The oceans kept, not spent. Life under the water held as commons.
Technology · OceanAbout The Ocean CleanupConfiance Communications
Confiance’s India brief for The Ocean Cleanup shows how ocean-cleanup hardware needs local narrative craft as much as interceptors.
Materials science · Recyclable productsAbout Le Méridien Maldives Resort & SpaPatémar +1
A Maldives resort collaboration with Bali-made Patémar puts recycled-plastic swim shorts beside reef education — retail as conservation touchpoint.
Technology · BiologyAbout Carbiolice
Plant-based PLA plastic is often sold as compostable, yet in a garden heap it barely breaks down. Carbiolice, a subsidiary of the French enzyme company CARBIOS, hides a protected enzyme inside the plastic that stays dormant while the pack is in use and wakes up only in compost. With the EU's new packaging regulation in force since August 2026, the question is whether brands will choose compostable formats for the packs that cannot be recycled.
Technology · BiologyAbout MMC Holding International
Open a box holding a speaker, a lamp or a bottle of gin and you will probably find white polystyrene foam. A British company grows a replacement instead: fungal threads knit hemp waste into a moulded insert that protects the product and can then be crumbled into a garden compost heap. Six years after first production, it says it has reached price parity with polystyrene and expects to make about 10 million units in 2026.
Technology · Biology
In a factory in Bergen op Zoom, billions of black soldier fly larvae eat food-industry by-products and become protein and fat for pets, fish and farm animals. Protix proved insect protein can be made at industrial scale in Europe. In 2026 it decided its next factories belong in Asia, faced the world's first protest against insect farming, and defended its green claims before the Dutch advertising watchdog.
Technology · Biology
Methane leaks from landfills, farms and gas pipes and warms the planet far faster than CO2. A Bengaluru biotech firm feeds it to bacteria and harvests a protein ingredient for shrimp, fish, poultry, pig and pet diets. PRO-DG cleared a US safety milestone in 2024, and in September 2026 the Gates Foundation backed the same platform's crop products for smallholders in Asia and Africa.
Technology · Finance
Plastic collected near coastlines in places with weak waste systems is unlikely to be recycled and likely to reach the sea.
Technology · Finance
Most "recycled" bank cards on the market used to contain around 85% recycled material.
Technology · Ocean
Most of the infrastructure that holds back water, moors ships or carries oil sits below the surface, where it is hard and dangerous to inspect.
Technology · Ocean
Wind and currents push floating litter into the corners of every harbour, where it collects against pontoons and sea walls.
Technology · Ocean
Halfway between Hawaii and California, ocean currents have gathered tens of thousands of tonnes of floating plastic.
Technology · Water
Most of the world's desalinated water is made by forcing seawater through membranes with fossil-fuelled pumps, then dumping concentrated brine back into the sea.
Materials science · Circular materials
Nylon is in our carpets, swimwear, jackets and car seats, yet almost all of it is made from oil and ends up burned or landfilled.
Materials science · Circular materials
Most "paper" takeaway boxes and cups hide a thin plastic lining that makes them hard to recycle and impossible to compost at home.
Materials science · Circular materials
Thin plastic films are everywhere in retail and e-commerce, yet very little of them is ever recycled.
Materials science · Recyclable products
Crisp packets, coffee pouches and shampoo sachets are light and cheap, but most are glued-together layers of different plastics and foil that no recycler can separate.
Materials science · Recyclable products
Paper bottles have been "a year away" for most of a decade.
Materials science · Reusable products
Chip packets are among the hardest plastics to recycle, and a deodorant stick is usually thrown away every two months.
Materials science · Reusable products
Europe sells billions of bottles of water each year, most in single-use plastic, even where tap water is safe to drink.
Materials science · Reusable products
A coffee-to-go cup is used for a few minutes and then thrown away. Germany throws away about 13 billion single-use takeaway packs a year.
Materials science · Reusable products
Zip-top plastic bags are one of the most common single-use items in the kitchen: they hold a sandwich or leftovers once and then go in the bin.
