Circular Economy for Wine (CEFW) is a digital space, inhabited and animated by circular practices applied to the wine system, which offer views, knowledge and ways of doing the economy in an environmentally, socially and commercially responsible way.

Drink responsibly.
This project provocatively wants to expand the reflection starting from this statement, asking a question (in the plural): do we design, produce, collaborate, communicate, drink and dispose of responsibly?

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CEFW reaffirms, while investigating wine, that “circular economy” is not synonymous with the enhancement of waste, but much more. First of all, it is a renewed cultural posture (which is then reflected in new economic models) that educates the limit as value, redesigns the concept of possession, invites us to cultivate depth in relationships and promotes the durability and care of goods, in favor of a future perspective of collective and ecosystem well-being.

The platform was created as an output of a research project, launched in February 2023 at the University of Gastronomic Sciences of Pollenzo and funded by NODES call, guided by this question:

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How can the circular economy contribute to the sustainable development of the wine sector, in particular in the winemaking process?

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We collected circular practices (in particular, as a first step, from north-western Italy), and then decided to make them usable, implementable and easily shareable through a digital platform, driven by the desire to tell how and why a new way of understanding and doing economics is urgent and possible.
The platform is to be imagined as a living and vital space: a collection of multimedia practices and insights that are continuously updated, thanks also to the contribution of other researchers, students and those who want to share their own circular strategies or discoveries elsewhere.
Browsing the platform you will encounter names of people and realities, even very small ones, that “circulate”: we hope that meeting them and discovering their actions will trigger new ones.
Therefore: copy, improve, network.

_{If you want to find out more about academic research, you can consult the scientific article: Destefanis, R.; Cela, N.; Torri, L.; Fassio, F. Systemic Approach Applied to the “R” Paradigm of the Circular Economy: A Critical Reading of the Winemaking Process Through Case Studies from Northwest Italy. Sustainability 2024, 16, 8960. [www.mdpi.com]}

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The research and design of the platform were conducted, within UNISG, by:

• Roberta Destefanis, systemic designer and research fellow at UNISG, project manager.‍
• Franco Fassio, systemic designer and associate professor of Design at UNISG, scientific director.

Ynnesti is a Creative Collective based in Alba (CN) that deals with the development of communication projects for the web and the press, which integrates great attention to environmental and social sustainability into its way of working and living everyday life.

Some professionals of the collective have been responsible for the co-design of the platform's pages and their web development, preferring solutions that would help to minimize the environmental impact of the site, including:

• choice of green hosting, certified by The Green Web Foundation;
• choice of a European server;
• UX that minimize email flow;
• no AI tools were used neither in the development phase nor in the maintenance and management phase;‍
• An action was carried out to offset CO2 emissions, through the planting of 5 trees in the”Ynnesti Forest”

Circular Market is a company with a social vocation - Benefit Company, founded in Turin in 2018, which deals with promoting and making the principles of the circular economy accessible and applicable through training, consulting, research and the Circular Market app.

He supported the project by sharing the theoretical study on the 10Rs of the circular economy and allowing the adoption of their graphic reworking (the basis from which they developed the web-game).Errando”).

The NODES (Digital and Sustainable North-West) ecosystem is the context and the search engine from which this platform took shape

NODES is the innovation ecosystem funded by the Ministry of University and Research (MUR) under the National Recovery and Resilience Plan (PNRR), Ministerial Decree No. 1054 of 23 June 2022.

The ecosystem covers the areas of Piedmont, Valle d'Aosta and the adjacent Lombard provinces (Pavia, Como and Varese) and aims to create a digital and sustainable North-West Italy. This ecosystem is comprised of 24 representatives of a series of local innovation actors that embody the region's productive and research excellence, in particular universities (8), innovation centers (6), research centers (5), incubators (3), an accelerator and a competence center.

The NODES project aims to support the sustainable growth of this geographical area through an integrated digital and ecological transition, in line with the specific objectives of the PNRR relating to “Digital, Industry, Aerospace”, and to strengthen the conditions for the development of a knowledge-intensive, competitive and resilient economy. To this end, NODES is organized into seven spokes, each with a specific focus. Spokes 7 is dedicated to the secondary agro-industrial sector and aims to innovate the agri-food system of northwestern Italy, making food companies more competitive on local, national and international markets.

Spoke 7 is active in two flagship projects, SADAIFO-ANIMAL and SADAIFO-PLANT (SADAIFO stands for “Sustainable And Digital Innovation for Foods”), which aim to promote sustainability and digital innovation in the sectors of processed animal and plant products.

The research project from which the platform was born is part of the SADAIFO-PLANT flagship project, whose specific objective is to improve the competitiveness of the supply chain of plant-based food products, with particular attention to the wine sector.