Science4Innovate

Waste Cooking Oils (WCOs) represent an unique platform of raw materials for several industrial production. WCO is a waste, cheap and available in large amounts worldwide. It is composed by a mixture of fatty acids which can be easy and fast transformed in useful chemicals. In this context, the quality and quantities of industrial processes dedicated to WCO transformation is limited by the availability of proper technologies and materials . With the aim to furnish an overview of the current state of the art related with the transformation of WCOs, I have collected with the help of my Colleagues most of the research papers published in the last 5 years related with the chemical transformation and the physical treatment of WCOs . Click here for download the full study. 

In Italy, as well as in the rest of the world, we are facing the threat of the new virus Covid19. Italian case is particularly of interest as the number of deaths is so far second only to China, where the epidemy killed about 3000 people [1]. Italian Authorities have adopted, after the epidemy started an emergency plan mainly based on social distances procedures, with the aim to reduce the rate of transmission of the virus [2]. On March 15, three weeks after the first deaths, we can compare the Italian positive cases and deaths to Chinas’ ones, considering that in China the epidemic curve already reached its plateau [3,4]. Regarding the positive cases, by superposing Italian and China curves it is possible to appreciate the same trend (figure 1). Figure 1 . Cumulative positive cases. Concerning the deaths number, during this first period of the epidemy, the trend observed in Italy and China is quite different. Italian growth of cumulative number of deaths is faster...