A Little bit of Everything

Thursday started off with a guest lecturer Giovanni De Giudici to discuss the geology of the area around the Quirra military base and what some of the history was surrounding the heavy metals in the region. Later in the evening, we wandered down to Via Roma to find that all of its lanes were closed off for the Rally Italia Sardegna kick off race. The racers were doing a short show-off event in a tight loop along the waterfront, while the main part of the avenue was home to a car show, complete with the police Lamborghini.

Friday contained our very comprehensive mock town meeting where each of us played the role of some different person involved in the case of environmental pollution due to the Quirra military base.  I had a lot of fun in the role of a concerned parent.

Saturday I finally took some time to do some exploring of the top of our hill with Cat and Anna. We visited the Torre dell’Elefante which overlooked our corner of the city. From there we continued up the hill to the Palace and then to the Torre di San Pancrazio which overlooked the entire city and the surrounding suburbs. For our final stop we went through the Museo Archeologico to see both Nuragi and Roman remains from the various sections of the island.

Torre dell'Elefante

The Palace

That evening the class then went on a hike of the Stella di Diavolo (or a hill that looked like a saddle where the devil once sat). From there we could see most of the Poetto beach.

Sunday morning we all tried to get ahead with the work that was due for the end of the class. We then spent the rest of the afternoon and evening at the Santa Caterina festival in the town of Orroli. Many of the town’s men and women would dress in their much more traditional attire. They would then march, ride horses and town large floats down the street with their tractors while the people atop the floats would throw down cookies and other sweets into the crowds of onlookers. At the end of the very long procession, the figure of Saint Caterina would be moved from its float and back into the church.

One of the many floats in the procession.

Climbing to the Top

Monday started off with another early morning bus ride up the southeastern coast of Sardegna to the coast of Villasimius where we proceeded to board a large cruising sailboat. The captain took us out to a very rocky island with a lighthouse on it. A few of us ended up climbing up to one of the highest natural points on the island to enjoy the well earned view from the top. We quickly made it back down to go swimming with the rest of the group where we saw some smaller fish and sea urchins.

As we headed back to the boat for lunch we watched a large lightning storm unleash its power over Cagliari way off in the distance. During lunch we devoured the pasta they had cooked for us and learned how to feed the crew’s favorite seagull as it flew down the length of the boat. Once lunch concluded we landed on a secluded stretch of beach. As everyone went to swim and explore the spit of land, Dylan and I decided to climb to the top of the highest promontory just behind the beach. We were a bit concerned being on top of one of the highest locations in the area while watching all of the lightning off in the distance. So we headed down to the boat as quickly as possible and enjoyed jumping off the rail of the boat with the rest of our class.

 Dylan climbing up to the peak high above the beach.

On Tuesday we had Dr. Tiziana Lai and Alessandro Murgia come talk to us about their respective work regarding end of life vehicles and the remediation of various contaminated sites in Sardegna. Alessandro brought up some rather interesting issues regarding the funding and resources that are available to clean up such sites contaminated with many naturally occurring heavy metals.

Wednesday was one of our last “free” days which we got to spend at Tuerredda (another amazing beach) on the southwestern corner of the island. I walked around the cove that we were in and collected a pocket full of sea glass before joining the others and enjoying the hot sun and crystal clear water.

Hopefully this wont be our last trip to the beach while we are here. But if that is the case, then it was definitely a great tip! 

Fighting the Tides

After finishing and presenting our second project on Friday, a few of us decided to head down to a restaurant with outdoor seating to enjoy a healthy serving of Sardinian pasta. On our way back we ended up stopping by a piazza and practiced our Italian with some of the local university students. This time they didn’t know as much English so there was no easy way to continue the conversation once I ran out of my Italian vocabulary.

The next day we all decided to sleep in late. We then figured that we head to the beach in Poetto. After trying out the cuisine at the local McDonalds we hopped on the bus and headed over. The weather was of course amazing once again so after soaking in the sun for a couple of hours of soaking in the sun we decided to fight our way into the overfilled bus and fulfill our craving for pizza.

We ended up doing the same again on Sunday however a few of us rented paddle boards and the rest of us spent the rest of the day swimming around. This time it was a free for all to get on to the busses as one after another drove past us and were already filled to capacity. We were eventually lucky enough to pack into a hot bus filled with sweaty beachgoers.

Sailing

After our amazing trip this past weekend we had to come back to reality and had a lecture from Stefano Milia about remediation techniques. We ultimately learned that there is no correct solution when remediating a particular site, we will always have to weigh our options between the cost and overall safety of the solution.

To change it up a bit, we spent Tuesday morning in a J24 sailboat out in the harbor of Cagliari. My boat’s instructor was Andrea. He was around thirty years old and was a special education teacher at a school on the north side of Cagliari. During his time off from school he plays the violin for an international orchestra and captains charter sail boats. While on board with him we got our six person teams to practice our tacks and jibes. Luckily no one was hit by the boom as it came around on each maneuver. By the time we were coming back into the dock the thermal winds had picked up so we decided to try our turns at more of a race pace where we would pull the jib sheets through the winch as fast as we possible could. After all of the hard work we all spent the rest of the day at the nearby beach.

