in some specific areas of Milan.”

The trees will be planted around the greater metropolitan area of Milan, which includes the city and surrounding towns and villages and has a population of 3.2 million people in an area of 1,575 m2.

The project is thought to be the most ambitious urban greening project in the world.

“It’s basically one tree for every inhabitant,” said Milanese architect Stefano Boeri, who proposed the project in 2005. “It’s one of the most democratic, inclusive and less expensive ways to tackle global warming and it also cleans up the air.”

The project is being managed by the Politecnico di Milano, which is identifying locations, choosing species of trees and organizing planting and maintenance.

“The goal is not only about planting, but also it’s about creating social environments,” Boeri said. “We have invested a lot in the edge of the city. We are working with schools to create public spaces and playgrounds.”

As part of his design for the Supersalone fair earlier this month, Boeri installed a “forest” of potted trees at the entrance to the Fiera Milano fairground. Other trees were dotted around the exhibition halls.

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Grycle is a waste management system that uses AI to manage multiple materials at the same time, recognizing and separating them all in one step. For instance, a plastic bottle will be separated into three different parts — the body of the bottle, the cap and the label — and treated accordingly. The software running Grycle will recognize and sort each of these automatically.

The process starts by shredding all the materials, after which the small parts are put through an electromechanical filter to separate the different components. Then, the spectrometer kicks in, analyzing these small components before depositing them into a bin containing only one type of material. From there, each material is processed into a composite pellet that can easily be reused by different industries to make new materials.

The best part is that the machine itself is powered by solar power (PV) and is compact enough to be portable.

“Grycle is special because in recent years there has been an increased awareness of the need for a radical change in the human relationship with the environment on a global scale,” Daniele Pes explained. “However, where everyone was talking about the problem, Grycle has been perceived as a sustainable solution, enabling a change in dramatically reducing human impact. The difference between talking about something and actually doing something is too wide, and we realized that, and did something about it.”

Over 2.1 billion tons of unsorted waste is produced globally every year, and by 2050 it is estimated there will be a 70% increase in this global waste mountain. Even worse is the fact that treating solid waste produces 1.6 billion tons of CO2 each year, representing one-fifth of global emissions. Machines like Grycle could help make a dent.

As of January 2022, the project is still in the prototype stage and the company is looking for investors to help scale up and enter the mainstream market.

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The product is a 3.10-meter tall orange squeezer machine that is topped by a dome filled with up to 1,500 oranges. When someone orders a juice, oranges slide down into the squeezer and as each orange is cut in half – its peel falls into the lower part where they accumulate. Through a process of drying, milling, and mixing with Polylactic Acid (PLA) – peels become a bioplastic. This bioplastic is then heated and melted into a filament that is used by a 3D printer incorporated into the machine. The resulting cups can be used to drink the freshly-squeezed juice and then recycled.

“The principle of circularity is a must for today’s objects,” said Carlo Ratti, founding partner at CRA and director of the Senseable City Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “Working with Eni, we tried to show circularity in a very tangible way, by developing a machine that helps us to understand how oranges can be used well beyond their juice. The next iterations of ‘Feel the Peel’ might include new functions, such as printing fabric for clothing from orange peels.”

Visitors to the “Feel the Peel” installments can first-hand experience the 3D printing process, with the concentric layering of the filament building their cup right in front of them.

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Rome is one of those cities, which has been testing the program called “Ricicli + Viaggi,” or Recycle + Travel, at three subway stations — including the Cipro station on Line A, Piramide on Line B, and San Giovanni on Line C.

Under the scheme, commuters can deposit plastic bottles in return for five euro cents each, which can be used toward the cost of a ride on the metro. Those cents can be accrued on the metro app until they hit the price of a metro ticket, which is currently €1.50. In other words, for every 30 bottles you bring, you get a free metro ride.

Environment Minister Sergio Costa liked the program but added that the ideal thing would be to “consume less single-use plastic and opt for reusable bottles.” And he has a point since Italians drink more bottled water than any other European nation, at 188 litres per person, making recycling empty bottles a major issue.

Rome is by no means the only city trying to tackle the plastic pollution problem with free metro rides. A similar scheme was launched in Beijing in 2014, and in Istanbul plastic bottles can help pay for both tram and subway trips.

Also, in the Indonesian city of Surabaya – buses accept plastic cups and bottles as payment for journeys. A two-hour bus ride costs 10 plastic cups, or five plastic bottles.

According to the organizers of World Earth Day, we buy 1 million plastic bottles every minute, with discarded bottles making up just part of the 275 million tonnes of plastic waste generated worldwide each year.

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CURA is a compact Intensive Care pod for patients with respiratory infections, hosted in a 20-foot intermodal container with biocontainment (thanks to negative pressure). Each unit works autonomously and can be shipped anywhere. Individual pods can also be connected with an inflatable structure to create multiple modular configurations — from 4 beds to over 40 — which can be deployed in just a few hours. Some pods can be placed in proximity to a hospital (e.g. in parking lots) to expand the ICU capacity, while others could be used to create self-standing field hospitals of varying sizes.

CURA aims to improve the efficiency of existing solutions in the design of field hospitals, tailoring them to the pandemic when regular hospitals struggle to increase their ICU capacity to admit a growing number of patients.

The response to the emergency in China and Italy during the COVID-19 pandemic has been to set up makeshift emergency hospitals such as tents or build new prefabricated wards with biocontainment. While the latter option is time- and resource-intensive, the former one exposes medical professionals to a higher risk of contamination and adds operational strain — especially in the long run.

Learning from both approaches, CURA strives to be as fast to mount as a hospital tent, but as safe as a hospital’s isolation ward to work in — thanks to biocontainment (an extractor creates indoor negative pressure, complying with the standards of Airborne Infection Isolation Rooms – AIIRs). It follows the standards for COVID-19 hospitals issued by the Chinese authorities while speeding up execution.

Each CURA pod would contain all the medical equipment needed for two intensive-care patients — including ventilators and intravenous fluids stands. All units can be connected by an inflatable corridor. The first CURA pod was built for test at a hospital in Milan, Italy.

CURA pods are being conceived as a ready-to-use solution. Shipping containers can easily be moved through different modes of transport — from ship to rail to truck — and re-used in different parts of the world, adapting to the needs and capacity of the local healthcare infrastructure.

CURA is developed in an open-source, non-for-profit framework and solicits suggestions and improvements.

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