Waitrose working to encourage sustainable food production
The Agriculture and Horticulture Development Board (AHDB) is committing £5m to fund Britain’s next generation of agricultural experts in an effort to overhaul the industry’s “fragmented” innovation and skills pipeline. It will plough the funds into supporting PhD university students over the next five years, following its recent report which identified a UK productivity gap […]
A new research centre that will support communities threatened by climate change was launched at the University of Reading by former Irish President and UN human rights high commissioner Mary Robinson. The Reading Centre for Climate and Justice is dedicated to putting justice at the heart of understanding the problems caused by climate change, and finding solutions […]
A series of workshops is bringing together African researchers, businesses and policy makers to explore how knowledge exchange could help provide safe, sustainable water. Lancaster University staff delivered the first of five week-long Knowledge Exchange workshops, to initiate the start of the £7M RECIRCULATE project, supported by the UK Government’s Global Challenges Research Fund. RECIRCULATE aims to […]
…And black plastic will not be used for Waitrose meat, fish, fruit and veg by end of this year. Waitrose has pledged to not sell any own label food in black plastic beyond 2019 – this is the earliest date a supermarket has committed to removing black plastic from its shelves. Reducing the use of […]
Provisional figures for global average near-surface temperatures confirm that last year, 2017, was the warmest year on record without the influence of warming from El Niño. When viewed alongside 2015 and 2016 – both of which were dominated by a significant El Niño – last year was the second- or third-warmest year for annual global temperatures since […]
The supermarket Waitrose will remove black plastic trays from meat, fish and fruit and veg ranges by end of year. The retailer has today announced that it will stop selling packs of disposable straws from September 2018. This builds on its track-record for being the first supermarket to stop selling items containing microbeads from September […]
Supermarket chain Iceland has said it will eliminate or drastically reduce plastic packaging of all its own-label products by the end of 2023. Iceland says the move will affect more than a thousand own-label products. New ranges will be packaged using a paper-based tray, rather than plastic. It follows recent outcries over the packaging of […]
Scientists think they have the answer to a puzzle that baffled even Charles Darwin: How flowers evolved and spread to become the dominant plants on Earth. Flowering plants, or angiosperms, make up about 90% of all living plant species, including most food crops. In the distant past, they outpaced plants such as conifers and ferns, […]
The Government has today launched its 25 Year Environment Plan, pledging to improve the natural environment by 2042. Many headlines have been made by the pledge to eradicate avoidable plastic waste, but the plan also considers sustainable land management, nature enhancement and reducing pollution, among other things. Leading environmental scientists at the University of Reading […]
Making grasses more digestible promises improved feed for ruminants and better biomass for biofuel production, with economic and environmental benefits for both. Plant biomass contains considerable calorific value but most of it makes up robust cell walls, an unappetising evolutionary advantage that helped grasses to survive foragers and prosper for more than 60 million years. […]
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