The agrifood industry shows one of the widest ranges of possible end products from crops, such as fruits, legumes, cereals, and tubers. The raw material is generally collected and processed industrially, producing a significant amount of organic waste. The overall picture is made more complex by the wide variety of nature and composition, and by the difficulty identifying the possible uses of the wastes coming from the processing industry. Such wastes are often disposed of in landfills or treated in waste-to-energy plants depending on the area where they are produced. The circular economy approach has suggested numerous possible generic strategies to improve waste management, involving the exploitation of waste to obtain new value-added products. The use of fibers from legume waste from the canning industry in the bioplastics production sector is a promising and relatively little explored line, particularly for the fibers of beans and green beans. With this in mind, in this article, green bean and borlotti bean fibers obtained from the treatment of wastes were used as reinforcing material for polycaprolactone (PCL)-based biocomposites by melt blending. Analyses were carried out about the morphological, spectroscopic, thermal, and mechanical properties of the starting and the obtained materials.

Resin pellets, which are highly prone to environmental dispersion, can absorb pollutants such as polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) and polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) once they enter marine environments. Principal aim of the study was to statistically confirm the correlation between pollutant content and the yellowing parameter - indicative of chemical aging of pellets - behind the use of pellets as a cost-effective alternative for chemical pollution assessment in the marine environment. In parallel, we first tested the use of the LIBS (Laser-Induced Breakdown Spectroscopy technique to detect the presence of metals on the surface of pellets. We conducted Italy's first national survey of resin pellets through a citizen science initiative. A total of 2270 pellets were collected from 73 beaches across 13 Italian regions and analyzed based on morphological characteristics, including discolouration, fouling presence, and porosity. From selected subsamples we extracted four PAH and six PCB congeners and examined the surface heavy metal content using LIBS technique. Pollutant concentration values were found to be correlated with the discoloration parameter of yellowing, further validating the use of resin pellets as an effective proxy for environmental pollution in place of traditional methods like mussels or others environmental matrix, as first proposed in the International Pellets Watch (IPW) framework.

Chitosan films have attracted interest as flexible and biocompatible materials in health monitoring technologies due to their intrinsic piezoelectricity. This work studies, for the first time, the piezoelectric performances of solution‐cast chitosan films in relation to their fabrication process and crystalline content. We investigate how processing parameters, such as solvent type, NaOH treatment duration, and thermal annealing, affect the crystalline content of chitosan films and its correlation with the overall piezoelectric behavior through comprehensive physico‐chemical characterizations. Special care is devoted to a reliable determination of converse piezoelectricity, using constant‐excitation frequency‐modulation piezoresponse force microscopy (CE‐FM‐PFM), a scanning probe method specifically suited to suppress measurement artifacts that affect conventional PFM in the investigation of soft materials such as semicrystalline polymers. Our findings reveal that a post‐processing strategy combining NaOH treatment and thermal annealing significantly enhances the piezoelectric response of chitosan, with a piezoelectric coefficient d ₃₃ reaching 27 pm V ⁻¹ , nearly twice as high as those previously reported in the literature. These results pave a promising path for the development of eco‐friendly and functional piezoelectric materials for biomedical applications.