EU lawmakers vote to ban single-use plastics across Europe

With fewer of us crossing international borders right now, the humble road trip is enjoying a bit of a renaissance! Whether you’re traveling within or across state lines, a car offers you freedom, flexibility and a safe and simple way to get from A to B.  By not flying, you’re helping to lower your carbon emissions, which is a great start to a more sustainable way of traveling. But when we go on any trip, we’ve got to bear in mind that we’re not only enjoying the places we visit, but also having an impact on a destination’s environment and local communities.  The best road trip is the one that leaves no trace of you in the environment. Or maybe you even leave some places better than you left them!

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.

It’s the birthright of every generation to rebel against its forebears. So how can young people today define themselves as different from their phone-obsessed, digital-native parents? By donning Little House on the Prairie dresses, baking pies and cavorting with fairies. The cottagecore aesthetic has become popular with Gen Z, but what many don’t realize is how this trend actually finds its roots in sustainability.