Anthropocene Magazine

Microplastics are a scourge on the environment, accumulating in farm soils and wriggling their way into the food supply—reducing harvests and harming human health. But what if discarded plastics could be used instead, to improve crop yields and make farming more sustainable?

Researchers are trying to do just that. They’re working to develop a new generation of polymers that can be converted into farm fertilizers at the end of their life—rather than shoved into landfills.

A new study, published August 18 in Scientific Reports, documents an important new step in this effort: engineers have found a way to make plant-based polymers whose stiffness can be tuned for different uses such as shopping bags or fidget toys. These new plastics aren’t themselves biodegradable—so no one has to worry about sandwich bags rotting in the kitchen drawer. But when they’re discarded they can chemically converted into fertilizers.

People have spent years using isosorbide, a chemical building block produced from plant-derived glucose, to create experimental plastics that could do this. A study published by the same team in 2021 produced isosorbide-based polymers that could be recycled into fertilizers. But these plastics were too hard and brittle most uses.

Chemists who developed conventional plastics faced similar problems. So they tuned the mechanical properties of their polymers by incorporating other agents to either soften or harden them. But the chemicals that they used often turned out to be harmful to humans—like the now-infamous bisphenol-A (BPA).

In the new study, scientists created a novel derivative of isosorbide that functions as a softening agent—allowing them to concoct isosorbide-based plastics that were softer and stretchier. They could then recycle these bioplastics by treating them with ammonia—releasing the original isosorbide building blocks as well as urea—a chemical frequently used for industrial nitrogen fertilizers.

 

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These recycled mixtures improved the growth yield of Arabidopsis thaliana, a plant belonging to the mustard family, and komatsu, a Japanese mustard spinach that is cultivated as food in Asia, by 5-fold and 2.5-fold respectively, compared to no fertilizer at all.

In the experiments with Arabidopsis, the recycled mixture of urea and isosorbide also improved the yield by about 1.3-fold compared to standard urea fertilizer alone.

Based on experiments published by the same team in 2025, isosorbide appears to stimulate plant growth independently of urea, by increasing tolerance to nitrogen deficiency and salt stress.

More research will be needed to explore the usefulness of these plastics. For example, the plastics produced in this study were deemed appropriate for use in plastic bags or clear plastic wrapping—but not for other uses, such as book shelves or bike parts that require greater strength. The authors also cite the need to conduct a ‘lifecycle analysis’ of these plastics—to quantify their overall water usage, energy consumption, and greenhouse emissions and compare these to standard plastics, and standard fertilizers. They’ll also need to show that bioplastic-derived fertilizers don’t add to microplastic pollution. But at least these new plastics are designed to avoid that problem.

Fujimata, et al. “Plastics to fertilizer: A polymer system based on isosorbide as a monomer, plasticizer, and fertilizer.” Scientific Reports. 2026.

Agrahari, et al. “Novel role of isosorbide as a biostimulant in enhancing plant growth and development in Arabidopsis thaliana.” BMC Plant Biology. 2025.

Image: ©Anthropocene Magazine

There are many ways to cut the carbon emissions of concrete. One is to mix conventional Portland cement with limestone or other similar materials. Another route is to blend cements with cementitious binding materials such as fly ash from coal-fired power plants and granulated blast furnace slag from iron and steel production. Yet other ways include using microorganisms orenzymes in concrete that soak up carbon dioxide.

The problem is what these formulas do to durability. Low-carbon concrete absorbs more carbon dioxide from the air than conventional concrete, a process that lowers its internal alkalinity and leaves the steel reinforcement inside more vulnerable to rust. Because today’s building codes are written to prevent exactly that kind of corrosion, they effectively discourage engineers from using greener concrete in the first place—even though it’s better for the climate.

A new study out of ETH Zurich, published in Nature Communications, offers a way past that impasse. Rather than treating corrosion as a fixed property of a given concrete mix, the researchers modeled how it actually unfolds in the real world. They tested three concrete formulations in four cities with very different climates—Zurich, Bergen, Manaus, and Huailai—feeding detailed local weather data into a model that tracks how moisture moves through concrete over time and how that moisture drives corrosion.

