Catia Bastioli is a chemist, researcher and entrepreneur. She is CEO of Novamont and Matrìca, President of Terna Spa of the Kyoto Club Association and of the Italian Technological Cluster of Green Chemistry SPRING, and member of the Board of Directors of Fondazione Cariplo. She has been developing and field-studying the model of biorefineries integrated in the local areas, where the primary objective is an efficient use of resources and priority is given to high value-added products (bioplastics and biochemicals), short value-chains and a system-based economy. This represents a cultural (before than economical) development model, based on territorial regeneration that starts from decommissioned chemical sites and uses local biodiversity and scraps in order to give origin to renewable raw materials, capitalizing research and innovation and involving different stakeholders (institutions, research bodies, actors of the agricultural and industrial world). The innovative technologies developed for the bioplastics integrated supply-chain have led to the foundation and growth of a series of companies, that today form part of the Novamont Group.
She has been a member of important EU working groups on climate change, environment and renewable raw materials, such as the European Union Bioeconomy Panel. Prime inventor of around 80 patent families in the sector of synthetic and natural polymers and transformation processes of renewable raw materials, she was awarded “European Inventor of the Year 2007” by the European Patent Office and the European Commission for her inventions related to starch-based bioplastics between 1991 and 2001.