US and Europe stand behind majority of global ecological damage, says study, published in the journal Lancet Planetary Health, writes ‘The Guardian’.

The US and Europe are responsible for the majority of global ecological damage caused by the overuse of natural resources, according to a groundbreaking study.

The paper is the first to analyse and assign responsibility for the ecological damage caused by 160 countries over the last half century.

It finds that the US is the biggest culprit, accounting for 27% of the world’s excess material use, followed by the EU (25%), which included the UK during the analysis period. Other rich countries such as Australia, Canada, Japan and Saudi Arabia were collectively responsible for 22%.

While China overshot its sustainability limit to claim 15% of resource overuse, the poorer countries of the global south were en masse responsible for just 8%, the analysis found.

“High-income nations are the primary drivers of global ecological breakdown and they need to urgently reduce their resource use to fair and sustainable levels,” it says.

Prof. Jason Hickel of the Institute of Environmental Science and Technology (ICTA-UAB) in Barcelona told the Guardian: “We didn’t expect it to be so high. If they are now to achieve sustainable levels, they need to reduce their resource use by about 70% on average from existing levels.”

The evidence suggested that this would require rich countries such as the UK and US “to stop focusing on GDP growth as a primary objective and organise their economies instead around supporting human wellbeing and reducing inequality”, he said.

Australia led the world in tonnes of overshoot per capita with 29.16, closely followed by Canada on 25.82 and then the US on 23.45.

About 44% of the planet’s nearly 2.5 tn tonnes of extracted materials were used by countries that had exceeded their fair share of resource use, the study said.

Cities across Europe are working with researchers to turn organic waste such as coffee grounds into valuable goods.

By PIETER DEVUYST

It’s hard to imagine a world without coffee given how many people enjoy kick-starting their day with a freshly brewed cup.

Once the coffee beans are roasted and brewed, the leftover powder – coffee grounds – is often thrown away. Millions of tonnes of the powder end up every year in landfills, where its decomposition worsens the climate crisis by emitting methane.

Old matter, new goods

But coffee grounds can be recycled into a wide range of products. The EU-funded WaysTUP! project is coming up with different ways to give coffee and other organic waste from European cities a second life.

‘We are trying to open the gates for products that were unthinkable before,’ said Amadeo Semper, who works for SAV – Agricultores de la Vega, a Spanish waste-management company that coordinates the project.

Valencia-based SAV collects coffee grounds from local coffee shops, which sort the waste in a separate bin stockpiled along a “smart” collection route that prevents the material from rotting.

Through a series of chemical and extraction processes, the company then transforms this waste into a range of high-quality food ingredients. These includes carotenoids, which are natural pigments that can be used for their orange colour, and polyphenols – antioxidants that can help protect against various diseases.

‘Carotenoids are usually made synthetically, but we have developed a process to do this in a natural way,’ said Semper.

The four-year project, which ends in August this year, also works with 25 other partners to collect, process and refine more bio-based products.

Beans to bioplastics

Among the partners is a UK-based company called bio-bean, which turns coffee grounds into coffee oil or upscales it into high-value products such as barbecue charcoal, heating logs and natural flavours.

While bio-bean already had experience extracting coffee oil to make renewable biofuels, the EU’s research funding allowed the company to expand to a new application: bioplastics.

‘Coffee oil is an exciting area where we could deliver a clean technology and promote sustainability,’ said Ben Mills-Lamptey, chief technology officer at bio-bean.

Like SAV, bio-bean collects coffee grounds from large chains such as Costa and Starbucks, which store the waste in a separate container, and from factories that produce instant coffee.

With the help of urban waste-management companies, bio-bean receives tens of thousands of tonnes of coffee grounds every year. After the removal of anything that isn’t coffee, the powder is dried and coffee oil is extracted.

Ultimately, the coffee oil is sent to other WaysTUP! partners. It is first fermented to create bio-degradable polyesters, which are then turned into bioplastic.

‘There is nothing like waste,’ said Mills-Lamptey. ‘We should all change our minds towards that and use the resources that we have more efficiently.’

Range of uses

Bio-bean is now extracting the coffee oil at a factory while creating other goods from used coffee that are sold commercially. Its dried coffee grounds product, “Inficaf”, has a range of applications including in cars and in home, shop and restaurant interiors.

‘It can be used in brake pads or to make kitchen cabinets,’ Mills-Lamptey said. ‘And most of the backgrounds at Costa or McDonald’s are now made with spent coffee grounds.’

But the potential of biowaste isn’t limited to coffee.

Back in Valencia, SAV also uses the leftovers from meat and fish to create new types of food.

It collects the fish and meat by-products from the city’s Central Market, one of the biggest food markets in Europe. With the help of the municipality, it gives back value to hundreds of kilos of animal leftovers that would otherwise be costly to discard.

SAV developed a way to turn fish waste into collagen, a protein used both to feed animals and to make food such as jelly desserts as well as pharmaceutical pills. It also found a way to reuse animal blood from slaughterhouses as a component in bio-fertilisers.

Network of cities

‘The range of products and applications that we can get from urban biowaste is huge,’ said Martin Soriano, an environmental scientist at CETENMA, a private non-profit technology centre in Spain.

