Piero Manzoni, founder and CEO of Simbiosi: “With our approach, born out of passion, we improve the agri-food supply chain (and beyond) by producing environmental value.”
Sustainability? "Today it's perhaps a term that gets used a little too loosely." Why? Because anyone who does not act simultaneously on the three fundamental pillars that make it up — namely "saving resources, combating climate change, protecting biodiversity" — has little to do with true sustainability. The person who, for years now, has been committed to fully closing this virtuous circle is Piero Manzoni, founder and chief executive officer of Simbiosi, a company based in the Pavia area whose mission is the development of technologies, solutions and patents aimed at saving natural resources (air, water, materials and soil) and energy resources within the agri-food supply chain.
Dr Manzoni, why Simbiosi? How did this project come about?
It came out of our experience and our expertise. And from a natural research and development experiment that has now been running for more than 25 years, which started in 1995 and concerns the regeneration of 500 hectares of the Po Valley: we brought it back to the biodiversity it had a thousand years ago. We want to be producers of environment. And that can only be done with a symbiotic approach.
You have identified three fundamental pillars for doing this: how do they connect?
They connect perfectly. The first pillar is resource saving. Resources are by definition finite because we live in a finite system, planet Earth: if we keep extracting resources and never manage to put them back into circulation, sooner or later they will run out. That is what we call the circular economy.
The second is climate change. Human activities, including the extraction and use of resources, have effects on the climate: we are talking about constraints on the planet's ability to export heat, due to CO2 emissions. This affects global warming.
Finally, biodiversity, of which we human beings represent only a small part and without which we could not live. Now, under normal circumstances we try to act on each of these three systems, but often separately: for example, we try to act on energy saving, but in order to save energy no expense is spared on other resources.
A behaviour that is not sustainable because it is not symbiotic, as your name suggests?
Yes, because nature acts differently, as a whole: everything springs from the same energy, a nuclear energy that comes from the sun in the form of electromagnetic radiation. With our experiment, we have understood and studied the way nature behaves, collecting billions of data points, creating a sensor-equipped area, and from that we have understood how nature uses its energy resources, how it transforms them, how it distributes them, how it safeguards them and how it develops. From that data we have extracted expertise and capabilities to develop technologies that we implement in the food cycle and beyond. This is what we do and the reason we do it.
In what sense does everything originate from nuclear energy?
Energy in nature is mostly nuclear energy, energy produced by the reactions that take place inside the Sun. These nuclear reactions bring energy to Earth in the form of electromagnetic radiation, causing vegetation and crops, through chlorophyll photosynthesis, to transform this energy into the production of fruit; causing the waters of the seas to evaporate and then return to Earth in the form of water, essentially giving life to biodiversity and therefore to all organic matter which, over millennia, then transformed into deposits of fossil fuels.
And this is where the snag in this perfect mechanism appears…
Yes, because we have now discovered that fossil energy, which we have used for so many years, has its drawbacks: both because it is not infinite, and because it produces CO2 that creates a barrier to the export of heat from the earth to the atmosphere. Today, using fossil fuels has become a problem. That is why, while waiting to produce safe nuclear energy that we do not yet know how to manage, we are trying to use other types of renewable energy that seek not to damage the environment and biodiversity. But we have taken the natural example, disaggregated it, equipped it with sensors and from there extracted our own technologies that we bring to market to recover resources, fight climate change, and not destroy or damage biodiversity. All together. In a holistic vision…
How does your mission translate into practice, in your relationship with your partners?
We have an ecosystemic vision, but our focus is then on the food supply chain, "from field to table and back to the field again," but not only that, as we were saying. With the cross-cutting objective of following circular economy logic, in which a single objective has many connections. Through these connections, we recover resources: by reusing waste from various human activities, recovering water for irrigation, minimising the use of fossil fuels used by tractors or industrial machinery, producing clean and innovative renewable energy. And then we manage energy, water and materials savings. We work to support production throughout the industrial cycle, recovering resources and then moving into processing and manufacturing companies, to complete the cycle with waste and therefore utilities and local areas.
So you start from the field and then extend across the entire industrial supply chain, is that right?
Let's put it the other way round: we start from factories, which are always located in rural areas, and from there we connect the surrounding territory with the companies themselves. We work extensively with processing and manufacturing companies across various sectors: dairy, meat, cured meats, wine, pasta, chocolate and many other industrial supply chains, as well as with utilities. Together with them we recover resources and make processes more efficient, but always connecting the company with the surrounding territory and ensuring that each benefits from the positive influence of the other, in a logic of symbiosis, as the name suggests. In doing this, we also build and enhance the territories around the companies, creating environmental landscapes that are beautiful but also efficient, where an ecosystem service is produced as well. Just as we did at the beginning with our 500 hectares. The same applies not only to agri-food companies but also to companies that recover organic waste, which becomes a by-product for other activities, while also producing renewable energy in various forms.
