 Hello everyone. My name is Federico Rossi. I'm an environmental engineer and a researcher of the University of Siena and a member of Life Care's Renewable Energy and Sustainability, a spin-off of the University of Siena. In this presentation, I'm going to describe you a little bit our team, the services we provide and the aim of the spin-off. As a spin-off, Life Care's is a private company that is economically supported by a public institution that is, in this case, the University of Siena, which is very important for all companies like Howard's, who want to rise and grow, especially in this difficult moment during the pandemic. So it was a great opportunity for us to take this chance to find a new organization. So eight members of the University of Siena, including me, have founded this company in 2020. All of us, let's say, that we share a common vision of how future society should be. We all think that the concept of sustainable development and green energy transition should be fundamental for future society. And these topics are currently very important because many countries, including Italy, decided to invest a lot on them for the post-pandemic recovery program. And for this reason, we think that sustainability, including environmental, economic and social sustainability, may represent a very important opportunity for both research and industry. So we are very glad to take part to this radical change with our contribution. Our team is composed of eight members. We all come from the academic world. Agedal Giuseppe Nicrop is our president and an associate professor of organic chemistry. Maria Laura Parisi is the vice president and an associate professor of physical chemistry. Ricardo Bazzosi is a senior professor of physical chemistry and he also invested very important roles in the Italian Ministry of Education and many international research programs like Horizon 2020. The other members of the team belong to different backgrounds. For instance, I'm an environmental engineer. Giuseppe DiFlorio is an engineer as well, but Lorenzo Tosti and Elena Buzi are chemists and Sabina Jetz is an agronomist. So this differentiation of our expertise is very helpful for us to guarantee to our customers the right figure for their specific needs. Our expertise is mostly related to the research on sustainable energy because in the last years we joined several national and international projects in this field, especially on geothermal energy. There is basically the heat that is produced by the inner part of the earth that can be converted to electricity or heat used for domestic or industrial applications. This is considered a renewable energy source even though there are some discussions about that, but it is really important for Tuscany and for Siena as well. Another research field that is very important for us is innovative and traditional photovoltaic. You probably know that photovoltaic models convert solar radiation to electricity. Traditional photovoltaic models are made of silicon where it has innovative modules that try to replace silicon with other more common compounds and cheaper compounds such as organic compounds. Energy storage is another important field of research because you probably know that some of the renewable energy sources like solar radiation is variable in time. Therefore, sometimes we can have an excessive production from photovoltaic which may represent even a problem for the electric grid. Therefore, it is necessary to store this energy surplus and use it when electricity is not available. In that way, we can extend the range of utilization of renewable energy sources. Our expertise is focused on renewable energy research, but thanks to flexible methodologies and software that we adopt and thanks to a collaboration and an exchange of information with our customers, we can deal with all the industrial processes. So our services are multiple. We can provide the calculation of the environmental and carbon footprint. That is basically the calculation of all the greenhouse gases emissions due to the life cycle of a certain product or we can also consider other environmental indicators like the acidification or the ozone depletion or the materials depletion. For this scope, we use a specific approach that is named the life cycle assessment. We will discuss it a little bit later, but I can already say that this is a standardized and consolidated approach. In case this approach is applied when a system is at the design stage, we talk about eco design because in such way the product we are designing is thought from scratch to be sustainable for the environment and therefore LCA analysis are much more effective. We also provide support for environmental audit and labeling. There are several companies that are interested in getting an environmental certification because it can be very useful in certain types of markets. These certifications are released by specific companies or specific organizations that use our same methodology. For this reason, we can provide the support for those companies who are interested in getting these certifications. Another support we provide is the support for environmental communication because a company who produces a sustainable product for the environment or a university that proposes project that is oriented to a sustainability perspective should express their results in the correct way. They should underline their environmental advantages of the product or the project they are proposing. We can provide support for this thanks to our experience with publications and the international journals or other conferences. The last service we can provide is the life cycle costing analysis. This approach is very similar to the life cycle assessment because the consumption of certain materials or the consumption of energy represents a cost as well as an environmental impact. Therefore, using a similar methodology, we can calculate the cost related to the overall life cycle of a product. From the raw materials extraction to the cost for the disposal. Before going into detail of the terms and the methodology that I mentioned, I would like to explain a little bit more why we are so much involved in sustainable development and environmental sustainability because we think that the model of development of our society is currently not sustainable because we are producing a huge amount of waste. The problem of plastics in oceans and in water bodies is well known but it is still unsolved and there are a lot of other environmental issues related with waste such as human and ecosystem toxicity. Another problem is the huge emissions of pollutants. The problem of global warming is well known and a lot of efforts are done by international institutions and research organizations to fight this very big problem but there are also a lot of other different implications related to the emissions of the environment like