Green Chemistry, Circular Economy and Sustainable Development: An Operational Perspective to Scale Research Results in SMEs Practices

Abstract

Green Chemistry, Circular Economy and Sustainability are issues at the center of the modern scientific debate and three major trends in the global market. These three subjects are interconnected and interdependent and represent an affordable set of principles bringing innovations in the management of complex processes connected with anthropic use of resources. Today’s world population requires more natural resources be consumed than in previous decades, thus contributing to making primary resources increasingly scarce and with limited access. Furthermore, an issue that persisted over time to become unsustainable is the waste emergency. It is also linked to the low capacity of operators to recover and re-use scraps of the production processes losing production values and generating environmental pressure. Companies, whose growth is crucial for the economic system, generate waste in all stages of the production processes; although there is an increasing attention and awareness on the issue of waste, we are still in the early stages of the process that will lead SMEs to zero waste production. If we recognize such attribute as a competitive factor, we can identify in advance a critical innovation demand generated by SMEs operating in low competitive areas which has to be supported with technological transfer inn order to result “green” and effective in the short/medium term. This paper presents data and defines there critical innovations domain in order to deliver an effective and scalable innovation transfer concerning circular economy thorough the application of green chemistry principles exploiting territorial factors in order to deliver sustainable local production chains.