Can Ghana save its forests without abandoning cocoa farmers?
“We earn around $200 [€175, ed] a month, and every expense has to come out of that,” says Francis Tenor, president of the Boase Sibi cocoa cooperative in Ghana’s Eastern ...
Startup, Alkelux: more durable food packaging made from liquorice waste
Alkelux is a deep tech start-up established in Sardinia in 2024 whose mission combines sustainable chemistry, the circular economy and the fight against food waste: transforming an industrial by-pro...
Europe moves to secure gallium supply as METLEN signs US deal
On July 29, METLEN Energy & Metals announced a long-term deal to supply approximately 25% of the annual gallium output expected from its planned production facility in Greece. The agreement was ...
MAIRE wins €1.3bn contract for Argentina’s largest urea complex
MAIRE has secured its first large-scale contract in Argentina, strengthening its international footprint through a €1.3 billion award for the development of what is set to become the largest ur...
Circularity in models for assessing the construction sector’s emissions impacts
The starting point, as Pierluigi Zerbino explained to an audience of businesses and academics, is disarmingly simple: “We asked ourselves: can the circular economy help to decarbonise the cons...
Design in times of political and environmental urgency: when manifestos emerge in times of multiple crises
There is an image that recurs in the winning project from the Manifesto for Shared Futures course: a student standing still, motionless, in the middle of a street in Milan, whilst around him the cit...
Renewable Materials Conference 2026: Defossilisation through innovation
The 2026 Renewable Materials Conference has a clear focus: how to defossilise the chemical industry through renewable carbon strategies and innovation across different industrial sectors. The confer...
The world reorganises without the US: the new geography of sustainability
At the end of November 2025, as the COP30 UN climate negotiations closed in Belém, the most notable absentee was the delegation of the United States – about to formally withdraw from th...
FS Group: building the future of sustainable mobility
2026 will go down as a landmark year for FS Group for the major acceleration and complexity of the transformation of Italy’s rail network. From the 11.6 billion euros in investment mobilised i...
Richard Heinberg, the mentor who taught us to face up to planetary boundaries
Richard Heinberg, one of the most important American environmental thinkers of this century, died on Sunday, July 19, at the age of 75, from pancreatic cancer diagnosed just two weeks earlier. It wa...
Stadler, the “connected intelligence” of waste
For most of its history, the recycling industry has been a business of steel and motion: conveyor belts, ballistic separators, screens, magnets. STADLER is a German family firm now in its eighth gen...
A world in a glass: the interviews of RM63
For issue 63 of Renewable Matter, we invited three experts to the Think Tank roundtable discussion who could offer us a broad picture of the beverage sector, ranging from wine production t...
Every sip is a system
Water is the invisible infrastructure behind all beverages. We hardly ever see it, as we prefer to look at the colour of a wine, the foam on a beer, the design of a label, the transparency of a bott...
Nunc est Bibendum
In contemporary Western society, the ritual and spiritual dimension of the act of drinking is often reduced to mere material consumption or, at best, hedonism. And yet, our human history is peppered...
The Warsaw Enterprise Institute’s links to climate denial and the oil and gas industry
“Europe is falling behind the US and China while energy prices continue to rise. One of the reasons for this decline is climate policy, with the Emissions Trading System (ETS) being one of the...
ETS reform: the EU is going along with the most polluting industries
On Friday 17 July, the European Commission presented its proposal to revise the Emissions Trading System (ETS), the EU’s carbon market, which since 2005 has helped halve emissions from th...
Critical raw materials, Luca Meini: “It’s urgent to move from strategy to execution”
In just a few years, critical raw materials (CRMs) have become the true bottleneck for Europe’s green and digital transition. Lithium, cobalt, rare earths, gallium, germanium – without t...
Underused power plants, high costs: EU pays the price for its dependence on gas
The Hormuz Strait energy crisis has reignited the debate over fossil fuel subsidies: should governments pitch in to limit the cost of fuel – and risk reinforcing their countries’ depende...
Startup: forest restoration with Rhizocore’s RhizoPellets
“Restoring underground networks means ensuring the success of tree planting, creating ecological and economic value, and opening up new markets for our technology”, says Toby Parkes, CEO...
Pricing carbon beyond ICAO and IMO: a “sovereign” experiment from Africa
This article is part of the thematic channel The Carbon Observer: subscribe to the newsletter Despite adverse political headwinds and a general global retraction from climate action and m...