One tangible example of our commitment to promoting the circular economy is the Circular is Cool pilot project, designed to raise awareness in young people about the themes of circularity and sustainability by bringing the circular economy into the classrooms of 10 Italian schools.
Thanks to our partnership with Humans to Humans, which works with companies to enhance their ethical mission, we developed the project to bring ethical and social content into schools; with the support of specialized creators, we aim to promote civic education, which the Ministry for Education has added to the subjects on the Italian curriculum.
The educational project began on November 5 with the “Principles of Circularity” webinar, followed by a second one – “Sustainable Mobility” – on November 12. The project’s final installment was the “Home of the Future” module on November 19. This series of three online lessons allowed students to discover and explore in detail the principles underpinning the circular economy model and to understand its real-world applications thanks to social creator Jakidale’s interviews with some of our managers.
In the first lesson, Enel X’s Head of Sustainability Nicola Tagliafierro analyzed with students the five principles of the circular economy: 1. Using renewable raw materials, 2. Moving away from owning products to using them as services, 3. Sharing, i.e. shared use of products, 4. Extending the lifetime of products themselves, 5. Recycling and reusing. Tagliafierro also told his audience, “the linear economy starts with using resources to make products and ends with landfills. But many of those products – or parts of them – unfortunately are left in the environment and take years to decompose. A plastic bag, for instance, can take up to 450 years to break down”. He added that to protect our planet – our home – we need to “change our consumption habits, be more supportive of the ecosystem and environment we live in, because we have to protect our world and must do it with small daily habits and, most importantly, by transitioning from a linear economy to a circular one”.
Protecting the environment also means choosing sustainable mobility: the focus of the second Circular is Cool session, which featured Massimo Agostinelli, Head of e-Mobility Marketing and Customer Experience at Enel X Italy. “Every time we use a conventional car,” he said, ”we harm the environment because we are using fuels that are highly polluting”. All of us in our own small ways can become leaders of the energy transition and work to reduce atmospheric pollution, by trying to move around in a way that is better for the environment. This is where electric cars come into play, as they are 70% less polluting than traditional vehicles and save 1.5 tons of CO2 every 15,000 km, which is equivalent to approximately 100 trees. And that is only the beginning of the benefits they offer! Electric vehicles, which can be charged using apps or cards, also allow us to save money and optimize the center of gravity – which means they hold the road better and are more comfortable. Lastly, their silent engines make for a genuinely unique driving experience.
