Waitrose working to encourage sustainable food production
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. […]
Modern farming owes much to long-standing research that continues to pump out results and to provide valuable perspectives to guide the future of agricultural science, achievements that will be celebrated at a three-day international conference in May. The Future of Long-Term Experiments in Agricultural Science, from 21–23 May, is being organised by the Association of […]
Rothamsted Research welcomes Environment Secretary Michael Gove’s speech today on the future of the UK’s farming industry, “Farming for the Next Generation”.
One of the most ambitious programmes to provide lasting improvements in nutrition in sub-Saharan Africa begins today when a diverse multinational team of experts from agriculture to ethics start looking for ways to end dietary deficiencies in essential micronutrients. Rothamsted Research is contributing soil and crop expertise to the programme, known as GeoNutrition, which has received […]
Over a quarter of the world’s land could become significantly drier if global warming reaches 2ºC, according to new research from an international team including the University of East Anglia (UEA). The change would cause an increased threat of drought and wildfires. But limiting global warming to under 1.5ºC would dramatically reduce the fraction of the […]
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