Materials science · Sustainable textiles
Dyeing fabric is one of the dirtiest steps in making clothes, using large amounts of water, energy and chemicals that often end up in rivers.
Materials science · Waste management
Europe's bottle-return machines work because every container carries a deposit. India has very few such schemes, and plastic piles up on pilgrim routes and beaches.
Materials science · Waste management
Deposit return systems get people to bring back bottles and cans, but feeding them into a machine one by one is slow and messy.
Transportation and logistics · Clean mobility
Ferries are slow, thirsty and, for their passenger numbers, some of the dirtiest vehicles in public transport. In Stockholm they produced nearly half of the region's public transport emissions while carrying relatively few people.
Eco-restoration · CleanTech
City rivers, canals and docks are often walled in stone and steel, with no shallow edges where plants can root, birds can nest or fish can shelter. The water is busy, but biologically almost empty.
Eco-restoration · CleanTech
Most plastic in the sea starts on land and travels there by river. Booms and nets across rivers can catch some of it, but they block boats and fish, and they miss plastic drifting below the surface.
Eco-restoration · Eco-acoustics
Harbour porpoises are small, shy and almost impossible to count from a boat, especially at night or in rough seas. Yet European law requires countries to know where they are and protect them.
Eco-restoration · Eco-acoustics
For years, ecologists who wanted to record bats, birds or frogs in the field needed recorders costing around a thousand dollars each, which limited most studies to a handful of sites.
Eco-restoration · Robotics
Small electric workboats, born in a Hong Kong university lab and now built and run from Bengaluru, that pull plastic, temple offerings and invasive weed out of India's ports, rivers and lakes.
Eco-restoration · Robotics
A battery-powered aquatic drone, about the size of a small car bonnet, that swims into dock corners and canal edges to scoop up bottles, bags and weed before they drift out to sea.
Eco-restoration · Robotics
A boat-piloted robot that hops along the seabed injecting seagrass seeds into the sediment, built to turn a slow job for divers into one that can cover whole meadows.
Eco-restoration · Robotics
A quiet, all-electric beach robot from eastern France that combs the top 10 cm of sand for cigarette butts, bottle caps and plastic shards that rakes and volunteers miss.
Planetary engineering · Atmospheric frontiers
An 80-gram box of sensors that rides a balloon up through the atmosphere twice a day at stations around the world, feeding weather forecasts and the climate record. Its maker is now working to shrink the litter it leaves behind.
Planetary engineering · Solar radiation management
Small pumps lift seawater from under the winter ice and spread it on top, where it freezes fast. The goal is thicker, brighter ice that survives longer into summer and keeps reflecting sunlight. It is one of the most watched, and most criticised, sunlight reflection experiments in the world.
Planetary engineering · Space frontiers
Only a small share of the planet has mobile coverage. Kinéis, based in Toulouse, put 25 nanosatellites into orbit in less than a year to collect tiny data messages from sensors anywhere on Earth. Its users include wildlife researchers, small-scale fisheries and firefighters watching remote forests.
Advanced technology · Extreme environment engineering
Satellites can see Antarctic glaciers shrink, but not why they melt from below. A Norwegian-built autonomous submarine called Ran swam more than 1,000 km beneath an ice shelf and sent back the first detailed maps of its underside, before vanishing under the ice in 2024. Its replacement, Ran II, is due this winter.
Advanced technology · Extreme environment engineering
The Southern Ocean absorbs a huge share of humanity's carbon dioxide, yet in winter almost nobody goes there to measure it. On 20 September 2026, a seven-metre orange robot sailboat left Hobart on a 22,000 km voyage around Antarctica. It is the first of four Saildrone Explorers that will circle the continent for five years, filling one of climate science's biggest data gaps.
Advanced technology · NanoTech
Farmers sow billions of seeds coated in thin films that hold pesticides, nutrients and colour in place. Many of those films are made with synthetic polymers that end up as microplastics in soil. At its biorefinery in Sarpsborg, Norway, Borregaard breaks wood cellulose down into fibrils with nanometre-scale diameters and sells them as Exilva, a biodegradable alternative.
