From November 25 to December 1, 2024, representatives from 175 countries gathered in Busan, South Korea; the fifth and final round of negotiations on a global treaty on plastics pollution. One of the main questions being: will the treaty include binding targets … Read more
If we move away from fossil fuels as a source of carbon, the question arises what should then become our source. Lux Research presents an answer: CO2 utilization. This could fulfil the demand for carbon value chains without relying on … Read more
Experts and scientists judged it impossible. The new Dutch wind turbine The Blade seems to mock natural laws. And yet, the new home-sized turbine is claimed to produce 2,500 to 3,000 of sustainable electricity yearly (link in Dutch). That’s the … Read more
The site change.inc contained an interesting article (in Dutch) on energy hubs – a central place where regional companies and households share their energy production and consumption. In the Netherlands, 1,200 of such hubs could play a major role in … Read more
According to RethinkX, precision fermentation and cellular agriculture will create an entirely new business model in the food sector: food-as-software. This will disrupt and transform our food and agricultural industries. If major changes in a number of key technologies come … Read more
Bidirectional charging, or possible charging from both sides, is a smart solution for grid overcharging. Bidirectional charging means that the current can go both ways. It is useful in particular for preventing the grid to become congested. Or if one … Read more
Pressure on the electricity grid gets heavier all the time. Many corporations and organisations aim to get more sustainable. But there are bottlenecks. Because at times, there is a glut of sustainable electricity (mainly solar and wind power), and at … Read more
Do we need carbon capture in order to meet climate goals? The jury is still undecided. If we would like to keep on using fossil fuels, we need carbon capture in order to keep CO2 levels down. But application of … Read more
Change.inc devoted an article to thermal industrial heating and cooling (in Dutch). Long neglected in views on the energy transition. Even though there is a lot of energy involved. But now, this has been analysed by analysts of Rubio Impact … Read more
The Conversation informed us about the negotiations on a global pact on plastic. A penultimate round of negotiations recently ended in Ottawa – the last stage will take place later in November in South Korea. Countries agreed that they should … Read more
Water scarcity is becoming an urgent problem in more regions of the world. This presses on industrial facilities, for instance. Many of them need to reduce their water consumption – while safeguarding the level of industrial production, of course. Water … Read more
Carbon dioxide is a powerful greenhouse gas. But we can put it to good use as well. Putting CO2 to good use may even reduce the burden of preventing its release to the atmosphere. When it comes to useful applications, … Read more
Boards made from agricultural wastes, are they achievable? Often, mdf and chipboard are made from wood. But Ecoboard has a different approach: it uses agricultural wastes. Boards are a wonderful material. For many purposes, they are strong enough. They consist … Read more
Hydrogen is at our disposal, so it seems, in many colours: black, grey, green, blue, turquoise, purple, aquamarine, pink, red, blue, yellow, orange, white, … [1, 2, 7]. Some colours are relatively new, like pink or purple for hydrogen from … Read more
We know that fossil and nuclear energy, and mining of resources, can have most unwanted social effects on local communities. Now this appears to be true for solar projects as well. As is testified to by a Chinese plan for … Read more
Animal husbandry has a major ammonia problem; in the Netherlands, anyway. Cows are held in barns in which urine and faeces are collected together. This is a perfect mix for a hefty ammonia emission. To the detriment of surrounding nature; … Read more
Already in our 2016 energy forecasts, we foresaw a much more favourable development of renewable energy than authoritative organizations: energy companies, the oil industry and international bodies like the IEA. Finally, from 2021 onwards, they start revising upwards their forecasts. … Read more
The release of CO2 to the atmosphere has become a problem. So much so, that a nonsensical idea like direct air capture (DAC) has attained followers. And is even experimented on by companies. Clearly, the world is in distress when … Read more
The Dutch site sciencelink.net recently devoted its attention to cultured meat. Not 100% vegetarian; for the instruction for meat production must be derived from a code derived from animals. But even so: it has great potential to substitute for ‘animal’ … Read more
UBQ Materials is an Israeli company that produces a thermoplastic compound from household waste. Their first factory outside Israel is under construction in Bergen op Zoom (the Netherlands). It will process over 100,000 tons of municipal waste to 80,000 tons … Read more
Thousands of developers of artificial intelligence recently asked for a moratorium on its development for half a year. ‘Powerful AI systems should be developed only once we are confident that their effects will be positive and their risks will be … Read more
The first assessment of solar and wind power performance over 2022 has been published, by independent climate think tank Ember. Both forms of energy production did very well. Together, they accounted for 12% of global electricity production, as opposed to … Read more
The newest development in artificial intelligence (AI) is called ChatGPT. GPT is the acronym of generative pre-trained transformer. Meaning: a self-learning program fed with large amounts of texts that generates new texts looking just like original ones. What is the … Read more
Energy storage doesn’t dominate the news. Sustainable energy gets all the credits: solar, wind, hydropower. But these can only make a difference when combined with energy storage. And the good news is: this is in rapid development. High prices, rapid … Read more
Renewable energy continues to grow spectacularly. Investments grow faster than in almost any other economic sector. Prices comes down all the time. It has such a success that a new problem comes to the fore. How do we going to … Read more
