ECOFUNCO closes its activities with a successful scientific conference
In the historical context of the former Benedictine convent in Pisa, Italy, ECOFUNCO partners met in June to recap all the activities performed in the three years of research. In order to disseminate the results, a scientific conference was held on 17 and 18 June 2022.
The 1st Conference on Green Chemistry and Sustainable Coatings hosted 31 talks in two days on the topics of materials from renewable resources, sustainable coatings, biodegradability, recyclability and sustainability, packaging with enhanced barriers, active packaging, health care cosmetics applications and electrospinning.
ECOFUNCO partners, guided by Patrizia Cinelli, project coordinator, had the opportunity to share the main findings of the project: they developed sustainable bio-based and compostable coatings to be applied on bioplastics and cellulose substrates to reach the same properties of fossil-based packaging materials. Also, the use of nanofibrils to add antimicrobial properties to tissues has been developed and tested.
In order to foster the cooperation between European projects, a session of the conference was dedicated to the funded projects FISH4FISH, PRESERVE, RECOVER, PROLIFIC and Agrimax. They had the opportunity to explain their objectives and give insights on their main research activities.
The Advisory Board from ECOFUNCO had been invited as well: Francisco Vilaplana from KTH in Sweden presented the work of his group on enzymatic upgrading of biomass. Vera Alvarez from INTEMA-CONICET in Argentina demonstrated the progress of biopolymer materials for sustainable agricultural applications, while María José López from the University of Almera discussed the power of synergistic interactions between organisms in recycling and degrading plastics.
The conference was held in hybrid format: during the two days, over 100 attendees listened to the speakers and interacted with them with many questions, which demonstrated the community's interest in having more occasions for sharing research results.
A complete playlist of the recorded interventions is now available on YouTube on the ECOFUNCO channel. Soon, also the presentations can be downloaded from the ECOFUNCO website page dedicated to the final event.