The products span proteins for food and animal feed, compost, bio-fertilisers, construction materials and cosmetics ingredients.

Soriano is using his academic background in biowaste applications to manage HOOP, an EU-funded project that was inspired by WaysTUP! and other research initiatives in the field.

HOOP, which began in 2020 and runs through September 2024, is helping European cities and regions use technologies developed in those other initiatives to recycle biowaste into valuable products.

Soriano’s team focuses on recovering solid biowaste and wastewater sludge in eight so-called lighthouse cities and regions in Finland, Germany, Greece, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal and Spain. Coordinated by CETENMA, HOOP is building the legal, financial and technical expertise in these areas for biowaste investments.

HOOP also includes 44 other members committed to replicating the practices and the aim is to have a network of 100 cities and regions in total.

Recycling urban biowaste and wastewater on a large scale would reduce the strain on landfills, help tackle global warming and generate green jobs in urban areas.

Spreading the word

To promote the circular economy further, WaysTUP! and HOOP are speaking with people across Europe to increase their awareness and acceptance of bio-based products.

The message is being spread at public events, in interactive exhibitions, on regional television and radio and even at local food markets.

By sharing the results of their work, the two projects aim to highlight the safety and environmental benefits of bio-recycled products.

‘The best way to convince consumers is to show them the benefits,’ said Mills-Lamptey of bio-bean.

Research in this article was funded by the EU. The article was originally published in Horizon, the EU Research and Innovation Magazine. 

The Continent is bracing for yet another drought after a winter with little rain and snow. It’s barely spring, and Europe is running dry, writes POLITICO.

A conflict over water triggered clashes in France, where several villages can no longer provide their residents with tap water.

Italy’s largest river is already running as low as last June.

More than a quarter of the Continent is in drought as of April, and many countries are bracing for a repeat — or worse — of last year’s bone-dry summer.

A study using satellite data confirmed earlier this year that Europe has been suffering from severe drought since 2018. Rising temperatures are making it difficult to recover from this deficit, leaving the Continent stuck in a dangerous cycle where water becomes ever more precarious.

“A few years ago I would have said we have enough water in Europe,” said Torsten Mayer-Gürr, a lead author of the satellite study. “Now it looks like we could face problems.”

Drought, said Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez, “is going to be one of the central political and territorial debates of our country over the coming years.”

France, where no rain fell for more than 30 consecutive days in January and February, experienced its driest winter in 60 years.

Italy’s CIMA research foundation found a 64 percent reduction in snowfall by mid-April. The River Po runs as low as it did last summer; Lake Garda is already at less than half its average level.

Catalonia is in a state of emergency after 32 months of drought.

A report from Spanish farmers’ association COAG stated that some cereals need to be “written off” across four entire regions this year; one meteorologist told El País to “say goodbye to almost the entire olive harvest.”

The Sau reservoir north of Barcelona has dropped so low that authorities decided to remove fish to avoid them dying off and contaminating the region’s water supply. Across Catalonia, reservoirs stand at only 27 percent — in April.  

Predicting precipitation over such long periods is tricky, especially with climate change altering rainfall patterns. One of the few long-term projections, the German weather service’s 2020s forecast, predicts the country will see less rather than more rainfall for much of the decade.

But even if precipitation levels stay the same, climate change will reduce water availability across swaths of Europe.

Finally, Europe’s glaciers and snow cover are rapidly shrinking thanks to rising temperatures — depriving major rivers like the Rhine, the Danube, the Rhône or the Po of vital supply.

This year, the contribution of meltwater to Europe’s water reservoirs “will be really much less than usual,” said Andrea Toreti, a senior researcher at the European Commission’s Joint Research Center.

“Poland and other regions like Bulgaria, Romania, Greece are showing warning conditions for drought,” he said. The European Drought Observatory also indicates water stress across Nordic countries.

Capitals — scarred by last summer’s devastating effects on sectors including agriculture, energy and industry — are scrambling to draft responses to current and expected shortages.

Earlier this month, Italy issued a drought decree reducing red tape for water infrastructure, including desalination plants. Spain in January published a new set of water management plans.

French President Emmanuel Macron’s new national water management strategy is aimed at reducing overall water consumption by 10 percent by the end of the decade. Under the plan, each sector will be asked to draw up proposals to reduce their water use.

Germany’s strategy, adopted in March, includes steps to make water use “sustainable” in 10 areas by 2050, as well as a slate of 78 measures to be implemented by 2030.

Meanwhile, managing water — and deciding who gets access to it — is turning into a political issue across the Continent.

Last summer, water use restrictions were imposed in the U.K., France, Spain and Italy, raising questions about the prioritization of water use for touristic infrastructure, big industrial installations and agriculture.

Some municipalities already face new restrictions — in others, they were never lifted. Catalonia recently imposed limits, including a mandatory 40 percent reduction in water consumption for agriculture.

In southern Germany, legal disputes over water have doubled over the past two decades. And in France, tensions between environmentalists and farmers over the construction of water reservoirs last month sparked violent clashes.