(Michael Buholzer/Keystone via AP News)

https://apnews.com/article/switzerland-climate-and-environment-83cc3ee9959e48301b98d68d15693b64

BERLIN (AP) — Swiss retailer Migros said on Tuesday that it is launching a coffeemaking system designed to replace capsules that produce thousands of tons of waste worldwide each year.

The cooperative said its spherical capsules — described as “coffee balls” — are fully compostable, unlike the plastic and aluminum containers popularized by its rival Nestle under the brand Nespresso 36 years ago.

Migros said its coffee balls are encased in a thin, flavorless, seaweed-based cover that can be discarded with the spent coffee after use. The company said the CoffeeB system, which also features a special coffeemaker, will be rolled out first in Switzerland and France this year, followed by Germany in 2023.

Webinar –Click here to watch the recording.

From the Climate and Sustainable Investment: Newsletter 2

The South African Financial Sector ESG Analytical Services’ Project presented its first webinar on 8 June 2022. The Webinar focused on Climate Finance for Sustainable Agriculture and showcased inspiring instruments that enhance environmental and socio-economic impact focused on regenerative agriculture by Restore Africa Fund, cultivated meat by Mzanzi Meat and Nedbank Citrus Shade-netting finance facility.

Posted 3 May 21 By Design Indaba. From the WISA Newsletter – June 2021

An innovation designed to serve communities with no access to electricity, WaterLight makes use of an available natural resource.

According to the United Nations, electricity demand is expected to increase by 70% by 2035. It’s also estimated that fossil fuel reserves will be depleted in the next 52 years. This, in conjunction with the fact that an estimated 840 million people have no access to electricity, calls for new energy solutions. The cordless light converts a natural resource – salt water – into light, thanks to the process of ionization of an electrolyte made up of salt water that transforms the magnesium on the inside into electrical energy. 

WaterLight is a more sustainable solution than solar energy for communities living off the grid. Not only longer lasting, it is also more efficient in that energy delivery is immediate (in contrast to solar lanterns that need to transform the energy) and more reliable (usable even in inclement weather). 
In order to work, it needs to be filled with 500 millilitres of seawater – or urine in emergency situations – to emit up to 45 days of light. It also serves as a rechargeable battery for mobile and electronic devices.

Read the full article here.

Monday, June 14 2021 From GreenBuzz – Joel Makower If the circular economy is to scale beyond a relative handful of companies engaging in a relative handful of initiatives, it’ll need some pretty powerful tools to enable them to assess the impacts of their products across the full value chain: design, materials selection, sourcing, manufacturing, packaging, transportation, merchandising, customer use and beyond. And to leverage those insights to create the next generation of sustainable, circular, even regenerative products. Without such a holistic perspective, companies will likely continue to tinker at the margins of circularity: substituting a renewable material here, increasing recyclability there, or maybe creating a program to take back and refurbish or reuse old products. Tomorrow, at Circularity 21, a new tool will be launched that just might change the game: the Higg Product Module, part of a suite of applications created by the self-described “sustainability insights” startup Higg. Marketed as “the only software tool on the market that can help companies calculate at scale the environmental footprint of their products beyond carbon emissions,” it stands to raise the bar not just on sustainable and circular materials and products but also the transparency that increasingly is being demanded from a variety of stakeholders. Read on for a deeper dive into the application.

9 June 2021 – From Verge Weekly – GreenBiz

Over the past 4.5 billion years (give or take a few hundred million) the Earth has cultivated many perfect examples of circular economy principles — including the natural patterns through which water is withdrawn from rivers, springs, streams, lakes (and so forth) through evaporation and returned through rainfalls both gentle and stormy. 

Terraformation, a climate-tech startup fronted by a former CEO of Reddit, engineer Yishan Wong, is drawing on that model to create a new unique approach to a topic that’s all the rage with sustainability professionals, reforestation. Its moonshot-y idea: turn desertified landscapes and degraded land into new forests, using water supplied by desalination processes powered by solar panels and native seeds that improve biodiversity. 