the ozone depletion or the acidification. These emissions can change the pH of the environment and get it much more acid. Another problem is the depletion of the natural resources of our planet. There is a famous indicator is the Earth Overshoot Day. There is the day when all the resources that can be naturally replenished by the planet are consumed. In 2019 this day was July 29. Actually in 2020 it was a little bit later because the pandemic unfortunately has slowed down all our activities but of course it is not the solution to address the resources depletion. The real solution is moving towards a new paradigm of development that is sustainable development. One of the main environmental problems of development is that it is really demanding from an energy point of view. Development requires a lot of energy and for such reason the energy consumption worldwide is increasing really rapidly. As you can see from this dynamic chart there are countries that are running really fast from this point of view like China and India but all the countries are increasing their energy consumption. Meanwhile resources are decreasing very fast and we have to turn the system to renewable energies if we don't want to be out of the energy that we need for the development. The consequences of climate changes can be really traumatic. The ice melting, migrations, extreme climatic events, the increase of sea levels, the desertification of a lot of areas of the planet which determines the lack of water, fresh water and food and worse for the few resources that are still available. This scenario can seem to you a little bit apocalyptic but actually the consequences are already there and I'm talking about hurricanes and huge wildfires that represent a risk for the environment but also for risk for human health, for human life and an economic risk as well because it is very expensive let's say to recover from these terrible events. For all these reasons the environmental, a lot of environmental sustainability programs have growth in the last years. The most famous example is the Paris Agreement of the United Nations where 196 countries in 2015 have declared their engagement to keep the increase of the earth average temperature below two Celsius degrees or 1.5 degrees if it's possible compared to the pre-industrial era. The engagement of world leaders is very important but it is not sufficient. It is not enough to win this battle against climate change and all the people have to contribute for this scope to really achieve the goals of the United Nations. Indeed the United Nations proposed another initiative that is the definition of the sustainable development goals, a list of 17 goals to be addressed by country in order to become really sustainable. A lot of other national and international programs have been proposed at national and international level by Italy as well. According to our experience the sustainable development goals that we are mostly addressing is the affordable and clean energy whose main target is ensuring universal access to affordable, reliable and modern energy services. For this perspective renewable energies are really important because you may try to think about remote communities in an isolated place not connected to the grid. In these places sometimes wind or solar energy are the only abundant resources and these resources allow to produce and self-consume all the energy needed by these people. Another important target is that of related to the energy efficiency because all the energy systems including those based on renewable sources have an environmental impact that is related to their overall life cycle. Therefore the only clean energy is that that energy that we do not produce and for this reason reducing the energy waste thus increasing the energy efficiency is getting really important. For all these reasons life cycle thinking is very very important to address these kind of issues. Life cycle thinking is a general approach that includes environmental, economic and social sustainability. Life cycle assessment is part of this general approach and it is a methodology to calculate the environmental impact of a product during its life cycle. It is already consolidated and standardized by ISO standards ISO 14,040 and 14,044 regulations and it is a methodology that allows to consider all the resources consumption and the solid gases and liquid emissions to the environment occurring over the system life cycle. It allows to describe the eco-profile of a product using several types of indicators. Among them carbon footprint and water footprint are the most commonly adopted. Carbon footprint particularly is very reliable because it is calculated on a scientific base. Indeed all the gases that are emitted to the atmosphere have a certain global warming potential which depend on their physical and chemical characteristics. All these global warming potential of all the gases are calculated and related to reference. There is carbon dioxide therefore all these indicators are expressed as kilograms of equivalent carbon dioxide. Another environmental indicator is the water footprint. The water footprint is let's say accounts for all the water consumptions related to a certain product. Let's try to think about agri-food and textile products. When we are eating a tomato we are also eating all the virtual water that was consumed for this scope and for the irrigation and for washing the tomato or when we are wearing a pair of jeans a lot of water has been used to wash and to treat the pair of jeans. So unfortunately the water footprint of a lot of countries like Italy are much bigger than what we may expect. In order to give a further example of the life cycle thinking approach let's try to think about what happens when we turn on light in our room. When we turn on a light somewhere in our country the power plant produces some electrons that flow from the power plant to our house across a very long cable. But in this power plant we are burning fossil fuels we are burning natural gas. So this natural gas comes from a wheel maybe in Russia or somewhere else. So there is a direct connection from the wheel of natural gas to the room that we are lighting up. So this is very representative of the effects in time and space of a simple action like turning on a light. In this slide I'm going to explain a little bit more life cycle assessment from the ISO 14,040 perspective. According to the standards this is a methodology composed of four steps the goal and scope definition where we are trying to answer why we are doing this analysis and for whom and we define all the methodological assumptions that are required for the analysis. The second phase is the life cycle inventory that is basically a list of all the materials and energy inputs so the consumption of raw materials and the emissions to the environment occurring during the life cycle of the