Making plastic circular is an increasingly chartered field
Streams of all things plastic floating across our oceans are now common news footage. By 2040, the amount of ocean plastic globally could triple to 29 million metric tonnes. Of the...
Articles
How to recycle a nuclear power plant
From Italy’s point of view – a country that stopped the production of nuclear energy in its territory after the 1987 referendum – nuclear decommissioning is an old story that is st...
Towards Factories with no Assets
Many offices don’t buy printers, lighting systems, computers or carpets anymore. To reduce their costs, they prefer to buy copies per page from Xerox, light per lux from Philips, c...
Sustainable Outdoor: Recycling Plastics and Manufacturing Materials at Oberalp
PFC-free ski skins, equipment warranties, recycled plastic packaging. These are just some of the ways Oberalp Group and its brands – Salewa, Dynafit, Pomoca, Evolv, and Wild Countr...
Regeneration: The Next Step for Outdoor Fashion
Fashion companies have advanced from sustainability to a regenerative economy in three steps. In phase one, they focused on their products’ health impacts. Then they aimed to reduc...
PrimaLoft, Circular Insulation for Outdoor Apparel
While protecting from extreme weather conditions and offering real durability, the outdoor clothing brand PrimaLoft, first designed for the US Army, addresses issues like GHG reduc...
Repair: Hallmark of Adventures Lived
If each outdoor enthusiast kept their jacket, pants, base layer, for just one or maybe even two seasons longer, each of these garments would “offset” in that time 1/3 of the produc...
Beyond ownership: Tool Libraries on the rise
Going beyond ownership and borrowing a blender or a ladder for a limited time at a Tool Library: despite the restrictions in place due to the COVID-19 emergency, this has been one ...
SynBio: What Synthetic Biology Can Do for the Circular Economy
Synthetic biology or SynBio is a powerful and versatile tool that can be used in a wide number of applications. The limit lies in the researcher’s fantasy – and, obviously, ethical...
Making Empties Count: Deposit Return Schemes Across The World
Many experts identify Deposit Return Schemes (DRS) as a key way of reducing the production of single-use packaging waste, especially in the food and drinks sector. The mechanism is...
New EU rules on packaging shows beverage carton is not as renewable as previously thought
Several of Europe’s biggest economies recycle less drink carton than previously thought, shows a recent report from Zero Waste Europe. New EU rules for calculating packaging recycl...
How Robotics and AI are Changing Recycling in the US
Recycling can be regarded as one of the pillar of circular economy. The essential step towards the transformation of a good into a new good relies and depends to its process. Recyc...
Enough Is Enough: Overpackaging in the Food System
In Europe alone, the demand for plastic is close to 50 million tonnes a year, 40% of which is packaging. And almost entirely single-use. This is too much. Examples of overpackaging...
Natural hydrogen: a geological curiosity or the primary energy source for a low-carbon future?
The history of energy is one of gradual substitutions from inefficient, dirtier, expensive options to cleaner, cheaper, higher-performing fuels. Mills and machines replaced manual ...
Christa Schweng: the Union is Circular
Christa Schweng was elected President of the European Economic and Social Committee (EESC) on 28 October 2020 for a period of two and a half years, to run until March 2023. She has...
Carlo Petrini and Franco Fassio: This is The Future of the Circular Economy for Food
If the agri-food industry wants to contribute to achieving SDGs it must embrace circularity, cut waste and value social and natural capital. It must also favour local scale while p...
Contaminated Earth. FAO: no more pristine soil on the planet
Food security, water, monitoring the greenhouse gas cycle, maintaining biodiversity: all these ecosystem services depend on the health of the soil. And yet, there is no land on the...
Europe: another step toward the right to repair
The war is not yet won, but there has been another successful battle. With a vote in the European Parliament on 25th November, the campaign for the right to repair scored an import...
Is remote working really better for the environment?
The Future of Jobs 2020, a report drafted by the World Economic Forum, highlights a number of ongoing trends, including the expansion of remote working, the acceleration of digital...
The Pros and Cons of Reducing Transport Emissions Using LNG
Heavy haul transport has to understand which path to choose. Better to fully push toward electrification, with technology that is not yet mature, or to go through a gas-powered tra...