Wong is a vocal advocate for the simplicity of mass reforestation as a way of drawing down excess carbon dioxide, but he recognizes there aren’t currently enough arable acres to reach that 1 trillion tree goal that the corporate world has passionately embraced. “The previous consensus was that we have 1 billion to 1.5 billion acres that get enough natural rainfall to support this,” Wong told me. Combining climate tech with Indigenous forestry practices could be a game-changer, he believes. “You can restore deserts, especially if they were in recent geological times a forest.”

Read the full article HERE

[email protected]

May 2021 -Lauren Phipps Director and Senior Analyst, Circular Economy, has written an interesting article on redefining Good Design and some of the finalists in the Ray Hope Prize for nature-inspired designers. She writes:

When most people think about good design, they might think of an Eames lounge chair, an iPhone or Frank Lloyd Wright’s architecture. Harmonizing functional perfection with a clean and timeless form, good design is often celebrated for its endurance and ability to remain relevant and adored for decades or even centuries. Not only have these iconic examples of good design stood the test of time, they have also been copied, mimicked and used to inspire designers across industries for years past, and will for years to come. 

So why not learn from efficient, interconnected and balanced ecosystems to build our industrial systems? 

That’s the question behind the theory of biomimicry and the practice of biomimetic design, recognizing that a perfectly designed, calibrated and fully circular system already exists in nature. Energy and materials elegantly flow through ecosystems, efficiently cycling back into new forms without waste or stagnation. 

This week, 10 nature-inspired designers were announced as finalists for the Ray of Hope Prize, which was created to honor the legacy of sustainability visionary and Interface founder Ray C. Anderson. The competition and accelerator is organized by the Biomimicry Institute. (I should also note that I was on the selection committee for this year’s finalists.)

“A circular economy is so much more than recycling or reusing waste streams, which is a reductionist understanding of what nature does,” Beth Rattner, executive director of the Biomimicry Institute, told me over email. “Biomimicry, as used by these teams, shows how the things we make can not only operate in cycles, but also benefit systems along the way.”

Here are five of the finalists using biomimetic design to tackle thorny human problems: 

Biohm

Manufacturing building materials from mycelium 

This bio-based building materials company uses the root structure of mushrooms to produce a higher-performance, lower-cost and more sustainable insulation material. Through a carbon-sequestering manufacturing process, Biohm uses landfill-bound commercial and agricultural byproducts to grow mycelium for its products. The London-based startup also manufactures a biodegradable alternative to wood-based sheet materials using byproducts from food production. 

New Iridium

Mimicking photosynthesis to catalyze chemical reactions  

Conventional chemical processes require significant amounts of energy or other material inputs to catalyze chemical reactions. New Iridium is developing a process that mimics photosynthesis, using light to convert water and carbon dioxide into chemical energy, and eliminating the need to use heavy metals or heat as catalysts in these reactions. 

Impossible Materials

Designing a common colorant from a beetle’s exoskeleton 

Impossible Materials uses the bright white scales on the Cyphochilus beetle’s exoskeleton as the design inspiration for its more sustainable and better performing white pigment. Used in everything from toothpaste to traffic stripes painted on roads, the world’s most common collorant, titanium dioxide, is sourced through titanium mining and its nanoparticles have been flagged as potential carcinogens. Making an alternative possible, Impossible Materials has manufactured a safe bio-based colorant from cellulose.

Infinite Cooling

Recapturing water in manufacturing facilities

Much of the water used in industrial cooling towers at manufacturing sites or power plants leaves the facility as high-density water vapor. Infinite Cooling turned to the fog-harvesting prowess of the Namib desert beetle to address this inefficiency, developing a product that can be added to cooling towers in existing manufacturing facilities. The solution saves customers millions of dollars and hundreds of millions of gallons of water annually. 

Spintex Engineering

Spinning silk like a spider 

The silk of a spider is one of the strongest biological materials in the world. Spintex Engineering has mimicked the precision of a spider’s spinnerets to produce artificial spider silk for use in textiles, apparel, aerospace and automotive industries. The startup’s process works at room temperature, is 1,000 times more energy-efficient than the production of synthetic plastic fibers, has only water as a byproduct and uses no hazardous chemicals. 

You can learn more about these companies and check out the other five finalists here. The winner of the Ray of Hope prize will be announced at Circularity 21 on Wednesday June 16th — don’t miss it!  

