Technology

Ecorobotix ARA: the Swiss sprayer that looks at every plant before it sprays

Most crop sprayers treat a field like a single surface. ARA, built by Ecorobotix in the Swiss town of Yverdon-les-Bains, photographs the ground as it moves, decides in a fraction of a second which plants are crop and which are weeds, and fires a dose onto a square about 6 centimetres wide. Five years after launch, 1,000 machines are working in Europe, the Americas and Australia, and the company is now assembling them in Kansas.

Ecozen Ecofrost: the battery-free solar cold room built for India's smallholders

Three IIT Kharagpur graduates asked why a farmer should sell tomatoes cheap just because there is nowhere cool to keep them. Their answer, Ecofrost, is a farm-gate cold room that runs on sunlight and stores cold rather than electricity, so it needs neither a grid connection nor a battery. Twelve years on, the Pune company behind it has grown into a profitable climate-tech business with revenue above Rs 1,000 crore.

FarmDroid FD20: the Danish solar robot that remembers every seed it sows

Weeds hit hardest in the first weeks after sowing, when sugar beet and onion seedlings are tiny. Conventional farms answer with herbicide, organic farms with crews of hand weeders. FarmDroid, from Vejen in Denmark, built a slow, light, solar-powered robot that records the GPS position of every seed it plants and then comes back to hoe around each one. More than 500 now work in 26 countries, and a bigger sibling arrives in January 2027.

About Carbiolice

CARBIOS Active: the French enzyme that lets PLA plastic compost at home

Plant-based PLA plastic is often sold as compostable, yet in a garden heap it barely breaks down. Carbiolice, a subsidiary of the French enzyme company CARBIOS, hides a protected enzyme inside the plastic that stays dormant while the pack is in use and wakes up only in compost. With the EU's new packaging regulation in force since August 2026, the question is whether brands will choose compostable formats for the packs that cannot be recycled.

About MMC Holding International

Magical Mushroom Company: growing packaging to make polystyrene a thing of the past

Open a box holding a speaker, a lamp or a bottle of gin and you will probably find white polystyrene foam. A British company grows a replacement instead: fungal threads knit hemp waste into a moulded insert that protects the product and can then be crumbled into a garden compost heap. Six years after first production, it says it has reached price parity with polystyrene and expects to make about 10 million units in 2026.

Protix: the Dutch insect protein pioneer rethinking where to grow

In a factory in Bergen op Zoom, billions of black soldier fly larvae eat food-industry by-products and become protein and fat for pets, fish and farm animals. Protix proved insect protein can be made at industrial scale in Europe. In 2026 it decided its next factories belong in Asia, faced the world's first protest against insect farming, and defended its green claims before the Dutch advertising watchdog.

CPI Card Group Second Wave: payment cards with a core of ocean-bound plastic

Plastic collected near coastlines in places with weak waste systems is unlikely to be recycled and likely to reach the sea.

Giesecke+Devrient Convego Recycled: the first card body made entirely of recycled PVC

Most "recycled" bank cards on the market used to contain around 85% recycled material.

IDEMIA GREENPAY: recycled PVC cards at the scale of hundreds of millions

The greenest card is often not the most exotic one, but the one a bank can roll out to every customer.

Apeel Edipeel: a plant-based peel that keeps fruit fresh longer, and survived a disinformation storm

Fresh fruit loses water and reacts with oxygen from the moment it is picked, and the clock decides how much ends up in the bin.

Mimica Bump: a freshness label you can feel, built to end overcautious expiry dates

Expiry dates are set for the worst case, not for how most of us actually store food.

Orbisk Orbi: the Dutch food waste monitor that photographs every discard

Two former supermarket employees decided they had spent enough time selling crisps and chips.

About Board of Radiation and Isotope Technology

BRIT COLTECH: India's home-grown technetium-99m generator for everyday nuclear medicine

Most nuclear medicine scans start with a small shielded box delivered to the hospital each week.

Commonwealth Fusion Systems' SPARC magnet: the 20-tesla coil that shrank the tokamak

In September 2021 a nine-tonne magnet in a Massachusetts lab reached 20 tesla and changed the economics of fusion.

ITM EndolucinBeta: Munich's purer lutetium-177 for targeted cancer therapy

Some of the most promising cancer drugs of the decade are radioactive.

Technology · Ocean23 Sep 2026About The Ocean CleanupConfiance Communications

Translating river plastic tech into Indian public trust — a PR mandate worth watching

Confiance’s India brief for The Ocean Cleanup shows how ocean-cleanup hardware needs local narrative craft as much as interceptors.

CorPower Ocean C4: the Swedish wave buoy that rode out an 18.5 m storm

Waves carry enormous energy along Europe's Atlantic coast, yet decades of wave machines have been wrecked by the very storms that make the resource so rich.

Minesto Dragon 12: an underwater kite that flies figure-eights to harvest the tide

Tidal currents are as predictable as a calendar, but most of them are too slow for conventional turbines to pay off.

constellr SkyBee: the European thermal satellite that spots crop water stress before leaves wilt

A thirsty plant closes its pores to save water, stops cooling itself, and warms up by a degree or two long before it looks unwell.

ICEYE SAR satellite: the Finnish radar microsatellite that sees floods through cloud and darkness

When a river bursts its banks, the sky above is usually full of cloud, and the worst flooding often peaks at night.

OroraTech wildfire satellites: thermal cameras in orbit that catch fires as small as 4 x 4 metres

In 2025 the EU lost more than a million hectares to fire, the worst season since records began in 2006.

Boreal Light WaterKiosk: the Berlin-built solar desalination container that sells safe water for cents

Along Kenya's coast and in its dry north, the only groundwater is often salty, and bottled water is far beyond many family budgets.

Desolenator: the Dutch solar-thermal desalination unit that turns seawater into pure water without membranes or toxic brine

Most of the world's desalinated water is made by forcing seawater through membranes with fossil-fuelled pumps, then dumping concentrated brine back into the sea.

Hydraloop H600: the Dutch home appliance that recycles shower water for toilets, laundry and gardens

Most homes use drinking-quality water to flush toilets, then pour lightly used shower water straight down the drain.