Climate Change and Environment

Fish and shellfish farming is growing fast around the world, yet in the European Union production has fallen and Member States rely on imports. EU-funded research wants to change that without sacrificing climate goals: healthier fish without antibiotics, feed made from fungi and insects, seaweed farms at sea and aquaculture that wastes nothing – and at the end you can check how sustainable your own seafood habits are.

An electric car battery that can no longer power a vehicle is not rubbish at all – it is a small mine of lithium, cobalt, nickel and manganese. The European BATRAW project, coordinated by Leitat, has shown step by step how robots, AI cameras, lasers, clever chemistry and a blockchain passport can turn worn-out packs into high-quality materials for brand-new batteries – and at the end you can find out how much of a circular economy engineer there is in you.

Every brewery produces it by the tonne: the wet, heavy mass of spent malt left in the mash tun once the sugars have been washed out. Usually it ends up as animal feed, or simply as waste. An EU-funded project has just finished asking whether that mass could become a plastic instead — and whether the bottles and trays made from it could later be sorted out and broken back into their building blocks. The answer says a lot about what the word “bio” on a label is actually worth — and at the end you can check how far your own thinking about waste really reaches.

Ammonia, fuels, plastics: the chemical industry still makes almost everything by burning fossil fuels at high temperature and pressure. A European research project has been testing another route - electricity from wind and sun, gas turned into cold plasma, and a catalyst that has to cooperate with it instead of shutting it down. The reported carbon footprint is up to over 90 % lower - and the test at the end asks whether thinking in parameters, conditions and comparisons is already your habit.