Louise Grantham, chief executive, REPIC, looks at the impact of Covid-19 and the rise of the circular economy in the WEEE sector, saying the pandemic has highlighted the reliance we place on global supply chains and markets, and their inherent fragility.
Source: www.circularonline.co.uk
Blockchain can transition supply chain management to a sharing economy where people and companies reduce waste and decouple growth from the consumption of finite resources, becoming more sustainable and profitable at the same time.
As negotiations before the 15th Conference of the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity (COP-15) take place, international research has quantified the impact of human consumption on species extinction risk. As negotiations before the 15th Conference of the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity (COP-15) take place, international research has quantified the impact of human consumption on species extinction risk. Around 1 million species already face extinction, many within decades, according to the recent Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) assessment report.
Read the full article at: bioengineer.org
Global e-scrap dumping-it’s a serious environmental and public health issue. To help address this critical concern, Cisco hosts Recycle IT Day every year, and has done so since 2002….| April 18, 2019…
Scientists employ artificial intelligence to guide the design of biomass waste-derived novel materials for CO2 capture
Biomass waste can be used to produce porous carbons capable of sequestering CO2 gas emitted from large point sources (e.g., power plants, cement industries). However, there are no general guidelines on how such high-quality porous carbons should be synthesized or their optimal operational conditions. In a recent study, scientists employed machine learning-based method to determine which core factors should be prioritized in biomass waste-derived porous carbons to achieve the best CO2 adsorption performance, paving the way to a circular economy.
The EU’s Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) that subsidizes European farmers is notable because of the harm it causes to producers in the developing world. Now, Eastern European farmers, who do not receive high subsidies as their Western European counterparts, are lobbying for reform to make arrangements “more equitable”. This article highlights the many failings of the CAP, and advocates for changing the system. However, this seems improbable at the present.
Late last month global circular economy organisation Circle Economy released their latest edition of the Circularity Gap Report, an initiative that aims to measure the state of the world economy from a circular perspective and identify key interventions to transition to a more circular model. Let’s deal with the most concerning aspect of their findings first. In 2018, when the first gap report was released, Circle Economy established that the global economy was just 9.1 per cent circular, already indicating a huge gap between the amount of resources we extract and what we effectively recover. Rather than increasing the amount of materials we reuse and recycle, however, the 2020 Gap Report found we have gone backwards.