Forests, soil, and the wild kept whole. Desert turned back. The land restored.
PressTransportation and logistics · Supply chainAbout Ferragamo
An Italian house publishes deeper country-of-origin visibility for leather — early traceability under a rising EU rule wave.
Materials science · Sustainable textilesAbout Aijek
A Singapore relaunch that bans polyester blends and centres Balinese cutwork shows sustainability as design constraint — and labour proximity.
Transportation and logistics · Supply chainAbout Ferragamo
Ferragamo’s reported origin visibility for most leather is a first mile of traceability — useful, incomplete, and newly newsworthy.
PressMaterials science · Sustainable textilesAbout Aijek
After a long pause, a Singapore label rebuilds on biodegradable naturals and Balinese kerawang — scale chosen, not performed.
Technology · Agriculture
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.
Technology · Agriculture
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.
Technology · Agriculture
The world's best-known farm machinery brand taught its big sprayers to spot a weed at 15 miles an hour and fire only the nozzle above it. In 2025 farmers used See & Spray on more than five million acres and cut non-residual herbicide by nearly half. For model year 2027 Deere has merged its three versions into one, added wheat, barley, canola and sugar beet, and says factory orders are nearly doubling.
Technology · Agriculture
In a dairy barn, ammonia starts forming within hours once urine meets dung. In the Netherlands, that gas settles on protected nature and has frozen farm permits since 2019. Lely, the family firm best known for milking robots, built a barn system that keeps urine and dung apart, pulls the gas out of the manure pit and binds it into a liquid fertiliser. In February 2026 a Dutch province granted the first final nature permit based on it.
Technology · BiologyAbout Carbiolice
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.
Technology · Biology
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.
Technology · Biology
A Finnish company feeds one naturally occurring bacterium with carbon dioxide and hydrogen and harvests a yellow, protein-rich powder. Solein is already on sale in the United States inside a sports protein powder, and Factory 02, forty times bigger than today's plant, is in final design. What it still lacks is approval in its home market: the EU novel food decision has now been pending for five years.
Technology · Finance
India has more than 115 crore debit and credit cards in circulation, and almost all are plastic.
Technology · Space
In 2025 the EU lost more than a million hectares to fire, the worst season since records began in 2006.
Technology · Space
An ordinary satellite camera sees a field in three colours, or perhaps a dozen. A hyperspectral camera sees it in more than a hundred.
Materials science · Circular materials
Thin plastic films are everywhere in retail and e-commerce, yet very little of them is ever recycled.
Materials science · Sustainable textiles
Sweden built the world's first commercial-scale plant to turn worn-out cotton clothes into pulp for new fibre, and then watched its owner go bankrupt.
Materials science · Sustainable textiles
Every year the clothing industry throws away huge amounts of cotton scraps and worn-out garments, while cutting down trees to make new fibre.
Materials science · Sustainable textiles
India's garment factories throw away vast amounts of cotton cuttings, and its wardrobes produce even more waste.
Materials science · Sustainable textiles
Most wood-based textile fibres, such as viscose and lyocell, are made by dissolving cellulose in chemicals and then regenerating it.
Green architecture · Green buildings
EcoCocon takes a waste product from wheat farms, compresses it into a timber frame and ships it as ready-made walls that meet Passive House standards.
Green architecture · Green buildings
Stora Enso helped turn cross-laminated timber from an Austrian niche into a mainstream way to build offices, schools and apartment blocks.
Green architecture · Micro climate systems
A normal green roof dries out in a heatwave, just when the city needs its cooling most. Optigrün's retention roof keeps a reservoir of rainwater under the plants.
Green architecture · Micro climate systemsAbout Sempergreen
Sempergreen grows plants into modular panels at its nurseries, so a building can get a fully green facade on the day it is installed.
Green architecture · Resource lifecycle
Most mass timber is glued, so at the end of a building's life it can only be shredded or burned. TRIQBRIQ builds load-bearing walls from small wooden blocks held together only by beech dowels.
Green architecture · Sustainable site planning
Most city street trees are planted in a pit not much bigger than a dustbin, surrounded by compacted ground. They stay small, lift the paving and die young.
Green architecture · Sustainable site planning
A wet lawn, a flooded driveway, a downpipe that overloads the sewer: Hydrorock's answer is a block of spun stone that drinks rainwater in minutes and hands it back to the soil over hours.
