Università degli studi di Modena e Reggio Emilia

The design of tiles can accelerate the transition of urban environments towards sustainability when building materials are prepared with sustainable, indigenous, renewable or recycled resources and additionally, present solar reflective properties for mitigating the Urban Heat Island (UHI) phenomenon. Here, an innovative approach to develop frit-free ceramics having solar reflectance property using locally sourced recycled granite waste was explored. The investigation unfolds in three parts: (i), the formulations were tailored for the engobe or glaze by varying raw material proportions; (ii), the solar reflectance was improved using whitening agents; and (iii), the selected formulations were subjected to an industrial trial casting of porcelain stoneware tiles. The full replacement of nepheline and feldspar with recycled granite powder offered properties suitable for the engobe such as a matte surface with high roughness and low gloss, while the same was identified to be less suitable in the glaze. The glaze formulation without any industrial frits was achieved by altering the proportions of nepheline and feldspar in the matrix. The solar reflectance of the engobe was enhanced by adding 10% of fine-grained zircon. The industrial trial showed that the developed formulation retained its conventional characteristics and superior functional performance in stain and chemical resistance.

The digital transformation of manufacturing firms, in addition to making operations more efficient, offers important opportunities both to promote the transition to a circular economy and to experiment with new techniques for designing smarter and greener products. This study integrates Industry 4.0 technologies, smart data, Life Cycle Assessment methodology, and material microstructural analysis techniques to develop and apply a circular eco-design model that has been implemented in the Italian ceramic tile manufacturing industry. The model has been initially adopted in a simulation environment to define five different scenarios of raw material supply, alternative to the current production one. The scenarios were then validated operationally at laboratory scale and in a pilot environment, demonstrating that a proper selection of raw material transport systems significantly improves the environmental performance of the ceramic product. Both the results of the laboratory tests and of the pre-industrial experiments have demonstrated the technological feasibility of the solutions identified with circular eco-design, enabling the re-engineering of the ceramic product as the fifth of the 6Rs of the circular economy. © 2021 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland.

The topic of sustainability is becoming one of the strongest drivers of change in the market- place by transforming into an element of competitiveness and an integral part of business strategy. Particularly in the manufacturing sector, a key role is played by technological innovations that allow companies to minimize the impact of their business on the environment and contribute to enhancing the value of the societies in which they operate. Technological process can be a lever to generate sustainable behaviors, confirming how innovation and sustainability constitute an increasingly close pair. However, it emerges that the nature of this relationship is explored by researchers and con- sidered by practitioners almost exclusively in terms of the degree of sustainability of technological solutions. Lacking is an in-depth exploration of how a product or process, in addition to being environmentally and socio-economically sustainable, must or can also be technologically sustainable. This research therefore aims to build a theoretical foundation for technological sustainability seen as a possible fourth dimension of sustainable development.

This research comes as part of a broader resurgence of study on the electrical conductivity of glasses—and the mechanism for electronic motion in the amorphous network—spurred by interest in using glasses as matrices for solid-state batteries, taking advantage of the glasses’ tailorable conductivity, chemical durability, and mechanical strength. The work presented in this study regards the preparation and characterization of some binary glasses belonging to the TeO2–V2O5 system. In particular, we focused on the glasses’ electrical conductivity at room temperature and at higher temperatures as a function of the V4+ ion content in the glass structure. The amount of V4+ in the glass was determined by a colorimetric method. Moreover, density and thermal properties (Tg, Cp) were measured, and scanning electron microscopy (SEM) and X-ray diffraction (XRD) measurements were performed as well.