The “sustainable growth” is the objective, the desired and coveted goal. It is also a dream, which however has its own cost. Sustainability, circular economy, energy and progress are the themes at the center of the panel now on stage at the event for the 50th anniversary of Newspaper. Lucia LeonessiGeneral Director of Confindustria Cisambiente, Marco MariSustainable Development Expert, Thomas SabatoCEO of Acea Infrastructure e Roberto Tomasi, CEO of Autostrade per l’Italia will discuss the challenge of sustainability, understood as an opportunity to improve and grow the country. The journalist moderates the panel Hoara Borselli.
Hoara Borselli introduces the panel and the ball passes to Leonessi. “The European directive is complex, sometimes cumbersome, and has poor grounding.” Tomasi: “If we see the projections to 2050, history tells us that revolutions in the world of transport need at least a century. Today we are in 2024 and we are faced with a revolution, but to make great transformations great foresight is needed Imagining, as Europe has done, that objectives could be achieved in 20-30 years is impossible. The ideology it risks being dangerous because it then clashes with reality. In six years we should halve our carbon footprint, but this is impossible. In order to achieve such important goals, planning is needed. We need to create long-term industrial skills. Sustainable mobility has many facets, electric mobility will be one of the solutions. Thinking of reaching zero emissions in 2050 is difficult, we can overcome the challenge of sustainability by becoming leaders. “We must find the right compromise between environment and development”, comments Borselli.
Mari: “We are condemned to manage complexity, there is little we can do technological neutrality is one point, the second is called sustainable development. I’m becoming allergic to the term sustainability because it has no definitions. Everyone understands it as they want. Sustainable development occurs only by keeping three elements in mind: environmental, social and economic. Competing on the sole rule of price means suffering dumping. We are better, more capable of giving answers in terms of design and construction quality: it turns out that, on buildings, the most excellent score bands are ours. There is a made in Italy that sometimes we don’t talk about well. We don’t just have fashion design.”
Leonessi again: “We must stop beating ourselves up, we must have more confidence in our credibility.” Speaking of sustainable development, Sabato intervenes: “Opening the tap is a simple gesture, but behind it there are large infrastructures which in Italy are however obsolete, we have almost 40% losses at a national level. Very little is invested, we need to recover and we can. In Rome we have started four construction sites in record time to fix the low network, by the end of the year we hope to start a 1.5 billion project which is fundamental for industry and agriculture. We have invested a lot in recovery of industrial, platform and groundwater: there are incredible technologies. And then people and their behavior are important, we have done training in Lazio and in schools to explain that there is a cost to water and that it must be used intelligently.” Mari: “The sustainable concept applied to construction is crucial, more than 14% of global consumption comes from consumption in our buildings. Working along a path in this sense also means reducing water waste. This combination of enormous infrastructure work would guarantee us an excellent result.”
Technology in the highways of the future. Tomasi: “We are celebrating 100 years of the country’s first motorway, the Milan-Laghi. The problem with technologies is that we have to modernize a complex network, while maintaining a traffic volume for the country’s development. We must preserve an infrastructure that we have, investing heavily, and then imagining the technologies of the future to accomplish this transition. Digital can help us: today we can plan a queue and we can warn the user in advance. In Italy we first give ourselves the rules and then the objectives, we should do the opposite. Operators should be proactive and politics should be attentive: either we involve the best capabilities or the objective will not be achieved.”
Leonessi: “Sustainability is also part of it when we clean ditches and carry out maintenance, it’s not always the fault of climate change. In this sense man is at the center and is responsible for what happens. We can do a lot, I hope we will with enthusiasm as we have done up to now.”
Sabato demonstrates Acea’s commitment: “The path is to invest heavily in plants, then we are also investing in family businesses, for example in the recycling of plastic to get from waste to secondary raw material. Recycling can be done, it’s a question of investments and know-how. We are pushing ourselves wholeheartedly into major investments.”
Mari concludes on the objectives in the real estate asset: “Italy should move to the European tables in time, to think about the upstream directives. We must bring our excellence and our uniqueness to those tables to think about appropriate objectives. I don’t think that supply chains different ones can operate in a distinct way, another theme is therefore the ability to integrate various aspects. And then there is digitalisation, eco-digital is central and has to do with infrastructure, we are the most infrastructured of all. Europe in this area. But digital permeates all of us, even in construction. The most important frontier is data, because these systems are carriers of data; data”.
Finally, Tomasi: “Infrastructure is the real enabler
social, Italy grows if there are infrastructures. We must take up this challenge again, we can aspire to be the driving force, but the industry must do its part. However, the AI has no vision or courage to know where to go”
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