More than one third of the total plastic production in Europe—about 14 million tonnes per year—are polyolefins, also known as polyalkenes.

Coastal areas offer great challenges when balancing the need to protect natural habitats, with the requirement of human and economic activities . Dikes, for example, may not constitute the solutions of the future.

Floor Brouwer is a researcher at the LEI research institute of Wageningen University and Research Centre in the Netherlands. The institute develops economic expertise and gives political advice in the agrofood sector and the living environment.

Algae are an interesting natural resource because they proliferate quickly. They are not impinging on food production. And they need nothing but sunlight and a bit of waste water to grow on.

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 .

How can policymakers change the way people think? This is what the InContext project, funded by the EU, hopes to answer. Leading European research institutions in the fields of transition, behaviour and sustainable development are trying to create a manual for change.

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.

Many African regions are prone to droughts. Advances in forecasting and early warning for these phenomena are now becoming available to help mitigate their consequences on vulnerable societies.

But by the time it began in May 2009, the original extreme urgency of the HighNoon project had ‘melted’ so to speak.

Peanut, egg and soy are more common food known to trigger an allergic reaction, a problem affecting around 8% of children in the EU. Intuitively, you might not list apples as causing allergic reactions.

Increasingly, many of the plastic products we use every day are no longer based on petroleum raw material . Instead, they are made from biomass such as starch, sugar, corn and other sources that also happen to be food products.

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.

A delicious tomato and bell pepper soup, a green bean and potato salad and a refreshing strawberry, kiwi and banana smoothy.

The EU’s driest region is Murcia in Spain. But it is also an area of intensive agriculture for such arid land.

Bill Wei is a senior conservation scientist at the Netherlands Institute for Cultural Heritage, in Amsterdam.

Making planning decisions about cities today means keeping an eye on climate change predictions.  More flash floods are expected, for example.

Staying healthy requires constantly stimulating the immune system. Ingesting non-digestible fibres such as polysaccharides is thought to help. Yet companies including such ingredients in their food products cannot claim that they boost the immune system.

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.

Detecting a single photon may seem overkill for most purposes. However, looking at such tiny amounts of light is essential for researchers working  with quantum computers as well as for  chip manufacturers, just to mention two examples.