Climate Change and Environment

Peatlands and coastal lagoons cover only a small corner of Europe, yet they store carbon, help regulate floods, purify water and support rich biodiversity. For decades, however, they have been drained and polluted. A new report from the BioAgora project suggests how to assess, monitor and restore them, and argues that counting species is not enough, because what really matters is how a wetland works — and at the end you can check whether you look at nature like an attentive field researcher.

A lost fishing net does not simply disappear on the seabed. According to expert estimates, abandoned, lost or discarded fishing gear makes up around 10% of all marine litter. The European NETTAG+ project, coordinated by researchers at the University of Porto, tackles it from several angles at once: workshops for fishers, acoustic tags for gear, sonar combined with artificial intelligence and underwater robots — and at the end you can check how much responsibility for the sea there is in your own habits.

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.