Environmental and social sustainability represents a genuine way of life for Enea Roveda of LifeGate. This year, after 20 years, the time has come to raise the bar.
"For us, environmental and social sustainability represents a genuine way of life, defining our way of being in the world, centred on a civilisation of awareness and on the concreteness of doing. We work to be the catalysts of social change, to awaken and nurture a new ecological consciousness, to inspire and spread new business models and new consumption models." These words belong to Enea Roveda, chief executive of LifeGate, with whom we decided to have an informal chat "in house" to draw a line, to mark a moment after the group's first twenty years of history.
Twenty years celebrated last 28 April, at a difficult historical moment that has certainly marked a watershed between what has been and what is to come. Between the meaning — and above all the perception — of the word sustainability before and after the pandemic. And with one clear objective: to look at the next twenty years with even greater enthusiasm, moving from being an Italian community of 5 million people who are passionate about and committed to protecting the Planet, to becoming a global information network made by people, for people.
"With more than 15 million euros in aggregate turnover, 88 shareholders and a team of more than 50 people with an average age below 40, over 70 per cent of whom are women, we are one of the first benefit corporations in Italy," Roveda explains. "And on the occasion of our 20th anniversary, we have decided to embark on a journey to become a 'public company' active on the sustainability front. To do so, we will shortly be launching a crowdfunding campaign. A way of opening the company to anyone who wants to take part in this project first-hand."
In 2000, talking about sustainability did not carry the same weight it does today. "My family's experience began in the 1980s with Fattoria Scaldasole, the first Italian company to enter large-scale retail with an organic product. The pioneering vision of those years is the same one that led to the founding of LifeGate, with the aim of promoting a sustainable development model," Roveda recalls.
Today that objective, translated into a manifesto, is becoming reality: the Italian government is grappling — for the first time in a united way — with sustainable projects aimed at a healthy recovery, thanks to the funding made available by the European Union through the recovery fund. And with a Europe, led by president Ursula von der Leyen, that has made sustainability its mission for the next five years through the green deal. Not forgetting the United Nations, which paved the way in 2015 with the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).
And LifeGate, in Italy, has led the way. Over the years the group has worked with more than 5,000 companies, supporting them with strategic consultancy and bringing to life concrete projects against the climate crisis. Impatto Zero® was the world's first project to give concrete form to the commitments of the Kyoto Protocol — now embedded within the framework of the Paris Agreement, signed by the entire international community in 2015. Through Impatto Zero®, the CO2 emissions of 400 million products have been offset through the reforestation of 70 million square metres of land in Italy and around the world, from Costa Rica to Madagascar.
And then further initiatives were born, such as Foreste in Piedi, for the protection of 560 hectares of forest in the Amazon. Also with the aim of reducing CO2 emissions and halting global warming, in 2005 LifeGate Energy was founded — a clean, renewable, Italian and Impatto Zero® energy supplier, which over the years has provided 900 GWh of electricity to households and businesses. And then LifeGate PlasticLess®, the project launched on 8 June 2018, on the occasion of World Oceans Day, to combat the problem of plastic pollution in the seas, which in just two years made it possible to collect 25,000 kilograms of plastic waste in Italy and Europe. Finally, last but not least, Bee my Future, the initiative aimed at protecting biodiversity and bees — among the most important pollinators and at the same time the most threatened by pesticides. So far, more than 5 million bees have been adopted.
In the year that has opened the decade for the climate, the decade of solutions, LifeGate is not stopping and is raising the bar, to think big. All that remains is to wait and see what the next projects will be.
Join our Equity Crowdfunding campaign, with your shares we can change the world.