Promoting health and wellbeing: creating a more equitable and sustainable environment | NUI Galway Health Promotion Research Centre

Recycling Technologies, a business specialising in the chemical recycling of mixed plastic waste, has announced a major strategic business alliance with InterChem, a global commodities trader, worth more £50m.

The Product Platform Rulebook is an open-access guide, developed by the Construction Innovation Hub and industry leaders, for various stakeholders within the supply chain to develop and deploy Product Platforms. The Rulebook aims to enable and promote the adoption of Product Platform approaches by providing guidance, tools, and a common framework for the industry.  The construction industry needs disruption, which the innovators and early adopters have initiated over the last few decades with the adoption of Modern Methods of Construction. But we now need guidance to build confidence in the approach for the majority to follow.  A Product Platform is often referred to as a ‘Kit of Parts’ which is a group of common and repeatable assets that can be configured and combined with interoperable components to deliver a range of distinct projects.

The critical difference between biomass fuels and fossil fuel, is that of fossil and contemporary carbon. Burning fossil fuels results in converting stable carbon sequestered millions of years ago into atmospheric carbon dioxide (when the global environment has adapted to current levels). Burning biomass fuels however, returns to the atmosphere contemporary carbon recently taken up by the growing plant, and currently being taken up by replacement growth. If wood fuel is sourced from well managed woodlands, then carbon released from the wood during combustion will be removed from the atmosphere as the remaining trees and seedlings photosynthesize.

Several beauty and personal care majors have joined 100+ businesses in signing a statement from the Ellen MacArthur Foundation calling for recycling costs and responsibilities to be extended to industry. The public statement​​ said that without Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) – where supply chain members were mandated to take on certain costs and joint responsibility – packaging collection and recycling was “unlikely to be meaningfully scaled” ​in the future. Among the 100+ signatories, including a raft of food and beverage players like Coca-Cola and Nestlé, non-profit WWF and the European Investment Bank, several leading beauty players had aligned their support, including Beiersdorf, Henkel, L’Oréal, Schwarz Group and Unilever, among others. “For a circular economy, packaging that can’t be eliminated or reused must be collected, sorted and recycled or composted after use. But currently, the economics do not stack up: collection, sorting and recycling or processing packaging costs more than the revenues made from selling the recycled materials. We need dedicated, ongoing and sufficient funding to make the economics of recycling work,”​ the Ellen MacArthur Foundation said.