In the Modena area there is a company that works for hundreds of businesses committed to accurately calculate the carbon footprint of their products and activities. Objective: to predict and reduce the impacts caused by the progressive emergence of costs associated with environmental externalities. Because the future is already being built in the present. For FARE INSIEME, Giampaolo Colletti interviewed Andrea Ronchi, founder of CO2 Advisor
by Giampaolo Colletti
@gpcolletti
Believing in what you do. Believing in it to the point of deciding to take an important step such as starting a business. There you have it, the story we are about to tell you involves courage. But not for its own sake. That is left to those who have no skills, no preparation, no method. This kind of courage means awareness. Knowing that the path taken is the highway. And it is the outcome of much study, even in the field. This story starts with a young man from Emilia and involves many other experts who have become his workmates, as well as many medium and large-sized companies engaged in environmental challenges. These can no longer be put off, but must be faced with competence, preparation and method. Everything comes back, we might say.
Company history. So let’s find out more about this entrepreneur from Modena, born in 1984, with a bachelor’s degree in economics from the University of Modena in the faculty named after the labour lawyer Marco Biagi and then a master’s degree from the University of Italian Switzerland. His name is Andrea Ronchi and in doing consultancy work for large companies on environmental issues he decided to embark on his entrepreneurial path. “I realised over time that CO2 is a raw material to be treated with great relevance because it is often the third or fourth cost item in a company’s profit and loss account. So it does have an impact. I founded CO2 Advisor while I was leading the development of a young artificial intelligence company in the energy field and then while I was founding the digital company of the Falk Group. I had spent the previous eight years in the leading CO2 company in Italy, and many companies kept contacting me for consultancy related to CO2 markets and carbon management strategies. For this reason, we started immediately working for important companies, such as Mapei, Pirelli, Acque San Benedetto and many others”, says Ronchi. CO2 Advisor has a team consisting of nine professional consultants who work on environmental raw materials at an Italian and European level. They support companies and industry associations in defining strategies, carbon offset programmes, CO2 risk assessment, regulation and reporting. “The topic of decreasing our footprint on the environment should be treated in a way that is less ideological and more linked to business and reporting methods. The path to decarbonisation is necessary, but there are different ways and I have always been a big fan of market-based instruments”, says Ronchi.
Company profile. We are in Castelnuovo Rangone, a village with fifteen thousand inhabitants in the Modena area, in a green land located in the high plain at an altitude of up to 100 metres above sea level and about 13 kilometres South-East of Modena. Meanwhile, an operational site in the province of Brescia, on the shores of Lake Garda, is being completed. In 2024, the company had a turnover of around EUR 1.6 million and the forecast is for more than EUR 2 million in 2025. The market in which it operates is global, mainly for Italian companies and their foreign subsidiaries with about 120 customers. The company is at the outset of a moment of great transformation because it is starting to operate on two very new fronts: that of developing projects for the reduction and capture of CO2, and that of launching the first investment fund on projects for the generation of CO2 credits. Meanwhile, decarbonisation targets of over 95% by 2050 definitively make the environment a scarce resource. And all scarce resources have value. So value is reflected in prices. “When we say that CO2 should be considered as a raw material – a production input, even though it is in fact an output – it is because CO2 is becoming an explicit cost in more and more jurisdictions and sectors. Consider that in 2019, global emissions covered by mandatory carbon pricing schemes were 15%, while today we are over 26%. For a company it is never more crucial than today to know where CO2 equivalent emissions are produced throughout the life cycle of its organisation or products. This is because if today a company’s business model is profitable without all life cycle CO2-related costs being explicit, will this still be the case as carbon pricing regulations are extended? It is madness to set investment strategies with multi-year depreciation without considering the explicit costs of CO2,” says Ronchi. In the end, the challenge comes from awareness. Because – as Ronchi argues – every company should accurately consider the carbon footprint of its products and activities in order to predict and reduce the impacts caused by the progressive emergence of costs associated with environmental externalities. The future is already being built in the present.
https://podcast.confindustriaemilia.it/
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