Across Italy, entrepreneurs, researchers and local communities are demonstrating that damaged natural resources and industrial waste can become the foundations of new products. Projects in Puglia, Sardinia and northern Italy are applying circular-economy principles to dead olive trees, abandoned fishing equipment, textile scraps and cork residue.
In Tricase, in the province of Lecce, the benefit corporation and certified B Corp Vaia has introduced Olive Matter, a material containing wood fibers from olive trees affected by Xylella fastidiosa. The bacterial disease, first detected in Puglia in 2013, has devastated the region’s historic landscape and is estimated to have damaged or killed approximately 20 million olive trees.