Al last, the need to work towards zero-emission construction seems to dawn on the construction trade. Not an easy task, as the volume of building projects around the world is still growing. But at least, some in the branch have … Read more
Solid state batteries are going to provide a new boost to electric driving. They are in full development; but solid state battery-equipped cars will probably not hit the market before 2025. These batteries will have more capacity than lithium-ion batteries … Read more
Lignin is the least abundant of the three main wood components. In the past two decades, much research has been done on lignin processing. It hasn’t resulted in major industrial processes yet. Shouldn’t we shift our focus? This is the … Read more
How do we get rid of the growing amount of plastic waste in the world? On a macro scale, The Ocean Cleanup tries to accomplish that: by removing plastic from the oceans. But we will also have to try to … Read more
An article in Chemical and Engineering News calls our attention to the struggle to control weeds. Will we be able to control weeds in the future? Will the EU, that wishes to halve the use of agricultural chemicals, come to … Read more
In the Netherlands, Amsterdam suffers from congestion on the grid. As do other locations. Sustainable energy projects are stalled because of it. New business projects suffer the same fate. The solution, according to grid companies? More capacity on the grid! … Read more
Fur is one of the most difficult textiles to imitate. It also meets with a lot of resistance because its production requires killing animals. But Bio Market Insights now reports that the Dutch company Geneus Biotech has grown mink fur … Read more
Wood conservation is a necessary and noble art. In itself, wood is an excellent construction material: in ample supply, often locally sourced, easy to process; its production requires little energy. But softwood will quickly deteriorate. It may rot by action … Read more
The most important factor continuously propelling and changing society is technological development. Karl Marx would have been delighted to see that present-day society is still characterized by the relationship between base and superstructure as he proposed it, almost a century … Read more
Methane is a very powerful greenhouse gas. It has 82.5 times more warming potential than CO2 over a 20-year timespan. But fortunately, it lives shortly in the atmosphere: it degrades in 12 years. Therefore, methane mitigation is a key opportunity … Read more
Many proponents of sustainability adhere to the idea that the main path to sustainability lies in high-tech solutions. Like electric cars instead of the old ones, that guzzle fossil fuels. We even wrote a book on this ‘green growth’. But … Read more
The recent RethinkX project expects the ‘20s of this century to show revolutionary developments. Driven by stepwise changes in five key sectors of the economy: energy, transport, information, food and materials. Do we see these changes coming? And how does … Read more
The RethinkX report doesn’t fool around. It starts with a clarion call: ‘We are on the cusp of the fastest, deepest, most consequential transformation of human civilization in history, a transformation every bit as significant as the move from foraging … Read more
Formulae are of the essence to chemistry. We make an attempt to tell the story of chemistry versus bacteria in words only; with the occasional illustration. This episode is packed with formulae, with the beta lactam structure as the essence. … Read more
On August 27, 1942, the Times publishes an editorial on penicillin’s wonderful achievements. The paper urges government to take at hand industrial production as soon as possible. And now happens what Florey had feared: a lot of interest in the … Read more
Mankind has become cleverer all the time. Cleverness that manifests itself in subtlety: in order to arrive at a desired goal, we need less and less energy and resources. Fortunately so, because our planet can hardly sustain our growing wealth. … Read more
Ten years ago, last month, a tsunami struck the West coast of Japan. It flooded the Fukushima nuclear reactor. This resulted in a partial meltdown and a hydrogen explosion, that released a lot of radioactivity. The media devoted many articles … Read more
We need to move through the energy transition fast. Because continuous carbon dioxide emissions will result in unacceptable climate changes. That’s why we need transition paths that meet with little resistance. The Scientific American recently proposed a pathway in which … Read more
Wooden windows? Wood, not for the frame but for the transparent part, instead of glass? Yes, modern research has shown that we can make transparent wood with a relatively benign chemical treatment. A new application for this biobased material! Windows … Read more
Costs of producing renewable energy keep coming down; and technologies for cheap energy storage keep evolving. Therefore, the eternal problems with solar and wind energy appear to be more and more outdated (‘what to do if the sun doesn’t shine … Read more
For those living in the 19th century, it was by no means evident that we could use chemistry as a weapon against bacteria. Chemistry was a young science. It found its applications in polluting and dangerous industries. The mere idea … Read more
Suddenly, articles on plastic recycling pop up everywhere. Spurred on the one hand by continued growth in plastics production; and on the other hand by the ever growing problem of plastic waste. Scientists foresee that in 2050, there will be … Read more
Since 2011, the Caribbean is bothered by seaweed. Large quantities of Sargassum are washed up on the shores. There it rots, depleting the coastal waters from oxygen, releasing hydrogen sulphide and methane. And trapping marine life, coral reefs and fish. … Read more
In Europe, most people seem to have lost their belief in improvement. A concept of dreamers. But improvement takes place all the time; and the odd thing about this is that many improvements are swift and fundamental in nature, but … Read more
The solutions are here!, talking about major global problems. Solutions that exist already but are not generally applied. Or that are under severe and undeserved attack and therefore receive insufficient support. We have in mind: renewable energy and energy storage, … Read more