Everything started on the 10th of May 2010 – Veltha was set up in collaboration with Università della Tuscia of Viterbo (Italy) with the purpose of joining the European research family, active in areas related to the environment, sustainable development and eco-innovation.
In this regard, Veltha has been involved in different European projects – Depbal, Zephir, SCREEN, Digiprime, REPLACE, FrontSh1p. By operating in these fields, Veltha realized at the very early stages of its development, the importance of the circular economy as the systemic approach to foster sustainable use of resources and revolutionise the supply chains.
After the adoption by the European Commission of the “Manifesto for a resource-efficient Europe” and the first report of the Ellen Macarthur Foundation “Towards a circular economy”, in 2013, the Circular Economy became for Veltha the main target of research and commitment to enable the transition to this new vision.
Since the EU “Circular economy action plan” issued in 2015, Veltha has been researching different aspects of the circular economy by adopting a bottom-up approach, involving local authorities and stakeholders to identify value chains with potential and define a monitoring framework for assessing CE projects.
The involvement in the Horizon2020 SCREEN project allowed Veltha to collaborate with more than 25 European Regions and 900 stakeholders, thus extending the network of regional officers, policymakers, experts, and general stakeholders, that can be added to emerging industrial clusters, academia, and cross-sectoral value chains.
Our interest extended to more and more industries ranging from the textile, construction sectors to the automotive, plastics and bio-based ones. At that time, Veltha enlarged the research to further aspects like material flows and innovative technologies enabling new business models for SMEs. These activities anticipated the recommendations of the new CE action plan published in 2020 and paved the way for Veltha to be considered a frontrunner in the research devoted to a circular economy innovation system in Europe.