Animal hides are one of man’s earliest and mostly used materials; many rawhide products, primarily leather, have for centuries been used for several purposes. The peculiar mechanical properties of leather depend on the hide composition, a dense collagen feltwork. Unfortunately, due to their proteic composition, rawhides may undergo microbial attack and biodeterioration. Over centuries, different processes and treatments (brining, vegetal or chrome tanning, tawing, etc.) were set up to face the biological attack and modify/stabilise the hide’s mechanical properties. Nevertheless, even present-day rawhides are subjected to biological colonisation, and traces of this colonisation are clearly shown in Chrome(III) tanned leathers (in the wet blue stage), with obvious economic damages. The colonisation traces on tanned leathers consist of isolated or coalescent red patches, known as red heat deterioration. Parchments are rawhide products, too; they derive from another manufacturing procedure. Even parchments undergo microbial attack; the parchment biodeterioration seems comparable to leather red heat deterioration and is known as purple spots. Recently, an ecological succession model explained the process of historical parchment purple spot deterioration; the haloarchaea Halobacterium salinarum is the pioneer organism triggering this attack. The marine salt used to prevent rawhide rotting is the carrier of haloarchaea colonisers (Migliore et al., 2019). The aim of this study was to investigate the dynamics of biodeterioration on Chrome(III) tanned leathers and its effects on the stability/integrity of collagen structure. To this end, standard cultivation methods were integrated with three updated technologies, Next-Generation Sequencing (NGS), Raman spectroscopy, and Light Transmitted Analysis (LTA). A bioinformatic comparison between chrome tanned leather vs. historical parchment colonisers was performed to evaluate if leather and parchment share common culprits; furthermore, the effect of the biodeterioration on the physical properties of the hide product was evaluated.

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The GHGs emissions by different activities show that the main part that is 25% belongs to electricity and heat production and the industrial activities counting as 21% of total emission. About 37% of the electricity consumption in Europe belongs to manufacturing and share of industrial activities in GHGs are among 30% to 40%. The electricity production trends show that the proportion of the renewables energy is going to reach to 20% in Europe by 2020 and according to the new energy targets, the minimum use of renewable energy must be 27% by 2030 and decarbonizing by 2050. For the industrial sector as a main energy consumer several elements affect the total energy consumption that start from the mining of the raw materials, transporting the materials to factories, grid network and finally the product to the end users and landfilling/recycling the used products. In this regards, to analyse all factors together a new multi-objective dynamic model has been developed. Moreover, to achieve eco-factories, the main solutions have been provided and dynamically analysed by the model. The results show that, all possible factors must be considered at the same time and applying just some approaches such as solar panels and forgetting the other factors such as end user, life cycle analysis and many other factors will not achieve the sustainability goals. The multi-objective dynamic models can be used as an appropriate approach to check the role of all solutions in achieving eco and sustainable factories.

Here we present the hydrological effectiveness of Low Impact development (LID) solutions at urban catchment scale, by modelling a highly urbanised area located in South Italy. For the model creation and simulation, PCSWMM based on the Storm Water Management Model (SWMM) was used. The analysis was carried out by considering different land use conversion scenarios including the implementation of LID practices. Therefore, a specific permeable pavement and green roof developed and implemented at full scale at University of Calabria were chosen as source-control measures. The simulations were run by using as input a synthetic hyetograph of 30 min with return period of 10 years. Three hydrological performance indexes, Runoff Coefficient (RC), Runoff Reduction (RR) and Peak Flow Reduction (PFR) were evaluated at subcatchment scale and, a mean value was estimated for an overall evaluation. Main findings show that RR and PFR linearly increase with the reduction of imperviousness due to the modelling of a major percentage of LID solutions, while the RC decreases. In addition, first detailed results reveal the suitability of LID solutions to reduce surface runoff also for the scenario 1 which considers the conversion of only 30% of specific impervious surface in green roofs and permeable pavements.

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