A New Frontier for Start-Ups
“Giaura stems from the ancient Greek words for earth and air” says Max Beaumont, the 30-year-old founder of the company, “because it turns the Earth’s biggest waste stream, n...
From Recycling to High-End Products
Plastics with or without Market Value Plastics can be conveniently classified into two large groups: those with market value, such as Pet or Pe bottles, that are recycled through well-established c...
The New Juncker Commission: High Speed Link or Slow Business as Usual?
Rarely has Europe’s biobased policy community been infused with such a potent cocktail of speculation, expectation, anticipation and hope, mixed with a liberal dash of uncertainty. The unve...
Plastic Mediterranean Sea
After monitoring the floating waste for 87 hours and observing 1,700 km of sea by Legambiente’s Green Schooner (Goletta Verde) and by the Accademia del Leviatano in the summer of 2014, the p...
Portugal Returns to Sea
The Portuguese national marine jurisdiction is one of the largest in Europe, 18 times the size of the country’s emerged land. However, in the past thirty years, possibly since it joined the ...
A Kingdom Disunited by Waste
Every year, in the United Kingdom, secondary raw materials and energy for a total of about £15 million are recovered from waste, but sadly, most of it goes overseas. While the countr...
The Novel Players of the Recovering Economy Seek a New Balance between Regulations and the Market
Although the topic is unlikely to crop up in day-to-day conversation, the ongoing energy transition is commonplace. From an economic and ecological point of view, another, equally important transiti...
Vandana Shiva: 'No Land Just for Biofuels'
There is no such thing as a “good” biofuel deriving from a crop cultivated for energy. According to Vandana Shiva, a physicist and founder of the Navdanya (nine crops) Movement...
All Together on the Sailing Boat
Ellen MacArthur, a 28 year old sailor who in 2005 broke the record of solo circumnavigation of the world in just 71 days To survive the solitude of the ocean, sh...
A New Paradise between Artifice and Nature
Michelangelo Pistoletto, Venus of the Rags, 1967 - Photo: Paolo Pellion In 2012, at Venice Architecture Biennale, Pistoletto exhibited his work Recycled Italy, made en...
European Bioeconomy: Communicate, Communicate and Communicate
If you were to introduce the circular economy to a 10 year old child how would you capture their imagination on such an expansive subject? “I would try to explain it as if we are on a space...
5.5 Billion Precious Tons of Forests and Agricultural Fields
According to estimates by Water Footprint Network, for each ton of vegetables an average 300 cubic metres of water (300,000 litres) are needed; 1,000 for fruit; 1,600 for cereals; 4,000 for pulses. ...
Europe Desperately Seeking Biomass
The availability of biomass is the bioeconomy’s lifeblood. Being able to predict flows becomes strategic for government and the industrial sector. Lately there has been a proliferation of anal...
Bioplastics: Fostering a Sustainable and Resource Efficient Circular Economy in Europe
Dynamic Growth Potential Currently, bioplastics still only represent well under 1% of the about 300 million tonnes of plastic produced annually. But as demand is rising and with more sophisticated ...
Good Fibre Packaging
Every year 8 million metric tons of plastic end up in our oceans. Every year we use 1 trillion plastic bags, most of them only once. A constant stream of plastic waste, that is filling up seas and o...
Bioeconomy and Food Security: The Relaunch of Agriculture Is at Stake
A growing demand for food, raw materials and energy, following land consumption that went beyond the security threshold, has now reached its physical limit. This was the scenario addressed in Berl...
EPR - A Building Block of the Circular Economy
In Germany, reaching such a conclusion is a serious business. When Töpfer stepped in – an economist by training – he was determined to apply the polluter pays principle, i.e. the pr...
EPR as an Economic and Environmental Instrument
Over the years, EPR has been applied within the European Union and various countries to different waste streams, including packaging waste at municipal level. This has undoubtedly led to a better en...
Italy: Compost is Catching up
Collection of the organic fraction continues to grow in Italy. This gives us a profile of excellence compared to the rest of Europe, and in some cases such as Milan, even compared to the rest of t...
Biofuels: The Aviation Industry Takes Off
According to the International Air Transport Association (IATA), in 2014 air transport produced 715 million tons of CO2 (689 in 2012), about 2% of climate-change gases. Not a negligible share. There...