Green architecture · Sustainable site planning
Every new car park seals another patch of soil under asphalt. ECORASTER grids give cars a firm surface while leaving the ground open to rain, grass and gravel.
Green architecture · Urban eco innovation
Modern walls are too well made for bees. Old brickwork had cracks and crumbling mortar where mason bees could lay their eggs; new facades have none. The Bee Brick puts a row of holes back into the wall, on purpose.
Eco-restoration · CleanTech
City rivers, canals and docks are often walled in stone and steel, with no shallow edges where plants can root, birds can nest or fish can shelter. The water is busy, but biologically almost empty.
Eco-restoration · CleanTech
Planting trees is easy. Keeping them alive through their first dry summers is the hard part, and on eroded, rocky or arid land many saplings die before their roots reach moisture.
Eco-restoration · CleanTech
Replanting a degraded forest by hand is slow, costly and often impossible on steep or remote ground. Planting a few fast-growing species is quicker, but it does not bring back a living forest.
Eco-restoration · CleanTechAbout ONGC TERI Biotech
Oil spills on land and the black sludge left at the bottom of refinery tanks are some of the most stubborn pollution in the energy industry, usually dumped in lined pits that fill up and leak.
Eco-restoration · Eco-acoustics
Food companies are being asked to prove that their farms are good for nature, yet very few farms measure biodiversity at all, because hiring an ecologist is expensive.
Eco-restoration · Eco-acoustics
For years, ecologists who wanted to record bats, birds or frogs in the field needed recorders costing around a thousand dollars each, which limited most studies to a handful of sites.
Eco-restoration · Eco-acoustics
In a dense rainforest, a ranger standing a few hundred metres from a chainsaw may never hear it. By the time satellites spot the clearing, the trees are gone.
Eco-restoration · Eco-acoustics
Before 2007, ecologists who wanted to leave a recorder in the forest had to build their own from parts, waterproof it and hope it worked.
Eco-restoration · Robotics
Small electric workboats, born in a Hong Kong university lab and now built and run from Bengaluru, that pull plastic, temple offerings and invasive weed out of India's ports, rivers and lakes.
Eco-restoration · Robotics
A Navarra-founded company that coats native tree seeds in a protective capsule and fires them from drones over burned hillsides, promising fast, cheap reforestation that scientists say still needs proof.
Eco-restoration · Robotics
A quiet, all-electric beach robot from eastern France that combs the top 10 cm of sand for cigarette butts, bottle caps and plastic shards that rakes and volunteers miss.
Eco-restoration · Sustainable forestry
A Swedish battery saw with the power of a 40cc petrol model and a clutch that protects the chain and motor, aimed at thinning crews and arborists who want less noise, less vibration and no exhaust.
Eco-restoration · Sustainable forestry
Disease-resistant tree clones grown by the million at a nursery in Telangana and sold to farmers, who grow them on their own land and sell the wood back for paper and board.
Eco-restoration · Sustainable forestry
A Lund-made app that films trees as a forester walks through a stand, builds a 3D model on the phone and returns stem diameters, basal area and timber volume in minutes.
Eco-restoration · Sustainable forestry
An eight-wheeled timber harvester from Ostrobothnia that pairs a diesel engine with an electric motor and supercapacitors, so it can cut big trees with less fuel per cubic metre.
Eco-restoration · Sustainable forestry
A Cork-built platform that joins satellite images, harvester data and a field app, so forest managers can plan, watch and prove every harvest, now with an AI assistant called Crann.
Planetary engineering · Geological interventions
Founded by two friends from Munich, InPlanet spreads crushed basalt on Brazilian farms, where heat and heavy rain speed up weathering. It issued the world's first independently verified rock weathering credits and now finances projects like infrastructure.
Planetary engineering · Geological interventions
Mati gives smallholder farmers crushed basalt from nearby quarries for free, sells the carbon removal it measures, and leaves the extra rice to the farmers. In 2025 it won the USD 50 million XPRIZE Carbon Removal grand prize.
Planetary engineering · Geological interventions
UNDO spreads crushed basalt on Scottish fields and wollastonite on Ontario farms, speeding up the natural weathering that locks away CO2. Microsoft has bought nearly 49,000 tonnes of its removals.
Planetary engineering · Space frontiers
Only a small share of the planet has mobile coverage. Kinéis, based in Toulouse, put 25 nanosatellites into orbit in less than a year to collect tiny data messages from sensors anywhere on Earth. Its users include wildlife researchers, small-scale fisheries and firefighters watching remote forests.
