Environmental and safety risk assessment for sustainable circular production: Case study in plastic processing for fashion products.

Even if sustainability and circularity are the most challenging goals today, industrial waste minimization is rarely discussed and practical methods to reduce risks related to hazardous waste in manufacturing processes are not frequently applied yet. The case of Italian company specialized in plastic processing for fashion products, has the chance to design and test a new integrated methodology to reduce the risks for ecosystem and workers associated to hazardous waste. Focusing the attention to standard operations, extraordinary conditions, and emergency situations, all activities included in waste collection, storage and transport are identified and the risks associated to the environmental impacts and the occupational health&safety are analysed.

Environmental performance of glass foam as insulation material from waste glass with the alkali activation process.

Glass foams is an interesting option for the use of fractions of glass cullet otherwise destined to landfills. As building insulation materials, glass foams obtained by conventional processes have still some drawbacks in the purity of starting feedstock, which can be avoided by implementing an alkali activation process. Using the life cycle assessment methodology, the research analyses the potential impacts associated to the glass foam obtained from waste glass through the alkali activation in a laboratory scale plant with 'cradle to grave' perspective.

Certification ISO 9001 in clinical ethics consultation for improving quality and safety in healthcare.

This paper refers to the quality management process of the Laboratory of Clinical Bioethics (LCB) of the University of Padua (Italy), which has obtained the quality certification to ISO 9001:2008, as a Clinical Ethics Support Service. Its activities consist mainly in clinical ethics consultations and training services, addressed to those who are called to decisions with ethical implications in the clinical setting, proposing a structured approach to identify and analyze the ethical issues that may loom in the relationships between health professionals and patients, and participating in their solution. The expected benefits of the application of ISO 9001 were mainly the following: to formalize the procedure adopted for clinical ethics consultation and training, to obtain a controlled management of documents, information and data, to ensure and demonstrate the quality of the provided activities and to make methods and organization publicly available.

Quality management of Body Donation Program at the University of Padova.

Quality management improvement has become a recent focus of attention in medical education. The program for the donation of bodies and body parts (Body Donation Program) at the University of Padova has recently been subjected to a global quality management standard, the ISO 9001:2008 certification. The aim of the present work is to show how the above standard is useful in enhancing the efficiency of body donation procedures and the quality and output of medical education.

A model of quality assurance and quality improvement for post-graduate medical education in Europe.

Background: The issue of quality assurance (QA) and quality improvement (QI), being the quality of medical education intimately related to the quality of the health care, is becoming of paramount importance worldwide.

Aim: To describe a model of implementing a system for internal QA and QI within a post-graduate paediatric training programme based on the ISO 9001:2000 standard.

Methods: For the ISO 9001:2000 standard, the curriculum was managed as a series of interrelated processes and their level of function was monitored by ad hoc elaborated objective indicators.