Could two places be more different than South Tyrol and Tasmania? The former in the heart of Europe, surrounded by the stunning Alps, and the latter in the middle of the ocean, an island off southern Australia. Well, apparently these two regions have a lot more in common than you might think.

Vanessa Ward, Course Coordinator for the Bachelor of Design program at the University of Tasmania, recently visited the unibz Design Friction Lab to contribute to the MICST (Materials-based Innovation as Catalyst for a Sustainable Transition into circularity in South Tyrol) project. The project, led by the Faculty of Design at unibz in collaboration with other faculties of the University and the Laimburg Research Centre, aims at converting agro-food waste produced in South Tyrol into valuable materials through food technology processing such as fermentation. Ward’s research interest in circularity and her school-time friendship with Prof. Nitzan Cohen, leader of the MICST project, brought her to unibz for three months. During this time, she had the opportunity to develop new perspectives for her work and to discover some interesting and unexpected parallels between South Tyrol and Tasmania.

Despite the enormous distance between the two and their size (Tasmania is about 10 times larger than South Tyrol), they share a very similar climate and population size. Interestingly, they also share an apple culture: in fact, Tasmania was known as the “Apple Isle” and used to export apples to European markets until the early 1970s, when Britain joined the European Common Market and apple exports fell drastically. These similarities open up great opportunities for research collaboration. One example is the MICST project, in which design acts as the innovation catalyst for other disciplines. The aim of the project is to understand how South Tyrol deals with waste disposal and what the local main sources of industrial and agro-food waste and by-products are. Once the most promising raw materials have been selected, design and fermentation teams will work together to transform regional under-utilised resources into new valuable material alternatives, supporting the principle of circularity in the regeneration of by-products. “Coming here at the beginning of the project was very exciting for me. This project shows how important it is to work beyond disciplinary silos and to start making connections across subjects that may seem at first far apart” says Vanessa Ward. “Design is an optimistic discipline: it is often a journey in which you don’t always know where you are going, but you know how to get there. The similarities between South Tyrol and Tasmania open up potential collaborations for our territories: what works here could be translated there, and vice versa. I am quite confident in the project, and I think it is very promising that the province is funding this project: this demonstrates belief and trust in its resources” concludes Ward. The project is a good example of the importance of interdisciplinarity and raises awareness of the need to find new solutions that can contribute to our fight against climate change.