“If I just look at my courtyard , three of my neighbors have an electric car" , says Christian Patermann, long-time program director at the European Commission and now internationally known as the “father of the bioeconomy”.

What if the house of the future could be built, dissasembled and rebuilt, as if it were made of LEGO? This is one of the solutions that experts in the building sector have imagined in order to fight climate change.

In the southern Belgian province of Namur, concrete and bricks from demolished buildings are being turned into eco-friendly road surfaces.

When dealing with bioplastics, definitions like “biobased”, “biodegradable” and “compostable” can generate confusion among consumers : this affects the way these materials are dealt with after use, resulting in a problematic waste management process.

Low-cost interventions, big data analysis and new regulations on landfills are key factors for the smart management of waste in cities.

In January 2005, a severe storm swept across Northern Europe, from Ireland to Russia. More than 500,000 homes were left without power, with Denmark and Southern Sweden being particularly hard-hit.

Flash floods in Central Europe in 2002 damaged hundreds of roads, caused electricity failures, contaminated clean water and cost an estimated €150 billion in damage .

You may think that climate change is being caused by burning oil, coal and gas. But not so fast! The emission of methane from cattle is a surprisingly important factor .

Most of the animal proteins found in the meat industry waste have, until now, been underutilised. The challenge is to transform such waste into food of higher functionality and added value .

Landslides and floods are increasingly occurring natural events . They continue to damage infrastructures and farmland across the EU. Meanwhile, they are also putting people’s life at risk.

Food processing of cereal and fruits creates a rather voluminous amount of by-products . The London, UK-based Institution of Mechanical Engineers recently estimated that anywhere between 35% and 50%--or 1.

The process was developed by the Water Research Institute (WRI) of the Italian National Research Council and tested and scaled-up as part the EU-funded Innowatech project We know that biological processes offer the cheapest way to treat industrial wastewater.

Oil is less dense than water and therefore the oil escaping the sea bed travels up to the water surface. Dr. Fivos Andritsos and his colleagues from the Joint Research Center in Ispra, Italy have now developed a reservoir which can be applied on top of the leakage.