Benvenuti in Lombardia

Have you already been to the Lombardy Region? Here is a small introduction to this nice region of Italy, to get you in the mood for our next TLJ.

Lombardy's ID card

Hosting partner of the TLJ #6

Country: Italy

Capital of the region: Milan

Population: 10 million inhabitants

Surface: almost 24,000 km2

Partner in LCA4Regions: Lombardy Region

The GDP per capita is among the highest in Europe and amounted up to €37,800 in 2017 (€28,400 in Italy and €29,500 in the EU). In the same year, with M€ 380.955,24, Lombardy has had the fifth largest GDP among European Regions, representing about 23% of the Italian GDP.

Focus on the economy

The economy of Lombardy, affected by an unemployment rate of 6% (compared to 10.6% for Italy and 6.9% for the EU) is characterised by a variety of activities in all the traditional sectors, such as farming (1.2% of the employees) and industry (31.5%). Services (67.3%) have also had a strong development in the recent post-industrial phase, especially in Milan. SMEs, mostly family owned businesses, dominate the market.

In 2017, almost 40% of the total firms of the region are based in Milan and its province. The main sectors are: mechanical, electronics, metallurgy, textiles, chemicals and petrochemicals, pharmaceuticals, food, publishing, footwear and furniture. The service sector is also very well developed especially in the last decades, mostly related to international trade and financial services.

Lombardy’s production system is still one of the most developed in Italy and Europe: at the end of 2016 there were 74 enterprises per 1000 inhabitants, one of the highest rates of entrepreneurship in Europe.

The first manufacturing region in Italy

Lombardy is the first manufacturing region in Italy in terms of turnover and added value, the third one in Europe concerning the number of employees, after Bayern and Baden-Württemberg. The production system gathers approximately 110,000 enterprises employing more than 1 million persons. It is the leading manufacturing industry in Europe regarding some sub-industries such as manufacturing of metal products (excluding machinery and equipment), textile industries, production of base metals, manufacture of wearing apparel, printing and reproduction of recorded media, wood and products of wood and cork (except furniture).

With 14 universities and many more research centres, Lombardy is the first Italian region by number of patents registered at the European Patent Register concerning manufacturing technologies but also (industrial technologies, metallurgy, mechanical engineering, chemicals, textile).

Circular economy in Lombardy

In the last five years, since circular economy (CE) has moved its first steps in the EU agenda, Lombardy has witnessed many initiatives involving policymakers, enterprises and research centres to especially enhance waste prevention and material recovery. These pioneering, often bottom-up initiatives have been recently framed into a first Roadmap focused on Research & Innovation in CE.

More: www.regione.lombardia.it https://www.regione.lombardia.it

LCA experience

The Life Cycle Approach in Lombardy Region policy making was applied mainly to support the Waste management regional Programme, in particular to support the development of the version of the programme currently in force:

to evaluate the environmental performance of the municipal solid waste management system implemented;
to evaluate the environmental and economic performance of the construction and demolition waste management system, to identify recommendations for the regional government in order to maximize resource-efficiency.

In 2021, Unioncamere Lombardia and the Regional Government designed “Call for innovation of circular economy value chains in Lombardy” to boost circular economy transition. This call was devoted to support the SMEs transition to CE. Among the evalaution criteria set, one LCA based criterion was introduced: the scoring system to be used in the evaluation of the projects, awarded projects which were supported by a LCA study or a PEF study, coherent with the official “Category Rules”, capable of proving the positive impact of the project on the environmental performances of the activity run.