With climate change, flora and fauna shift their seasonal inner clock.  For example, fruit tree blossom earlier than previous years.

Potatoes, oranges, onions and shellfish; all are packaged in flexible and sometimes colourful nets. These are mainly made of polyethylene, the most common plastic. The problem is its biodegradability is low.

Eco-innovation is at its best when the waste of one industry becomes the raw material of another. This is precisely what the EU funded research project CAPS, is attempting to do with waste sludge from the paper industry .

Large amounts of industrial contaminants, such as mineral oil, chlorinated hydrocarbons and heavy metals, are hidden in the soil and ground water across Europe.

More than 3.3 million tonnes of used tyres were disposed in landfills in 2010, according to the European tyre & rubber manufacturers’ association.

Just like earthquakes, volcanic eruptions are extremely difficult to accurately predict. Yet, the eruption of the Santa Ana Volcano in El Salvador was predicted a few days before it happened on 1 st October 2005.

It may look incredibly innocent, but the harlequin ladybird, a stowaway onboard fruit and flower consignments from Asia, is on a ‘most unwanted’ list.

Carbon nanotubes (CNTs) are set to become an important material for the future. That’s because they are light, robust, and highly conductive, both electrically and thermally whilst still being chemically stable.

Sea bass or sea bream, by far the most consumed fish species around the Mediterranean area, increasingly originate from aquaculture.

Natural sensory system such as bacteria engineered to detect pollution and placed in a self-contained portable box could be the most effective way to track pollutants .

Nobody knows the underlying biological mechanisms of the European eels migration . Thanks to an EU-funded research project called eeliad , now about toreach completion, biologists have revealed some of its secrets, including a better understanding of its biology and migration route.

Following the 2006 ban on sturgeon fishing, the Romanian town of Sfantu Gheorghe, located at the mouth of the Danube river, turned to other income source to replace its fishing based economy.

We can blame all sorts of things on the weather. But a stomach bug?  It seems unlikely. Yet, scientists say greater quantities of rainfall and bigger storms will lead to more stomach upsets in parts of Europe.

In 2010, nearly two tons of fish was found dead due to lack of oxygen on the coastal line of the Romanian Black Sea.  Oxygen depletion , or hypoxia , occurring in the water is thought to be responsible.

Liberalising the heat market is, in theory, possible. It would operate in the same way that enables owners of domestic-scale wind turbines, or any other electricity producer, to sell surplus into the grid and draw power from the network.

In 2009, Czech and Slovak scientists involved in EU funded Envirisk project, completed their analysis of the impact of air impurity on population health, based on 15 years of past data available from their respective countries.

British porridge, Dutch pea soup snert, Italian risotto or Spanish paella are only a small sample of the diversity of diets across Europe .

By 2030, two planets might not be sufficient to sustain human activities. Estimates suggest that we are currently using resources equivalent of 1.5 planets . And the trend is going upwards.

The building sector has become much greener. To get such credentials it has adopted methods borrowed from other industries, such as life cycle analysis ( LCA ), which looks at the environmental impact of a building at every stage from its creation to its decommissioning.

Albert Jansen, membrane expert at the Netherland’s Organization for Applied Scientific Research (TNO), talks about his new seawater desalinisation technology, designed to meet the increasing demand for clean drinking water.