Acea talked about its many sustainability projects during the last edition of Acea Sustainability Day, a digital event open to the public and the media, dedicated to Infrastructures and next city: the opportunities of a crisis.
Circular economy, innovation applied to infrastructure management, clean energy and environment, resilience, energy efficiency, and protection of water resources. All these topics are included in the 5 macro-objectives of the Group’s Sustainability Plan, the strategic tool that defines how sustainability is concretely translated into business management.
Acea’s main activities for sustainable development
Acea has been investing in circular economy for many years. This commitment is maintained through a number of waste treatment plants, including composting plants, and paper, iron, wood, plastic, and metal recycling plants, as well as other reduction or recycling activities, including sewage sludge management.
Composting and plastic recycling: waste treatment and circularity
The SmartComp large-scale composting project applies sustainability to the organic waste transformation process. Acea SmartComps are mini composting plants that transform organic waste in compost directly in the location where the waste is produced. One of the advantages is lower CO2 emissions, consequence of the fact that road transport to take waste to composting centers is out of the equation. Another advantage is the production of compost, reusable as a fertilizer in agriculture and flower and plant cultivation.
In the recyclable plastic processing sector, Acea took the first step by acquiring the Plastic Recycling Center in Beinasco, forecasting a treatment capacity of 2.9 million tons of waste by 2024 with new acquisitions.
To give value to non-recyclable waste from the plastic recycling process, the company is also involved in the P2Me or “Plastic to Methanol” project. The so-called “Plasmix” is a mix of different plastic, discarded by recycling centers because it cannot be recycled in the same way as other plastic: through chemical transformation, the technology developed allows to extract methanol from rigid and flexible plastic that cannot be recycled.
Protecting and adding value to water resources
On the topic of water resources, a new sustainable supply management model for aqueduct water was presented during Acea Sustainability Day: a model that takes into account the natural refilling time and dynamics of underground water and that studies current climate changes and their effects on the availability of water resources.