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Elza Bontempi is a researcher with expertise in all the aspects connected with the circular economy, with an interdisciplinary skill set. Indeed, she has extensive knowledge about materials and eco-materials, because she focalized her research on sustainability innovation (e.g., alternatives to waste landfilling), strategic environmental management, and sustainable raw materials recovery. Moreover, she also contributed to developing new strategies to promote the circular economy diffusion, by proposing preliminary simplified approaches to LCA, mainly dedicated to SMEs and legislators.

This work was highlighted by Science for Environment Policy , which is the news and information service published by Directorate-General Environment, European Commission.

Finally, to advance the state of play about circular economy in higher education, she published a book about “Raw materials substitution sustainability” in 2017.

She was the TOP WORLD RESEARCHER (first position of reported 500 researchers by SciVal) for the research topic of Waste Incineration; Municipal Solid Waste; Carbonation; for the 2017-2020 period.

She was ranked among World’s Top 2% Scientists in the 2021 and 2022 list of outstanding researchers prepared by Elsevier BV, Stanford University, USA.

Elza coordinated several projects about the circular economy and is assisting governmental entities with a wide range of sustainability strategies and policy development. In particular, she’s the scientific reference for the circular economy of the Lombardy Energy Cleantech Cluster.

She is currently responsible for sustainability development actions for INSTM consortium.