system. Those flows are listed and quantified. The third phase is the life cycle impact assessment. This stage allows to convert all the amounts that we listed in the previous phase to environmental impacts using different impact categories. This can be done through the product with some conversion factors that are named impact factors. The fourth phase is the interpretation. In this phase we try to understand the message and the meaning of our LCA result that should be coherent with the goal and scope of the analysis. Therefore the interpretation of LCA result may suggest to the analyst some changes to be applied in the previous steps of the model. One of the decisions we have to do when we design an LCA model is the system boundaries. The system boundaries include, let's say we have to set all the processes, everything that is included in the analysis and what is excluded. The more general approach is the cradle to grave approach where we consider all the environmental impacts related to raw materials extraction to the end of life. Sometimes this approach cannot be done or maybe it is not reliable because maybe we are considering innovative technologies whose waste management is not yet very clear. We can move to a cradle to gate analysis or excluding the end of life or focusing on just one phase or a few phases of the life cycle. For instance the operation. This can be done for instance when we compare vehicles that are fueled by natural gas or oil or gasoline. In this case maybe we can be focused on the operation of the vehicle because we are just comparing different fuels. The last option is to perform a cradle to cradle analysis which reflects the idea of circular economy where the raw materials extraction are let's say reused or replaced by the materials that reach the end of life in a closed loop. Over the system boundaries in the golden scope definition we also have to define the function of the system. So for instance the function of a geothermal plant is producing electricity. The reference flow that is the main output of the system. The reference flow of geothermal plant is the electricity production and byproducts. It is possible that our product system has multiple outputs. For instance a geothermal plant may be able to produce both electricity and heat. The functional unit of the analysis is a unit that is used to express the results. For instance it should be coherent with the function and if the function of the system is producing electricity the functional unit can be set to one kilowatt hour. So the results are expressed as kilograms of equivalent carbon dioxide per kilowatt hour or other indicators are all expressed per kilowatt hour. This is very important to compare different systems having the same function. For instance we can compare a geothermal plant with a photovoltaic plant or with another wind farm or whatever. Okay let's discuss a little bit how to show LCA results. There are several ways of presenting LCA results. The first one is using midpoint indicators. All the emissions to the environments are responsible and can be connected to different environmental issues like global warming, acidification and ozone deflation. LCA allows to calculate using some reference units these environmental indicators and so this approach is named the problem-oriented approach. After that all the above mentioned problems have some effects, have some damages to the environment. For instance we have the three damage categories, damage for the ecosystem, for human health and for resources. This way to describe the results is a damage-oriented approach and it is named endpoint impact, endpoint environmental impact. It is also possible to summarize all the impacts to the environment using a single score, a single environmental impact value expressed as eco points. That is a unit that through the normalization and weighting of the impacts allows to summarize all the impact and damage categories. Moving from the midpoint indicators to the single score we are adding uncertainty to our model because every step we use conversion factors that have a certain uncertainty. Even though these methods are all standardized by internationally recognized research organizations and universities. Indeed it is not possible to really see what are the effects of global warming to the human health in terms of a number of years of life lost. The choice of the way to express the results also depends on the target audience of the analysis. So LCA results can be used to compare different solutions and determine which ones are the most let's say the most sustainable for the environment. So it is the support for the seasoned makers. So what do we need to make life cycle analysis? LCA analysis requires several data. We need some background data that are generally contained in a database. The most common database is a co-invent but there are a lot of different databases. All these databases contain all the background information we need to build our model. For instance if our customer is consuming a certain amount of electricity we need to know what is the environmental impact of that electricity. The amount of electricity consumed by the customer is a primary data. So we need background data to build the model but then the model is composed of primary data possibly provided by the customer. Moreover we need the calculation software like Sima Pro that allows us to perform the calculations and the life cycle impact assessment and then the other the last ingredient of the recipe is the technical and scientific background of the LCA analyst who should be able to interpret the results and providing suggestions for improvements of the LCA models or for the product we are considering. As you can see in the previous slides there are several approaches to perform a life cycle analysis. The European Commission and the Joint Research Centre is trying to provide a unified and a single approach that is named PEF or Product Environmental Footprint or Organization Environmental Footprint if we are considering the life cycle of organizations instead of products. This method is more specific because the JRC provides some category rules that are specific for different products so those are the rules that we should follow to perform a life cycle analysis. The JRC also provides a specific database and the specific calculation method so if we follow all these rules and we use all these tools the European Commission can release an environmental certification that is the Product Environmental Footprint or Organization Environmental Footprint. Here you can see a list of all the products and all the sectors that have been regulated by the PEF category rules and here you have other environmental certifications some of them are generic like the EMAS that is a European certification, the ISO 14001 that is a World International certification. We have some certifications related