We changed gears again for Wednesday and went to visit the Villaservice facility in Villacidro. There they landfilled municipal solid, and special waste. In addition to that, they digested the organic fraction of waste so that they could produce and burn biogas. Landfill gas was also produced and collected and burned for energy at a different end of the plant, where as the biogas from the digester was used to warm itself and to supply energy for the waste water treatment plant so that they could clean all of the waste water that was generated from the plant in all of its various processes. The plant also had a composting facility to deal with the more fibrous fraction of organic waste and then that could be reused by farmers as fertilizer.

Once again, we had another couple of amazing days in the delightful island of Sardegna. 

Pigs, Sheep and Cougars. Oh My!

700 photos and 2 days later we returned from yet another amazing weekend trip into the countryside. We left for a 3 hour bus ride to the east-central part of the Sardegna where we stopped in the town of Nuoro to visit a traditional clothing museum. Due to the remoteness of the region the villages maintained much of their cultural traditions as compared to other areas of the island where you can see much more foreign influence from past invaders. They said that the shepherd communities of the area tended to have a much more self-sufficient mentality than many other areas of Sardegna and that it has traditionally always been more matriarchal due to the men always being out with the herds. 

We then went to the outskirts of the neighboring town, Orgosolo where we ate lunch with "shepherds.” They shared smoked meat and cheese with us in addition to sheep potatoes and roasted pork. We noticed that they were very generous when pouring wine which got the large group of elderly Italians very excited to meet us. The shepherds then sang to us with their throat singing quartet and had most of us dancing. We then went into the town of Orgosolo where people come from all over to paint political graffiti all over the place. 

The class loaded back onto the bus to make the last leg of the trip to our resting place for the night at Hotel Enis Monte Maccione in Oliena. It is a bed and breakfast halfway up a mountain with a driveway consisting of 18 switchbacks. When we arrived there was an hour and a half until dinner would be ready so we decided to burn off our lunch and go for a hike up to a promontory on the side of the mountain. It ended up being a 3 mile round trip hike with an approximate and eight hundred foot climb. We took some amazing photos of the countryside below us and then managed to make it back in time for dinner. This time sheep and rabbit was on the menu for dinner and I discovered that I really like rabbit meat. A group of us then woke up at 5 AM the next morning to do the same hike again in hopes of catching the sunrise where we once again got excellent photos of the valley below. 

After breakfast we drove out of the mountains to the Gulf of Orosei. We went on a boat ride down the coast to visit some of the natural caves that were produced from the groundwater running through the limestone. One of the caves we were in stretched for 8km and we walked on path for a kilometer into it to see the interface where the freshwater meets the saltwater. The boat then took us further down the coast to two different beaches that could only be accessed from the coast. We were able to relax and enjoy our lunch while we lounged on the white pebble beaches. We truly live a very tough life down here on our beautiful island!

Our first day back at school after our weekend adventure to the Agrotourismo contained a long block of group presentations about the differences in policies between various American states and European Union mandates. The next day (Tuesday) started off with a bus ride 20km north to visit the Ecoserdiana land fill where they used to landfill the municipal solid waste from Cagliari but have since stopped accepting MSW and have been taking “special” waste instead. What we saw being dumped was predominately industrial waste and fly ash. They were in the process of adding more capacity to their larger landfill by building on top of an already capped portion of the landfill. We learned that they were in a bit of a transitional period where the landfill gas being produced is declining because there is no more organic matter being land filled any more. I found it interesting that they had to pipe the landfill gas 2.5 km to an offsite co-generator location where they could then tap into the local low voltage distribution network. They were able to generate 1.9MW of electricity from their combustion generator. Ecoserdiana had also recently installed a 1.5 MW solar array to further utilize the capacity of their grid connection. I was personally glad to see that they were generating energy from the methane produced in the landfill but it seems much more efficient to incinerate waste entirely and then landfill the inert ash produced by the process.  

A view of the landfill as they prepare the existing landfill to be the bottom of the new landfill. 

Weekend Cultural Visit 5/23 - 5/24

After a day of classes on Friday we all woke up early Saturday morning to travel a little ways up the western coast of Sardegna. Along the way we stopped at a small mining area of Porto Flavia and explored a cave used for the mining of zinc and lead. The mines opened in the early 1900’s at that time laborers had to painstakingly dig the ore out using hand tools until a more mechanized process involving conveyer belts and pneumatic tools was introduced around the 1960’s.

Our next destination was to be Sa Perda Marcada, an Agroturismo in Arbus. En-route we stopped at Temple d’Antas, a Roman Temple made for the Sardinians over the remains of a Carthaginian one. The first stood for 500 years before the Romans erected a new one around the time of Christ.

From there we had one last short trip through the steep mountains to the Agrotourismo. We arrived just in time for a traditional dinner (which lasted for 2 and a half hours). The next morning we took a walk around the farm and had fresh eggs for breakfast. After being properly fed we started our cooking lesson making Sardinian gnocchetti and a traditional Seadas comprised of goat cheese and lemon zest for dessert.