E-mail: Lauren at: [email protected]

By Jesse Klein Greenbiz Group.

As consumer products companies hunt for more sustainable packaging options, some — notably smaller brands — are turning to aluminum as an alternative to plastic. The big draw? Aluminum is touted by some manufacturers as “infinitely recyclable,” and it certainly has a much higher recycling rate in the U.S. compared to plastic, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. But it might not be the sustainability silver bullet companies are counting on, according to industry experts.

Read the full article HERE

 UNICEF have released a report entitled, “Thirsting for a Future – Water and Children in a Changing Climate”. The report can be freely downloaded from the UNICEF page.

Climate change is one of many forces contributing to an unfolding water crisis. In the coming years, the demand for water will increase as food production grows, populations grow and move, industries develop and consumption increases. This can lead to water stress, as increasing demand and use of water strain available supplies. One of the most effective ways to protect children in the face of climate change is to safeguard their access to safe water and sanitation. This report shares a series of solutions, policy responses and case studies from UNICEF’s work around the world.

By 2040, almost 600 million children are projected to be living in areas of extremely high water stress. The report says that if action is not taken to plan for water stress, and to safeguard access to safe water and sanitation, many of these children will face a higher risk of death, disease, and malnutrition.

The effects of climate change intensify the multiple risks contributing to an unfolding water crisis by reducing the quantity and quality of water, contaminating water reserves, and disrupting water and sanitation systems. Rising temperatures, greater frequency and severity of droughts and floods, melting snow and ice, and rising sea levels, all threaten the water supplies that children rely on and can undermine safe sanitation and hygiene practices.

Mexican researchers have developed a new adsorbent material, made from orange and grapefruit peels, that could help clean highly contaminated wastewater. The new process, called Instant Controlled Pressure Drop (ICPD) treatment, modifies the structure of the residues, giving them adsorbent properties such as a greater porosity and surface area.

The researchers spearheading this project are from the University of Granada (UGR), Centre for Electrochemical Research and Technological Development (Centro de Investigación y Desarrollo Tecnológico en Electroquímica, CIDETEQ) and the Centre of Engineering and Industrial Development (Centro de Ingeniería y Desarrollo Industrial, CIDESI).

Researcher, Luis Alberto Romero Cano, from the Carbon Materials Research Team at the Faculty of Science, UGR, explains that by a subsequent chemical treatment, they, “…have managed to add functional groups to the material, thus making it selective in order to remove metals and organic pollutants present in water…”

Mr Romero Cano said, “…The results show a great potential for the use of said materials as adsorbents capable of competing with commercial activated carbon for the adsorption and recovery of metals present in wastewater, in a way that it could be possible to carry out sustainable processes in which products with a great commercial value could be obtained from food industry residues…”

Fruit peels are wastes which pose a problem for the food industry, given that they take up a great volume and aren’t very useful at present. According to experts, 38.2 million tons of fruit peels are produced worldwide each year by the food industry.

Palm oil is the world’s most common and versatile oilseed, found in products ranging from cooking oil to biofuels and household chemicals. Conventional palm oil production can be associated with illegal and unethical practices such as clearing of rainforest, land appropriations and the use of forced labour. These issues create regulatory, operational, and reputational risks for companies that can threaten their market access and overall brand equity.

This document, released by CERES in January 2017, aims to increase understanding, transparency, and accountability regarding responsible palm oil production by providing a shared set of reporting guidance for companies across the supply chain. Its primary purpose is to inform the content of public corporate communications and transparency on responsible production and sourcing activities including and beyond certification.

The document can also be used as a resource to guide dialogues and due diligence processes between companies, their suppliers, civil society stakeholders and investors.

The guidance document builds on, and integrates, common recommendations from existing reporting frameworks and sustainability initiatives. It is not intended as a new verification standard or as a separate reporting survey or scorecard. Companies are encouraged to report the information outlined in the guidance document through existing channels, such as sustainability reports, dashboards, and existing reporting frameworks.

While the document sets out “better practice” reporting, it can be used to improve reporting and transparency through a process of continuous improvement, regardless of where companies are in their sustainability journey.