“PROPER Umbria” (Italian Pilot Project for the Efficiency of Resources) is an initiative that aims to promote the circular economy by optimizing the reuse of the business waste. The project is conducted by ENEA (Italian National Agency for New Technologies, Energy and Sustainable Economic Development) in collaboration with Sviluppumbria and the multinational Meccanotecnica Umbra, available for conducting pilot testing. In detail, the methodology developed consists in mapping the raw materials and the materials used in production processes, after which the resources are diagnosed and the optimization plan developed. “The project is based on the diagnosis of resources, similar to what companies in the energy field do to establish what interventions are needed to improve efficiency – Laura Cutaia, Head of the ENEA Laboratory “Valorization of resources”, which coordinates the project PROPER Umbria, explained -. The development of a voluntary discipline for resource accounting by companies can be an important opportunity to know the state of resource management and to carry out their monitoring, in order to develop an efficiency plan both at company level and on a territorial scale, also allowing companies to achieve economic benefits. Furthermore, in order to measure the degree of circularity of a company and therefore, on a large scale, the degree of circularity of an industrial system, it would be important to know the quantity and type of waste reused as by-products by companies, an indicator currently not available but extremely useful”.
