IL BIOECONOMISTA

The European bioeconomy has its own manifesto. Catia Bastioli, CEO of Novamont, makes it available with her publication “A circular approach to bioeconomy” published by Edizioni Ambiente, the leading Italian publisher on environmental issues. This is a real action plan that involves all of us as consumers and, first of all, as citizens and people, starting from the successful case of the company headquartered in Novara and, as Bastioli recalls in the subtitle, offers a great “opportunity to decarbonise the economy and reconnect it with society “.

“There is a lot more at stake than industry and agriculture in this reconnection: there is the antidote against the growing poverty that fuel populisms jeopardizing our democracies.” We need a new development model, Bastioli tells us, allowing us to “live within the limits of nature.” To do this, “we must overcome our own limits and be clearly aware of our responsibility for climate change and the central importance of natural resources. Our mindset and our established habits are in fact the greatest obstacle to trying new models, making us short-sighted, feeding selfishness, arrogance and ignorance, holding back the process of change and prolonging the current structural crisis indefinitely”.

Bastioli’s criticism of the current model of development is very clear: “The dominant economic model of the last decades of the 20th century and the first decade of the 21st century is largely linear, designed to create increasingly standardized products that generate wealth for the few to the detriment of many. It is largely inefficient development model that wastes raw materials, energy, human resources. It provokes marginalization, violence, abuse, illegality, ignorance and disregard for people. What’s more, we have accelerated the impoverishment of natural heritage “.

The circular bioeconomy revolution more than economic is social and cultural, and is based on local communities. All this will lead us to a new era, with effects that are already evident in the world of finance. The circular bioeconomy is about to become the mother of all the markets. The challenge of global warming offers us the greatest potential for investment income and growth that has ever been seen. In order to find a comparable economic transformation, we need to go back to the First Industrial Revolution.

Bastioli seems to tell us that the meaning of green in the era of climate and energy is no longer a radical chic fashion, a slogan from Milanese or Parisian boutiques, a way of life that we follow in the hope of being rewarded after ten years. No: green indicates a way in which we grow, design, build, work, produce and live simply because it is better. Green is the way to operate smarter and more efficient. Without offending those who say – like Trump – that global warming does not exist or those who argue – like rentiers in fossil sauce – that bioeconomy is utopian.