Day: July 21, 2021

Jan Huitema is a Dutch politician and Member of the European Parliament (MEP) from the Netherlands since July 2014. He is a member of the People Party for Freedom and Democracy, part of Renew Europe. He was re-elected in 2019. During his first term from 2014 until 2019, Huitema was a member of the AGRI Committee, where he served as rapporteur on fertiliser products and water reuse. During his first term he worked on a change in the definition of animal manure and prevention of the patenting of plant-properties. In 2019, he joined the Committee on the Environment, Public Health and Food Safety.

The idea of  a circular economy—one in which materials are used in a closed loop, running on renewable energy—is gaining traction, and many companies are setting goals to become circular in the next few decades. The coming years will be crucial in solidifying the growing circular economy. Here are seven trends that are likely to help it expand in 2021. More Brands Will Employ Reusable Packaging. A growing number of companies are rethinking product design to avoid disposable packaging. Startups like Blueland and Everdrop now sell cleaning products in the form of tablets that can be dropped in reusable bottles. Bite sells tiny toothpaste tabs so it can avoid the standard plastic tubes.

For the first time, RMI has examined the vast potential for resource recycling in China and shown how it can serve as an important component of reaching the nation’s zero-carbon goal. Growing the Circular Economy: Opportunities for Resource Recycling under China’s Carbon-Neutrality Target [PDF] quantifies the market opportunity across nine key segments, from scrap steel and plastics to biomass and EV batteries, finding a ¥2.8 trillion potential market in 2050.

If you could design waste out of your business, would you?  Increased sustainability, cost savings and reduced consumption of natural resources … these are just a few of the benefits companies see when they convert waste to energy rather than use traditional waste disposal methods like landfills and fuel blending. For companies that generate hazardous waste, in particular, keeping their dangerous waste out of landfills helps protect the environment while giving them a competitive edge. These companies aren’t few and far between. In fact, the push toward a waste-free economy is catching on as more companies are embracing a circular economy, an economic system that focuses on eliminating waste and the unnecessary use of resources.

Intelligent re-use of hundreds of mammoth end-of-life turbine blades got a boost today, as European wind engineers Vestas spun into recycling. The Aarhus -headquartered engineer has fabricated over 1,000 blades at its UK base on the Isle of Wight, and recently hinted it may soon confirm up to 2,000 new jobs in the North East.    It supplies blades of up to 110 metres to projects worldwide, including SSE Renewables’ 1GW Seagreen park off the Angus coast. The company announced today a breakthrough in technique for recovering for second use the epoxy materials used to fabricate the giant structures.  Vestas leads CETEC – Circular Economy for Thermosets Epoxy Composites – , a circle of chemical engineers, academics and manufacturers.