 

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The finding reframes the problem: climate, not chemistry, is the main variable. Wet concrete can corrode up to 100 times faster than dry concrete, while differences between concrete mixes had a comparatively minor effect. In other words, the same low-carbon concrete that might degrade quickly in a humid, rain-soaked city could hold up fine in a dry one.

That points to a fix that’s more about policy than materials science: building standards that account for local climate, rather than applying identical rules everywhere. As lead researcher Ueli Angst put it, engineers need “a better understanding of how environmentally-friendly types of concrete behave over the long term under different weather conditions.” If codes were calibrated to a structure’s actual location, low-carbon concrete could be deployed far more widely in the climates where it holds up—without waiting for a new chemistry breakthrough first.

Source: Christhiana Albert et al. Rethinking concrete durability for low-carbon concretes through climate-informed corrosion modelling, Nature Communications, 2026.

Image: valentinplugarug/magnific.com

Probiotics are a popular dietary supplement, promising to boost people’s health by populating their guts with healthy microbes.

People trying to help coral endure heatwaves might soon be reaching for something similar. Infusions of a special probiotic cocktail helped coral stay healthier as they stewed in overheated water in the Red Sea near Saudi Arabia, scientists reported last week in Cell Reports. Even a mix of dead microbes, a so-called postbiotic, proved beneficial.

While scientists have seen promising lab results that such microbial tweaks might help ailing corals, this is the first report from real world conditions: wild coral in the open ocean during a real underwater heatwave.

“When an innovative idea like this actually works—particularly under field conditions—we are positively surprised,” said Erika Santoro, a postdoctoral researcher at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) in Saudi Arabia. “The most exciting takeaway is that this study opens a new avenue for coral microbial therapies.”

People might picture coral as rigid, brightly colored underwater sculptures. But they are so much more. This “skeleton” is just the mineral home to colonies of thousands of tiny coral polyps, identical clones resembling little sea anemones. Then there are the symbiotic algae that live inside the polyps, providing much of the coral’s energy through photosynthesis. Finally, there’s a stew of microbes living in an around the coral.

Scientists are experimenting with each of these kinds of organisms in a desperate bid to help coral endure the underwater heatwaves proliferating across the world. Without help, most corals are expected to be killed by the end of the century, as the oceans absorb much of the excess heat generated by global warming. That would lay waste to one of the most productive and diverse marine ecosystems on Earth.

 

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Researchers are altering coral genetics in hopes of boosting heat tolerance by measures such as crossbreeding coral from different parts of the world. They are working to find and breed strains of algae that will do the same, in some cases accelerating evolution in overheated laboratory waters. They are also studying the microbial communities surrounding coral, in search of mixtures that might help coral stay healthy.

In this new research, Santoro and colleagues tested two different microbial mixtures collected from Red Sea corals and identified as likely candidates based on their genetic profiles and performance in earlier experiments. In 2022, during a prolonged underwater heatwave in the Red Sea that pushed temperatures to nearly 32° Celsius (90° Fahrenheit), the scientists dosed colonies of spiky Acropora valida in a reef near KAUST with one of five mixtures. Two got different probiotics. Two received dead “postbiotic” combinations of the same blends. The last got a salt water placebo with no microbes.

Over 15 days, the scientists watched for changes in color that indicated the coral might be ejecting their algal companions, a response to heat stress. They also measured how efficiently the algae were using sunlight for photosynthesis.

The results were encouraging. While they saw little difference in color changes, coral treated with the placebo and one postbiotic experienced a big drop in their photosynthetic performance. By contrast, corals that got either probiotic or one of the postbiotics showed no decline in photosynthesis over the 15 days.

A survey of the microbial population around the corals at the end of the experiment showed that the communities in the healthier corals looked different than in the sicklier ones. That difference was also reflected in chemistry tied to their metabolic activity.

The success of one of the postbiotics was “particularly exciting,” said Santoro. That’s because dead microbes could be more practical to use on a large scale, because they can be stored more easily since they aren’t alive.

A single 15-day experiment is hardly evidence of a silver bullet. There likely won’t be a single measure that gives coral the key to surviving, and no one is talking of measures that could rescue coral if climate change continues on its current trajectory.

