If renewable energy is going to provide a steady source of energy to power grids, we need to find ways of storing it. Lithium-ion batteries are currently the dominant technology, but new rivals are emerging. These include vanadium batteries, hydrogen and even volcanic rocks. Could they offer a serious challenge to lithium-ion’s supremacy?
Can whales help cool the temperature of our planet? A whale’s body can store up to 33 tonnes of harmful carbon dioxide. When they die and sink to the ocean floor, all that carbon is stored there for centuries...
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Oceans are the source of at least 50 per cent of all oxygen produced on Earth. Yet industrial fishing, offshore oil exploration and using the ocean as the world’s dumping ground for plastics and harmful chemicals have placed this fragile ecosystem...
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A revolution in retail recycling? Unwanted goods create mountains of waste and cost retailers hundreds of billions of dollars.
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Hundreds of billions of dollars are wasted in customer returns.
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Intriguing technologies are emerging which could lead to zero emissions aviation.
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The long haul to zero emissions aviation. Intriguing technologies are emerging which could lead to zero emissions aviation. Bio and synthetic fuels are viable, but still expensive and not perfectly clean.
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The world is choking on plastic waste. Less than nine per cent of it is recycled, but an emerging industry promises to change all that. The FT’s Charlotte Middlehurst discovers how chemical recycling...
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Investors are getting excited about chemical recycling, but campaigners see it as a distraction
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Renewable energy sources such as wind and solar power are now becoming viable alternatives to fossil fuels. But for electricity grids, constantly matching supply with demand becomes much harder when you strip out coal and gas-fired plants that provide...
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The coronavirus pandemic is a tragedy, but the FT’s Martin Sandbu believes it could also be a once-in-a-lifetime chance to rebuild better economies that work for everyone.
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The pandemic has brought the economic polarisation seen in many countries sharply into focus. We’ve seen many of those in humbler occupations that we all depend on marginalised by Covid-19.
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Patagonia and Stella Mccartney have been singing the tune of ethical fashion for a few decades, but it wasn't until the past few years that some of the most exciting innovations in environmentally conscious fashion have been launched.
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Could the second-hand clothes market help support a circular economy? With over 80 billion garments being produced every year and garments only being worn 7 times before being thrown away, the fashion industry has a massive negative environmental impact.
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Aluminium is lightweight, durable, and 100% recyclable. It’s also a key input for numerous industries. But today, the aluminium sector contributes about one per cent of global greenhouse gas emissions.
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Amidst the growing appetite among companies and investors for disclosure of environmental, social and governance data, the London Metal Exchange plans to launch a platform which trades ‘low-carbon’ aluminium.
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After a tumultuous 2020, Lombard Odier's Kristina Church looks ahead to what investment trends we can expect to see in 2021, and shares insights into how new regulations in sustainability will impact businesses.
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Start up, Dendra Systems, aims to restore ecosystems and biodiversity using AI and drones. With the ability to analyse an entire ecosystem down to a blade of grass, Dendra Systems hopes to restore and reforest areas around the world that have been damaged
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The world is continuously looking for alternative protein sources. The FT’s Paris Bureau Chief Victor Mallet discovers how insect protein is reinventing the food chain and alleviating pressure on feeding the animals that feed the world.
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As the world’s population rises, the demand for animal protein in particular is increasing the strain on the environment. As a result, hundreds of millions of dollars are being invested in insect protein companies.
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Our economy is in danger of cannibalising itself. Our planet's natural capital - soil, forests, water sources, minerals - is being depleted at a rate that is unsustainable. A shift if needed, but how?
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Behind that unassuming façade, WISErg has spent the past decade working on a potential solution to one of the world’s biggest challenges to sustainability: how to process food waste.
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In the Covid-19 era, employers are looking at a range of innovations aimed at making workplaces safe. These range from materials that can puncture and kill viruses, to germicidal ultraviolet irradiation, to viral furnaces.
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As economies return to work, a range of technologies are emerging to keep us safe from the coronavirus. Some are high-tech, expensive and still at the experimental stage, while others involve adjusting existing technology.
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Agriculture’s entire food chain could account for up to 37 per cent of greenhouse gas emissions.
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It sounds at first like science fiction: giant machines that suck carbon dioxide directly out of the air.
