Greasy sheep wool is currently considered a special waste for its high bacterial load, with expensive disposal costs for sheep breeders. For this reason, wool is often burned or buried, with serious consequences for the environment. On the other hand, sheep wool is well regarded as one of the most performative insulating natural fibers due to its thermo-hygrometric and acoustic properties. In the building sector, sheep wool meets the requirements of green building components because it is an eco-friendly material, there is a surplus of it, it is annually renewable, and totally recyclable. If used instead of common insulation materials (e.g., fiberglass, rock wool, polyurethane foam, polystyrene), sheep wool offers significant benefits for sustainability such as a reduction in the production costs for new insulating materials and in environmental pollution. Mechanical and physical properties of sheep wool investigated in previous studies were assessed and discussed with the aim of providing an organized framework of possible applications of wool fibers in building components. This paper highlights in detail aspects that have not yet been investigated enough to detect new potential uses of sheep wool fibers in rural buildings and the reuse of traditional ones.

Different treatments of six selected Mediterranean agro-industrial by-products, i.e., citrus pulp, olive pomace cattle and poultry manure, whey and silage, were investigated through LCA application with the aim of analysing their environmental sustainability, in terms of “level of greenness”. In detail, an AD-based treatment system composed of four biogas plants fed by a mix of the selected agro-industrial by-products (scenario 1) was compared with the conventional treatment of those feedstocks (scenario 2), i.e., land application, biowaste composting, olive pomace treatment, and feeding treatment. The results clearly demonstrated that the AD-based treatment system is the most environmentally sustainable solution, since the environmental damages associated with the investigated scenarios are equal to 11.08 μpt and 598.44 μpt, for scenario 1 and scenario 2, respectively. These results confirmed that, as reported in the literature, anaerobic digestion of agro-industrial feedstocks is considered to be a “green” solution with high saving potential with respect to greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, and plays a relevant role in renewable energy production by valorising agro-industrial by-products, by contributing to closing of organic matter cycles within a circular economy perspective. The results achieved in this study could represent a guideline to improve sustainability of energy generation by AD-based systems. In fact, since the results were obtained by means of real-world modelled scenarios, they could be extended to other AD-based systems analogous to that analysed in this study for developing and supporting sustainable economy concepts and energy-food-waste nexus approaches.

Animal welfare is becoming an increasingly important requirement in the livestock sector to improve, and therefore raise, the quality and healthiness of food production. By monitoring the behaviour of the animals, such as feeding, rumination, walking, and lying, it is possible to understand their physical and psychological status. Precision Livestock Farming (PLF) tools offer a good solution to assist the farmer in managing the herd, overcoming the limits of human control, and to react early in the case of animal health issues. The purpose of this review is to highlight a key concern that occurs in the design and validation of IoT-based systems created for monitoring grazing cows in extensive agricultural systems, since they have many more, and more complicated, problems than indoor farms. In this context, the most common concerns are related to the battery life of the devices, the sampling frequency to be used for data collection, the need for adequate service connection coverage and transmission range, the computational site, and the performance of the algorithm embedded in IoT-systems in terms of computational cost.

Worldwide, around 998 million tons of agricultural waste are generated yearly, including livestock wastes, which create several critical environmental issues if not properly treated. In this study, a Geographical Information System (GIS)-based model to locate and quantify both the yearly amount of livestock waste, i.e., sheep wool, and the territorial distribution of sheep farms, was carried out and applied within the selected study area. The aim was to identify those territorial areas most suitable for localizing new shared wool collection centers to sustainably manage the reuse of this waste as potential green building material. Data related to both sheep farms and sheep number and the related sheep shared wool (SSW) yearly production were acquired and applied in GIS. By GIS-based model results, two collection centers have been identified within the provinces of Agrigento and Enna. Then, to develop a sustainable reuse in terms of reducing environmental impact due to the SSW logistics and supply phase, a possible third collection center was localized within the territorial area belonging to the province of Ragusa (south area of the Sicily). In this research, for the first time the issue above reported was addressed, by achieving results that contribute at developing an efficient collection chain for recovering and properly reusing SSW to respond adequately to a further industrial scale production.