On our way back to Cagliari we stopped at a public beach surrounded by miles of rolling sand dunes. We soaked in the sun for a couple of hours before returning to our school work. 

After being collected streetside, trash is brought to a location such the location here were it is dumped into a hopper before being loaded into an incinerator.

 Mixed paper ends up at a facility such as this where it is recycled into new cardboard.

Organic waste comes to a composting facility where it is broken down and turned back into compost that can be used on larger local farms.

Visiting the "Jersey" of Cagliari

May 20^th

Our class started off the morning with a field trip to Papiro Sarda a paper recycling facility across the harbor from downtown Cagliari. It consumes approximately half of the mixed paper, cardboard and office/printer paper from the city of Sardinia. The mixed paper and cardboard is used to make more cardboard whereas the fiber in office paper is of a higher quality than the mixed paper and can be used to make things such as recycled notebook paper. A majority of the paper they produce happens to be cardboard and there is only one paper mill in the facility, so they only produce the higher quality notebook paper about 1% of the time. In both cases the paper products are fed into the pulping machine where the paper is mixed with water in order to break the bonds between the fibers in the material and make it a homogeneous mixture.

As a liquid, contaminates and solid objects can be more easily filtered out of the mixture as the pulp passed through the sieve at the bottom of the pulp tank. From there the pulp passed through one last cyclone filtering out finer particles and then straight onto the production line where the water content was reduced to about 50% before it entered the drying drums were the moisture content is taken down to the final 5-7%.

During the process the final paper product weighs approximately 95% of the initial input mass and all of it is reused in either notebooks, paper bags or cardboard boxes.

After lunch we traveled to a waste to energy facility operated by Tecnocasic where both industrial and municipal waste is disposed of. Waste is taken from collection trucks and placed into a hopper. All waste is then ground up and homogenized so that it can be more easily burned. Steam produced from the incinerator runs two turbines that generate a combined 13MW. Fly ash and other contaminates are subsequently filtered out of the smoke which is then released into the atmosphere. Those byproducts are then landfilled or can be used in products like concrete.

In an adjacent facility also run by Tecnocasic organic waste is filtered and composted over the course of 90 days. The final compost is then sold to large local farms to be used to fer.

Both facilities in addition to a wastewater treatment facility consume 4 of the 13MW produced by the incineration facility while processed water is used as cooling water for the incinerator. The remaining energy produced by the facility is then sold back to the electric company.  All 3 facilities operate in a highly synergistic manner. With this model waste volume is dramatically reduced while the population benefits from having a cheap energy source and new nutrients for their food all while minimizing how much material is placed in their nearby landfill. 

May 14th-16th

May 14^th-16th
To say I am amazed by Sardinia would be un understatement! Upon arriving in Cagliari on Thursday afternoon I was taken aback by how lively the city was and how it also managed to have a small town feel at the same time.
We instinctively went to a pizzeria for our first dinner which was promptly devoured and followed by a delicious cup of gelato. We did a bit of exploring after dinner. Being that most of us are experienced at navigating the Boston streets, we were able to find our way through the mess of streets. Friday morning we woke up “early” to meet up with Environmental Engineering students from the Universities of Cagliari and Padua. There was a bit of a struggle to understand everyone’s different languages but after some group activities we were able to become a bit more comfortable with one another and we started questioning everyone on their home country’s customs. After the meeting Professor Cossu from Padua invited all of the Northeastern students to his beach house in Geremeas for dinner on Saturday night.
We spent that night at a tiny restaurant with 20 of us around a long dinner table. Many Italian Christmas Eves had prepared me for what was about to be served. Four courses and 2.5 hours later we left with full stomachs and were ready to explore Cagliari’s nightlife.
Saturday morning was spent catching up on sleep and adjusting to the new time zone. After another great Italian meal of seafood salad, we all packed our beach clothes and got ready for the other students to pick us up and take us to their beach house. We enjoyed the magnificent water and played a bit of soccer on the beach. In the meantime dinner was being prepared for us by our hosts. We consumed our second back-to-back 4 course meal consisting of Italy’s finest prosciutto, steak, Sardinian sausages and an assortment of other foods. We mingled with the students for the rest of the night and went back down the beach to gaze at the stars.
From everything that we have done so far, I am really looking forward to what the rest of the week holds!

Pre-departure

As the nervous excitement builds, I look forward to spending my Summer I semester in Sardinia. I am hoping for a more relaxed and slower paced lifestyle while there. I am expecting much better food, coming in the form of fish and pasta. I hope that the locals are friendly towards us visitors but I would understand where they were coming from if they did come off as being a bit “cold”.

It is definitely going to be very different living in a different country for a month. While I did study Italian in high school I am still learning to understand the relatively quick speaking native Italians. I would ultimately like to be able to learn the local customs and try to fit in as best as possible.

I hope to see how different societies deal with their environmental and waste problems as well as see how their culture functions and hopefully we can bring back what we learn while in Italy to use in our everyday life or as we go out into the work force as engineers.