Take this as a glimmer of good news amid an ocean of bad news for coral.

Santoro, et. al. “Probiotic and postbiotic treatment improves coral health and promotes specific metabolic and microbiome changes in situ during a heatwave.” Cell Reports. Sept. 3, 2026.

Image courtesy of Coral Probiotics Village

An integrated, nationwide system for recycling and reusing old EV batteries could save 6.1 billion tons of carbon emissions and 3.9 trillion Chinese Yuan over 30 years, according to a new study.

The savings depend on resolving a conceptually simple but logistically profound problem: a geographic mismatch between where old batteries get switched out of EVs and where they could be reused.

China has the world’s largest EV market that is also growing faster than anywhere else, leading to a flood of old EV batteries, which are typically retired from use once they can hold only 80% of their original charge. The most common method for recycling these batteries recovers only a limited set of metals and sends the rest of the battery material to the landfill.

Recently reuse of old EV batteries as part of stationary storage for solar or wind power has emerged as an alternative solution. New recycling methods are also being developed that remanufacture battery components without breaking down their chemical structure.

But retired batteries aren’t always where they need to be in order to get a second act. And moving lots of old EV batteries around isn’t straightforward since they are hazardous materials that can catch fire, be damaged, or leak toxic materials into the environment if not transported properly. Is it worth it?

The answer is a resounding yes, according to the new study, the first to systematically explore how to optimize battery reuse and advanced recycling.

The researchers modeled the supply, demand, and disposal of retired EV batteries for each province in China from 2020 through 2050. They calculated the life-cycle greenhouse gas emissions and economic costs associated with a dozen different scenarios involving varying levels of battery collection and post-disposal pathways.

 

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Retired batteries mostly accumulate in the wealthier eastern provinces of China with high rates of EV ownership, the researchers report. But demand for battery storage is mostly in the western part of the country where there is a lot of renewable energy potential. And demand for advanced recycling is mostly in battery manufacturing regions with the necessary specialized factories.

Absent any intervention, the mismatch will become more acute in the coming decades, as EV adoption accelerates in the east and renewable generation expands even further in the west.

Study scenarios that prioritize either advanced recycling or storage reuse are associated with three to five times greater cost savings and one to three times greater emissions reductions compared to a system that continues to route batteries mostly to conventional recycling, according to the researchers’ model.

Put another way, the business-as-usual pathway leaves 50-97% of potential cost savings and 26-53% of emissions reductions on the table.

Realizing those savings will require establishing efficient networks for transporting retired batteries between provinces: investing in specialized trucks, streamlining permitting, and so on.

The impact of building out that system would be pretty minimal, eating up just 2.3% of the cost savings and 0.03% of the emissions savings.

The optimal scenario according to the analysis, involving a balance of storage reuse and advanced recycling and moving away from conventional recycling after 2030, would save about 6.1 billion tons of carbon emissions and 3.9 trillion Chinese Yuan over three decades.

Other regions such as Europe and the United States have similar spatial mismatches between EV adoption and renewables generation, so the findings have relevance beyond China. “These results demonstrate that early, coordinated planning can convert spatial barriers into scalable climate and economic benefits, offering a transferable pathway for other rapidly electrifying markets,” the researchers write.

Source: Xie H. et al.  “Spatial mismatches constrain high-value utilization of retired batteries for decarbonization in China.” Environmental Science and Ecotechnology 2026.

Image: Based on Getty for UnSplash. ©Anthropocene Magazine.

When people imagine the front line of antibiotic resistance, they may see a hospital where antibiotics are overprescribed, or a feed lot where cattle are pumped full of these drugs. They probably won’t picture a cornfield. But a new study suggests that crop fields may be an important battleground for fighting antibiotic resistance. And the way we farm will decide who wins.

The new study, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, found that high-intensity farming, typical of the U.S. Corn Belt, produced soil microbiomes that were more likely to transmit antibiotic-resistant pathogens to humans, compared to lower-intensity farming methods. In other words, modern farming may contribute to drug-resistant infections, which kill up to 4.7 million people per year, worldwide.

