[…] I also thought about going back home, but wasting that opportunity would have been a shame (ReStartAlp 2018, ndr). My goal was to develop a product capable of recovering wool every year without having to wash it first. That’s how I got to the fertiliser pellet”.

Chiara Spigarelli

It took Chiara Spigarelli four years to obtain a permit to bag and distribute her natural fertiliser pellets, made by processing sheep wool. The permit arrived on 10 October 2022. Since that day, Agrivello, her innovative start-up, has finally made it out of the limbo it had been confined to by laws and regulations that consider grease wool (wool straight off a sheep) as special waste, thereby forbidding any use of it prior to washing. “I was kept in check by an EU Regulation dating back to 2009,which obviously did not take into consideration any possible innovative solutions to the problem of disposing of wool, which is shorn every year. After all, circular economy came to the fore in Europe only ten years later, and it was just in 2020 that a package of measures was approved, with the goal – as set out by the European Commission – of ‘avoiding waste altogether and transforming it into high-quality secondary resources’”.