Can Italian wines outperform European benchmarks in environmental impact? An examination through the product environmental footprint method.

Nowadays, there is a pressing demand for precise tools to quantify sustainability and assess the contributions of products and processes to sustainable development. This requirement extends to the wine industry as well. In 2013, the European Commission introduced the Product Environmental Footprint (PEF), providing a standardized methodology grounded in life cycle thinking for evaluating the environmental impacts of products across various industries.

Development and testing of the Product Environmental Footprint Milk Tool: A comprehensive LCA tool for dairy products.

The paper describes the general structure of the PMT_01 tool developed to assess the environmental impacts of different dairy products as Protected Designation of Origin (PDO) cheeses of Lombardy Region (Po Valley - Northern Italy) and High Quality fresh pasteurized milk in a cradle-to-distribution center gate approach. Based on the PEF Product Environmental Footprint (PEF) methodology, the authors aim to provide a useful instrument for technicians and researchers in the evaluation of the environmental load of dairy products, allowing the process-hotspots identification through 16 different impact categories. The tool requires a modest amount of data that can be easily collected at the farms and at the dairies.

Frequent moving of grazing dairy cows to new paddocks increases the variability of milk fatty acid composition.

The aim of this work was to investigate the variations of milk fatty acid (FA) composition because of changing paddocks in two different rotational grazing systems. A total of nine Holstein and nine Montbéliarde cows were divided into two equivalent groups according to milk yield, fat and protein contents and calving date, and were allocated to the following two grazing systems: a long duration (LD; 17 days) of paddock utilisation on a heterogeneous pasture and a medium duration (MD) of paddock utilisation (7 to 10 days) on a more intensively managed pasture. The MD cows were supplemented with 4 kg of concentrate/cow per day.

[Progressive pseudorheumatoid arthropathy in childhood (late spondylo-epiphysial dysplasia with progressive arthropathy). Description of a case].

The progressive pseudorheumatoid arthropathy of childhood is a very rare disorder that follows an autosomal recessive mode of inheritance, and which can be framed in the group of the spondyloepiphyseal dysplasia tarda. This affection is characterized by specific radiological anomalies and by clinical signs resembling an inflammatory disease, with the normality of the routine laboratory studies. The authors describe a case recently come to their attention.