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Our current economic model is wasteful, idle, lopsided and dirty. It is WILD. But we believe a transition is underway to a circular, lean, inclusive and clean economic model. We call it CLIC™.
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How Denmark's Chr. Hansen is using natural products in the transition towards a sustainable economy
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Alice Ross, the FT’s Deputy News Editor outlines the impact agriculture is having on the environment, and what can be done to alleviate the damage.
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Agriculture’s entire food chain could account for up to 37 per cent of greenhouse gas emissions.
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The coronavirus pandemic prompted a huge drop in carbon emissions. As the travel industry begins to rebuild and the summer holiday season hits its peak, how do we ensure a green recovery?
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From bacteria to blue whales and from fungi to flowers, the loss of Earth’s biodiversity and the subsequent damage to our ecosystem is one of the top ten dangers facing society today.
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There is limited time left to reduce emission levels and mitigate climate change risks, but the path to net zero will bring with it significant investment opportunities
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A post COVID world is one that will look quite different to a pre-COVID world.
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It seems inevitable, in the short-term at least, that Wuhan will be remembered most widely outside of China as the city at the centre of the coronavirus outbreak.
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Recycling precious metals and minerals from used electronics can help make today's consumption patterns more environmentally sustainable.
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Digital solutions could be the key to producing more food while protecting the environment
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The consumer movement against plastic food and beverage packaging is gathering momentum, and companies are beginning to respond.
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From homeworking to healthcare, Covid-19 has forced society to adapt in ways that should endure
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For all its horror, the pandemic may change our habits when nothing else could
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When it comes to green issues, many of us assume it’s activists and campaigners who will change the world. But the FT’s Gillian Tett believes that as the responsible investing business continues to grow, so too will the need for financial transparency and
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By 2050, 68% of the global population is expected to live in cities and eat 80% of food produced. Unless we find a way to grow food within or near cities, the ecological footprint of feeding the masses could be devastating.
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Cell- and plant-based meat start-ups are developing ‘cuts’ of steak and chicken
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In a nation where space is at a premium, the Dutch are leaders in creating environmentally friendly buildings. From repurposed redundant structures to modular, transportable studios and floating neighbourhoods, the FT’s Helen Barrett explores three comple
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Five sustainable gadgets for the kitchen and the living room, designed with the wellbeing of the planet in mind
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Whether they’re tracking the origin of valuable assets or allowing consumers to discover more about the sustainability of their purchases, digital technologies are making the supply chain ever more efficient, and transparent.
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Precision weather tracking, ‘blood pressure monitoring’ for plants and complex nutrient analysis apps are now the must-have tools for modern farmers.
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The notion of ‘growing’ a steak in a test tube sounds like science fiction. But our food habits change
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The so-called ESG business space is currently reckoned to be worth more than some $32tn. The FT’s Gillian Tett explains that companies are realising they cannot afford to ignore issues like climate change, income inequality and a whole range of governance
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Globally, we produce 50m tonnes of toxic electronic waste every year — and the UK is one of the worst offenders
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Up to 50 billion tonnes of sand a year is being mined, dredged and even stolen to satisfy the global appetite for infrastructure, according to the UN, and it’s disappearing faster than it can be replenished.
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At first glance, the business of recycling and reusing small electronics sounds neither glamorous, nor lucrative.
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Thousands of Central Americans are trying to flee to the United States in what’s become known as the migrant caravan. Many are escaping violence and extortion, but climate change is also playing a part.
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Lorenzo Bertelli oversees bags made from recycled fabric after joining family group
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Investors are showing greater interest in alternative proteins, as the climate impact of food production comes under the spotlight and the global population continues to climb.
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Roughly a quarter of the 348 million tons of annual plastic production worldwide now goes into packaging, according to Plastics Europe and UK conservation charity the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, making it the single biggest use of the material
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Start-ups are utilising bacteria and fungi to generate protein and boost agriculture.
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Artist Mathieu Lehanneur discusses his work for new exhibit DYSFUNCTIONAL, created in partnership with Carpenters Workshop Gallery and Lombard Odier.
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Theoretical neuroscientist and entrepreneur Vivienne Ming believes that AI and what she calls “augmented intelligence” mean we’ll eventually have people who are artificially smarter than others.