to the energy efficiency of electronics and other laptops or other electric components. We have some certification specific for clothes like guts or ecotex or other certifications that are mandatory when we consider the possibility to recycle products like plastics. Ecodesign, I already said something about that when I spoke about our services. I just would like to add that the interpretation is very important in this stage because it is the phase where we try to get and understand the message of our LC analysis that allows us to really improve the design of a certain product. Life cycle costing as I said in the previous slide this is a methodology that mimics life cycle assessment. Indeed to perform a life cycle costing we can use the same eco-invent database that also contains data about the economic impact of the products. So why should we perform, why a customer should ask us to perform a life cycle analysis? First of all we have a moral reason and more general reason that preserving the environment is something that we should do for ourselves but also for future generations because these environmental problems that I listed before really have some huge and terrible consequences. The other reasons are we have some more practical reasons that saving energy and resources does not only contribute to reduce the environmental impact but also allows to save money because resources have a cost and so it represents also an economic advantage. Proposing a sustainable product in the market can be also very useful for those companies who want to attract customers that are conscious and interested in environmental problems. These customers are getting very, very, there are a lot of customers that are interested in that because the public opinion is getting always more conscious about these environmental issues and their terrible consequences. Investing in sustainability is also important to promote and to stimulate innovation. During the eco design we are improving the environmental performances and the sustainability of a certain product so we can provide innovative products on the market and at the end depending on the legislation of certain nations we can have different types of advantages from the administrative point of view. In these slides now I'm going to show you a very short summary of some case studies. This is an example of a geothermal power plant particularly it is a geothermal power plant in the design phase though this is an example of eco design. The eco design because the system is not already constructed it is still at the design level. So according to the project we calculated we consider all the inputs in terms of resources, energy materials and all the outputs in terms of emissions, waste and materials recovered for a second life. The life cycle stages of a geothermal power plant are the exploratory investigations that is a very important phase to really find a place where the geothermal resources can be really exploited. The commissioning that consists on the drilling of the wheel to get the heat to be converted to electricity and the construction of the plant, the operation and maintenance, the decommissioning and at the end the recycling and reuse of certain parts of the plant. Our goals were calculating the eco profile so all the environmental parts at midpoint level, studying alternative solutions for the minimization of the impact and so performing the eco design. As you can see we have in this table the midpoint results that are expressed using different units according to the LCEI method adopted and here in the third column we have the results for considering electricity as the only output of the power plant. We have then a second column where we consider the production, combined production of heat and power so basically the approach that we used is to avoid the environmental impact of heat produced burning natural gas so we can have actually some negative impacts because we are avoiding the impacts of alternative heat production and then we can present and compare our results with those of the energy mix so the electricity that we can withdraw from the grid. We can see that the geothermal power plant is really sustainable from the environmental point of view because all these environmental indicators are, all the environmental impacts are lower than the energy mix excluding the mineral, fossil and renewable resources depletion that are concentrated during the construction of the power plant. Summarizing all the inputs so all the results to calculate a single score we can see that the overall eco profile of a geothermal plant is much more sustainable than the energy mix in Italy. Now I'm going to describe you another example of eco design for PV plants. This is a theoretical, let's say, analysis where we compare the eco profile of a PV plant assisted by storage in several countries of Europe, Denmark, Spain, France, Greece, Hungary, Italy, Portugal and Romania. For all these countries we consider a reference energy consumption over the year for a residential user composed of a family of three people and this parameter that is the equivalent operative time at full power of the PV plant that is basically proportional to and representative of the solar radiation availability. I'm not going to describe in detail the equations for the design of the PV system and of the capacity of the storage system. At the end of applying all these equations we can get the solar home system so the size of the PV system and of the battery bank in our PV installation that is named the solar home system. So the following step is calculating the performances of the PV system namely the how much energy we have to consume from the grid, how much energy we are producing and the self-consuming and what is the lifespan of the energy storage systems. All these outputs contribute at the end to the calculation of the eco profile of our PV system because the environmental impact is expressed per kilowatt hour of output of electricity supplied to the load to the electric load. So we need to know all the both the configuration and the performances of the PV system and eco-invent is the database that we use to perform the analysis. OpenLCA is the software and then we get the environmental impacts so we can compare the results for different countries. We can see that in Italy, in Romania, in Hungary and in Portugal the best battery is a battery composed of nickel, cobalt and aluminium whereas in Spain and Greece the best battery is composed of nickel, cobalt and manganese whereas in France and Denmark the best solution is using the electricity for the grid. So I hope that after showing you let's say what our life cares can do if you have curiosities about that you can always contact and search for our company on the website LifeCaresSRL and you can if you want further details about our services please contact us. Thanks a lot for the attention.