The last part of your mission is to close the loop between the countryside and the city: how is it possible to turn this into a, so to speak, two-way journey?
Peri-urban rural areas must not only provide a food service for major cities, which between now and 2050 will become ever larger and ever more crowded, but must become areas that collaborate with cities to help them overcome certain challenges that are intrinsic to their future. Think of waste and pollution. By consuming all that food in such concentrated areas, we have a logistical problem of transport and storage and a problem of waste, as well as turning peri-urban zones into areas that are increasingly depopulated and marginalised solely for food production — to the point that outside cities we no longer find natural environmental areas, but only zones that are almost always intensively farmed. These, however, lose their ecosystemic quality, their role as a green lung that rebalances CO2 concentration in the air; they lose their natural capacity to recycle organic waste matter, and they also lose fertility and, above all, the ability to retain water in the soil through the presence of organic matter. Moreover, cities need energy and cannot produce it, given the density of consumption within them.
We can say the same things about the areas surrounding industrial districts…
Peri-urban rural areas inevitably become indispensable for the production of clean green energy too. The Earth is surrounded by satellites that give us decrypted binary images and data of land, rural areas and the orography of cities: from these images we can draw conclusions about the vegetative vigour of plants, understand whether they need water, fertilisers or tilling, and whether organic matter is lacking.
Another major problem for cities, as well as for industrial companies, today is waste..
We see the effects in Rome, in Naples until a few years ago. Solving the problem does not mean sending waste abroad — something that, incidentally, has a significant environmental impact — but taking scraps, transforming them into by-products of any kind (including energy by-products) and returning them to circulation in peri-urban areas or in industrial supply chains, in line with the three pillars mentioned above. Organic waste contains very large quantities of nutrients, such as phosphorus, nitrogen and potassium, which must be returned to agriculture.
We are in a period of alarm over the lack of water, especially in the Po Valley, and an urgent plan for accumulation and against dispersal is needed: do you have solutions for this too?
Yes. Our technologies, our satellite analyses and our field sensors are able to safeguard water. The companies that work with us, thanks to our organic fertilisation systems, the reconstruction of natural ecosystemic barriers and precision agriculture within them, have less need for additional water. And from the water we have available, we extract thermal value — so, in addition to water, we also supply companies with heating and cooling. As you can see, these are all symbiotic operations between the land, the company and the environment, according to the concept of the circular economy applied to the food cycle.
Speaking of energy, we are right in that transition phase you mentioned at the outset. Where do things stand, and how does Simbiosi contribute?
We are in a phase of energy transition, but solar panels on rooftops in cities cannot be enough; we need to produce energy outside built-up areas if we do not want to use fossil fuels. To give an example: to produce the 1,200 megawatts of a power plant near Milan, we need 1,200 hectares of solar panels. But if I were to do that with ground-mounted solar, I would obviously be taking land away from agriculture and would therefore have no way of producing food. We, on the other hand, are able to produce energy on farms while continuing to produce foodstuffs, intervening with artificial intelligence to optimise both agricultural and energy production — to be supplied to both communities and businesses, thanks to one of our technologies — and to bring it easily into the city.
The pandemic, moreover, renewed appreciation for the importance and the healthfulness of a living countryside.
Yes, if we also consider the social dimension of the issue, we have to say it: in cities the quality of life is often not at its best from an environmental and psychological standpoint; people often need to escape and find peace in the countryside, outside consumption centres, at least for certain periods. In short, to seek a form of "distancing." Hospitality, then, is also an important service that peri-urban areas offer.
The possibilities offered by new technologies are fundamental, but the value of a symbiotic approach to sustainability is almost intuitive. Why is society, the economy and politics only arriving at this now?
Because the wealth of countries is measured in gross domestic product. Until now, the focus has been solely on extracting value from what is produced, externalising all the negative effects of that production. Let me give an example: some celebrated tourist destinations — they may well be beautiful, but after resorts and mega-hotels have been built there and they have been filled with coaches, they start to become less attractive because of the chaos. Well, if those who built there had considered that sooner or later the cost of reconstruction would also need to be factored into the profit-and-loss account, perhaps that economic venture would not have been so advantageous. If everyone who produces something were required to pay for any negative effects too, everything would change. Perhaps something is now beginning to shift; we thought about it earlier, with that experiment we carried out out of passion.
How has that passion from back then evolved?
It has remained. Those 500 hectares from the experiment have stayed as they are, because that is a European project where we cannot produce. On the 1,700 hectares of our own land, between Simbiosi and the other companies in the parent group, we have created the Innovation Center Giulio Natta, where we host some of our startups — companies in which we invest financially and in whose business development we participate. In the meantime, we develop technologies and solutions and, together, we produce environmental value.
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