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Men dominate the venture capital scene. A recent UK study found that less than one per cent of venture capital goes to businesses founded by women.
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People are living longer and children have always been expected to look after their parents in old age. But the FT’s Roger Blitz is convinced individuals are becoming more self-centred and less interested in the family.
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Culinary 3D printing is new and rather niche but it could be an answer to some of the food industry's biggest challenges.
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Whilst the traditional home ownership model is no longer viable for many, it hasn’t dampened the appetite for city centre living, nor impacted the growing desire for a smaller environmental footprint.
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As urbanisation accelerates and infrastructure decays, researchers are working out how cities can heal themselves. As the FT’s Nikou Asgari explains, they are carrying out tests on materials that repair themselves and an army of maintenance robots that ca
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A Chinese scientist claims to have created the world’s first genome-edited babies, but won't this cause more inequality in society?
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Chief Economist of Lombard Odier Samy Chaar shares his diagnosis for Europe's economy ""We're not going to run the marathon tomorrow, but we're doing ok"".
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Chief Economist of Lombard Odier Samy Chaar shares his diagnosis for Europe's economy ""We're not going to run the marathon tomorrow, but we're doing ok"".
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Who wants to worry about taking care of the environment when they’re on holiday? No one, according to Xenia zu Hohenlohe, partner at Considerate Group, which is which is why she thinks hotels should do the job for their guests.
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At the end of 2017, China banned virtually all materials for recycling. Before that, it took about 60 per cent of the plastic waste exported by G7 countries.
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Waste in fashion is on a massive scale, and less than one per cent of recycled textiles are converted into new, wearable materials. But very gradually, that may be changing.
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Could computers ever replicate humans and take over the world? It’s unlikely, according to leading neuroscientist David Eagleman, largely because what it means to be human is constantly evolving.
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An investor with ownership in a large forest faces numerous choices, ranging from farming the land, to building houses, to simply selling all the wood
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The internet has rapidly become an indispensable tool, but the FT’s Hannah Kuchler thinks it is seriously flawed and in urgent need of repair.
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Cities across the world are turning themselves into vast sponges.
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Since ancient Rome animal poisons have been used to heal rather than harm the human body. Scorpion venom can be used to help detect and cure diseases, but milking scorpions by hand is a time-consuming and dangerous process.
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One of the most innovative blockchain and cryptocurrency hubs on the planet right now is in Nairobi, Kenya.
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We may think we’re in control of our technology but the FT’s Rana Foroohar believes it may be controlling us. A recent study found that 4 in 10 Americans are suffering from addictive behaviour linked to their phones.
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In the past, Big Data was often compared to oil, because companies could get rich off their deep wells of information. But just like oil, data can be ‘spilled’, with serious consequences.
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Car subscription services, an alternative to owning or leasing a car, are gathering speed. As the FT’s Patrick McGee explains, it could hugely disrupt the traditional car ownership model.
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Didier Rabbatu, Head of Equities at Lombard Odier Investment Managers explains why businesses embracing change and embedding sustainability will soar like Eagles, whilst companies clinging to a dated mindset - sticking their heads in the sand like Ostrich
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Barter is making a comeback. That’s because technology has made it a lot easier to swap things online. It also means people can give away things like personal data to tech companies in return for services.
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The next economic revolution is already underway - and it is driven by sustainability.
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President Trump seems determined to tear apart the global economy by erecting tariff walls and promoting bilateral trade deals. Does this mark the end of globalisation?
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Sea levels are rising, and that could be causing waves of unexpected house price increases in poorer areas of coastal cities. The FT’s Ed Crooks reports on what has become known as climate gentrification.
Watch videoBillions are being invested in storage technologies essential to speeding up the replacement of fossil fuels by renewables.
Renewables such as wind and solar are becoming cheaper than fossil fuels in most parts of the world, but they need storage to be a viable, stable source of energy. In November 2020, UK prime minister Boris Johnson vowed to install enough wind turbines to power every home by 2030, but that will require solutions to manage the intermittent supply of energy.
That is where batteries — devices which store electricity as chemical energy — fit in. Lithium-ion batteries, used in mobile phones and Tesla electric cars, are currently the dominant storage technology. They are being installed across the world from California to Australia, to help electricity grids manage surging supplies of renewable energy.
