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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Climate change predictions for Europe indicate considerable changes in the water balance throughout the continent, with an increased likelihood for summer droughts in the Mediterranean, Central and South Eastern Europe.

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.

Scientists of the European research project ALARM (Assessing LArge scale Risks for biodiversity with tested Methods) achieved an alarming result: pollinators and insect-pollinated plants in Britain and the Netherlands are declining in parallel.