Politecnico di Milano (ABC Department)

The ABC Department at the Politecnico di Milano works on architecture, construction engineering and the built environment. It is a perspective that starts from buildings and territories, and that leads to questions of energy, matter, resources and the way human systems consume them.

From this perspective the department also arrives at food. Paola Caputo, associate professor in the department, studies biomass and biofuels, energy efficiency, the integration of renewable sources into buildings and the analysis of energy and material flows linked to food production. She is the scientific lead of PER-REP, a project coordinated by the ABC Department within Spoke 1 of OnFoods, the extended national recovery plan partnership on food sustainability.

PER-REP grew out of a concrete problem. Agri-food supply chains have to measure and communicate their own sustainability, and the available tools are often rigorous but unusable, or usable but not solid. The project tries to hold the two together: scientifically grounded assessment methods, involvement of the actors in the supply chain, tools that people at work can actually use.

Out of this comes Foodmeter, the free sustainability self-assessment tool for agri-food businesses, which measures how far strategies, products and production methods align with environmental, economic and social sustainability criteria.

For the ABC Department we worked on Foodmeter, looking after its branding, content and web application. It is a project that stands well for the kind of work that interests us: taking a research result and turning it into a tool that leaves the university and reaches the people who need it. Our meeting with the ABC Department came through OnFoods, the partnership we support on communication and public engagement.