But along with lithium-ion batteries, cheaper, longer-duration storage technologies — most of which are not yet cost-effective — will be required to fully replace fossil- fuelled power plants and allow for the 100 per cent use of renewable energy. At the moment, gas-fired power plants bridge the gap from renewables to provide stable supplies of energy for longer than current batteries can.
From battery technologies that use abundant raw materials to volcanic rocks, tanks full of liquid air and systems that lower weights down abandoned mine shafts, companies are racing to develop the next breakthrough that will unlock large-scale renewable energy by mid-century.
Every day electricity grids must constantly match supply with demand — a feat that becomes much harder when you strip out coal and gas-fired plants that provide a reliable, steady supply of energy.
In the first quarter of 2020, renewables provided a record 47 per cent of the UK’s electricity. Yet that success created a problem just weeks later when energy demand fell by as much as 20 per cent after the first national coronavirus lockdown in March. The National Grid’s job becomes more difficult when electricity generation from renewables reaches about 50 per cent of the total — it needs the help of big spinning turbines of fossil fuel plants to moderate volatility in the system.
The advantage of lithium-ion batteries is that they can be placed anywhere and can provide power to the grid very quickly, as they do in electric cars. They can respond in milliseconds and generally provide up to four hours of storage, helping grids deal with sudden outages in electricity generation, but are less cost effective in the longer term.
Last year, the world’s most powerful lithium-ion battery was unveiled outside San Diego.
LS Power’s Gateway battery has far more wattage than the Tesla-built Hornsdale Power Reserve in Australia, the previous record holder. Yet Gateway will soon be surpassed by even bigger projects in California.
Gateway’s debut almost doubled California’s battery storage capacity. At full strength it will be able to discharge 250 megawatts — 100MW more than Hornsdale after an expansion there is completed. One megawatt can serve about 750 homes in California.
The state’s three big utilities have already surpassed a state target to contract 1,325MW of storage capacity by 2020, according to the California Public Utilities Commission.
The Gateway project will be able to discharge its 250MW for just an hour at the start, though LS Power is expanding it to about three hours of capacity for next summer and eventually four hours, the company said.
But alternative technologies could enable safer storage of large amounts of energy for longer periods of time, which would allow even greater integration of wind and solar. But they need to be scaled up quickly in order to meet rising demand and become cost competitive.
In January 2020, the California Energy Commission, the US state’s primary energy policy and planning agency, issued a call for long-duration energy storage — defined as providing energy for over 10 hours — enough to store a day’s worth of solar energy for overnight use.
One of the winners of the tender was Invinity Energy Systems, a company that uses large batteries based on vanadium, a raw material used by the steel industry to increase the metal’s strength. These so-called Redox flow batteries — first developed by Nasa in the 1970s — use large tanks of separately charged electrolytes to store energy, which makes it easier to expand capacity than conventional batteries.
In the centre of Dalian, north-east China, Rongke Power is building the world’s biggest vanadium battery. At 800 megawatt-hours, it would be more than three times the size of the world’s largest lithium-ion battery installation in California. It would help Liaoning province’s electricity grid better integrate wind power.
Yet worryingly, vanadium prices are highly volatile and surged to $127 per kilogramme in November 2018 before falling to $25 per kg last year, which could have an impact on the cost of production.
Others looking for storage options are avoiding batteries altogether and trying natural and physical solutions similar to pumped hydro - using electricity to pump water up to a high reservoir and then releasing it, which drives a turbine to create even more electricity. The reservoir of water acts as a way of storing energy. But these systems are challenged by geography and could be limited by increasing water scarcity in the future.
Outside the German city of Hamburg, Siemens Gamesa run the world’s second-largest wind turbine manufacturer, and uses 1,000 tonnes of volcanic rock from Norway to store 130 MWh of energy in the form of heat, providing enough energy for about 3,000 German households, or roughly 750 electric cars.
Electricity is used to first heat the volcanic rocks to at least 600C. The energy can be stored for up to a week, but the target is to dispatch power overnight.
Despite their various advantages, these technologies will find it hard to beat the manufacturing scale of lithium-ion, which has been driven by the surge of investment in electric cars over the past decade. In addition, hydrogen, which is produced through the electrolysis of water using electricity, could emerge as a competitive solution for storing energy for longer periods of time.
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