This article is part of the special Tech4Climate, Startups for the environment by Italian Tech, on newsstands today 6 October with The print (Piedmont, Val d’Aosta and Liguria editions), Sentinel of the Canavese, The Province of Pavia, Journal of Mantua, Courier of the Alps, The Tribuna of TrevisoIl Mattino di Padova, The New Venice, Il Piccolo e The Messenger Veneto, and tomorrow 7 October with The XIX Century.
The Piedmontese scene of startups active in the environmental field is rich and varied. Here are three examples of “green” technology at the service of Smart cities. Nexton deals with public lighting, iThanks has found a way to streamline the procedures with which supermarkets identify the food close to expiration e Wiseair has devised a participatory system of air quality monitoring.
Analysis – The Italian Tech special
It’s time for environmental startups, the next tech giants will come from there
by Arcangelo Rociola
Public lighting is a topical topic once again, since the price of energy leads to a reduction in waste. Parco Borsellino in Chivasso (To) is the gym of Nexton, a Turin startup that develops technological solutions aimed at developing connected and sustainable communities. The park’s lighting system has made it possible to save 60% of energy, reducing CO2 emissions by 50%. These data are verified by the Piedmontese municipality. A piece of the mosaic of Smart cities, connected cities that make life more practical and eco-sustainable. Nexton technology, called NextLight, is based on easy-to-configure devices equipped with maintenance tools that warn the operators in case of malfunctions of the light points. “During the absence of traffic, all the light points are at minimum light intensity, but as soon as a pedestrian or a cyclist enters the detection spectrum of the light point, their passage is communicated to the other light points which adapt according to the logic of customizable lighting intensities “, explains the CEO and co-founder of Nexton, Davide Tuzi.
Nextlight also complies with road safety regulations, allowing those who pass under these new generation lampposts not to be disturbed by the increased power of the lighting, which is gradually supplied so as not to alter the field of vision. All this thanks to a proprietary software that allows the administration of lighting via the web, using any mobile or fixed device. A solution that does not require changes to the electrical network and that adapts to LED street lamps. The communication between the hardware parts is built on services provided by Amazon Web Services and is accompanied by security protocols to prevent cyber-intrusions. Chivasso officially adopted NextLight in May 2021 after a test phase that began in October 2020.
At the end of 2021 Nexton was chosen for a period of acceleration in Israel, winning a place in the cooperation program signed between Rome and Tel Aviv and, in May 2022, it was selected among the companies committed to achieving the objectives of the UN 2030 Agenda for the sustainable development of the Planet. “There are products we are working on that are in the process of being patented and therefore we cannot talk about them, we have an ambitious roadmap, including later versions that are more advanced than those installed in Chivasso, with improved performance”, concludes Tuzi.
Starting from a spreadsheet, iThanks has streamlined the procedures with which supermarkets identify food close to expiration. Born in 2019 from an idea of Marco Cartolano and Andrea Gasco, iThanks immediately distinguished itself among the startups that have tackled the problem of food waste. Cartolano, director of a large retail outlet, has solved a professional problem by himself. Identifying food items that are about to expire is a time-consuming and error prone procedure. Automation proved to be a trump card and was implemented starting from a normal spreadsheet, and then creating an algorithm that was tested on some brands using a web app. In 2020 iThanks was appreciated at the Atena Startup Battle event, a challenge between innovators in front of a jury of experts and investors.
In the meantime, the idea has become an app currently in use in several stores in Piedmont and Emilia-Romagna, a digital assistant through which to populate a database that contains information on each product on sale and which also allows you to obtain inventory reporting, with repercussions on the necessary supplies and the devaluation of goods for sale. Although designed for the sale of food, the app can be used in all businesses that sell products with a deadline, for example pharmacies. A project that had the support of the Turin Chamber of Commerce, the “Mettersi in proprio” (Mip) initiative of the Metropolitan City of Turin, and Turin Social Impact, an organization that promotes and accelerates companies with a social impact. iThanks has also joined the network of partners created by Last Minute Sotto Casa, a Turin startup that facilitates the purchase of expiring products, making spending cheaper and collaborating to reduce food waste which, in Italy, is estimated at 220 thousand tons of food per year, a number that in economic terms is quantified at over 3 billion euros and, in environmental terms, in over 1.7 million tons of CO2.
In December 2021, Wiseair closed a € 1 million investment round. It offers an air quality monitoring service that helps make environmental decisions. Startup founded in 2019 by Paolo Barbato, Andrea Bassi, Fulvio Bambusi and Carlo Alberto Gaetaniello, markets a package that includes an infrastructure of IoT sensors to be placed on the territory and which allows the monitoring of environmental pollutants. A dashboard is added to the sensors to which the municipal administration can access to obtain data in real time and view trends and analyzes, as well as download detailed reports.
Furthermore, Wiseair offers continuous support to the analysis of emission sources and to the construction of policies to protect the air quality of the territory and encourages communication with citizens by sharing data on the free app.
The startup has the mission of guiding policy and decision makers in identifying, implementing and monitoring policies and measures that have a concrete and quantifiable impact on air quality in cities. The service is built around local administrations and is designed for citizens.
“The sensors that we install on the territory monitor the atmospheric particulate matter through a technology called laser-scattering, are powered autonomously by a solar panel, and send data with the wi-fi network. Following the framework promoted within the United Nations Gems / Air, these technologies constitute an additional and complementary source of data with respect to the monitoring systems of the regional agencies, with which we actively collaborate “, they explain to Wiseair.
In 2019 the project started with Arianna, a balcony vase to monitor air quality that was distributed through citizen-science activities in large Italian cities. In this way it was the citizens themselves who contributed to the monitoring. The balcony vases, still distributed today in Milan, Rome, Turin and Bari, were tools to trigger a grassroots awareness that leads to debate in the local communities of large cities, providing data directly to citizens. IoT sensors designed for windowsills have therefore become means at the service of administrations, to allow decision-makers to take a position with knowledge of the facts. Wiseair continues to grow in Italy and, starting in 2023, wants to aim for internationalization.