To find out how farming methods affect this risk, researchers compared the soil microbiomes from four widely used farming schemes: high-intensity corn cropping with heavy tilling, synthetic fertilizers, and non-antibiotic biocides to combat pathogenic fungi; two medium-intensity cropping schemes, with reduced biocides and tilling, and use of cow manure to reduce or eliminate synthetic fertilizers; and low-intensity grazing rotated with no-till cover crops, with only intermittent biocides, manure, or synthetic fertilizers.

The team analyzed the microbiomes of soils from these farming schemes, as well as the manure used in the medium-intensity fields. Using metagenomics, they quantified the abundance and diversity of antibiotic resistance genes (ARGs), mobile genetic elements (MGEs) capable of transferring these resistance genes from one species of bacteria to another, and known human pathogens capable of receiving those resistance genes.

 

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It was hardly surprising that the manures used to fertilize crops contained plentiful ARGs and MGEs. But once those manures were spread on fields, most of the bacteria harboring them failed to take hold—out-competed by the diverse microbiomes present in the medium-intensity fields. As a result, ARGs and MGEs were actually less abundant in these medium-intensity soils, compared to soils from high-intensity fields that received no manure at all.

The team estimated the relative risk that a pathogen could acquire an ARG and infect humans. They found the risk of transmission significantly higher for high-intensity compared to medium-intensity fields.

They attribute these results to two factors in the high-intensity fields: lower bacterial diversity, less likely to out-compete bacteria with ARGs, and environmental stress due to synthetic fertilizers, biocides frequently containing copper or other heavy metals, and tilling—potentially favoring bacteria with ARGs and MGEs.

Intensive farming is already known to have plenty of costs—such as high greenhouse emissions from synthetic fertilizers and runoff that pollutes rivers, coastal waters, and lakes. But these new findings suggest that it also has another, unrecognized cost: facilitating the spread of drug-resistant pathogens that could harm humans.

Conversely, the authors write, “soil and crop management practices could be strategically leveraged to limit the onward spread of drug-resistant pathogens.”

Nickodem, et al. “Soil management practices shape the abundance, diversity, and spread of antimicrobial resistance.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 2026.

Image: Based on TopMicrobialStock/iStock.com. ©Anthropocene Magazine

Researchers in Finland have developed a way to make leather-like fabrics from fungi at large scale using industrial equipment. This is a key advance towards vegan plastic-free leather alternatives for the mass market.

“Our process uses renewable feedstocks and mild conditions and does not involve livestock or chemically intensive processes,” says Géza Szilvay, and industrial biotechnologist and food scientist at VTT Finland, who published the research in the journal ACS Applied Bio Materials. “In this respect the process differentiates clearly from production of animal or synthetic leathers.”

Humans have for eons used animal hides to make clothing, utensils, and tools. Scientific advances have led to ethical synthetic leather. But those materials are made from fossil fuel-based plastics, so they create carbon emissions and linger in the environment for decades.

In the hunt for sustainable vegan leather alternatives, researchers and a few startups have recently looked at fungus. More specifically mycelium: the soft white mass of fibers that form the root-like underground structure of fungus.

Besides being free of animal cruelty, mycelium-based leather is sustainable. Mycelium grows in as little as two weeks requiring minimal water and energy, and it fully biodegrades at the end of its life. This has also prompted researchers to explore its use for sustainable building materials and electronics. Once harvested and processed into mats, mycelium looks and behaves much like leather. It is soft and supple, and has a surface that manufacturers can texturize and dye.

 

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But it it challenging to work with. It can be inconsistent in thickness and more fragile than hide. That’s because “most approaches grow mycelium directly as sheets, leveraging on a natural bottom-up biofabrication process,” Szilvay says.

He and colleagues took a different approach. They first grow the mycelium in a nutrient-rich liquid in a bioreactor to create a wet pulp. Then they wash the pulp and mix it with sorbitol and cellulose. Sorbitol makes the mass soft and less brittle, while the cellulose adds strength. Then they spread the flexible and durable fungal mass into thin sheets and dry them.

The team was able to make 1 meter of the material per minute using a roll-to-roll process. This approach offers greater flexibility in formulations so the properties of the fabric can be tuned, Szilvay says. “With certain formulations we achieved mechanical properties that are in the range reported for animal leather.” But the researchers still need more work to make materials with the same tear strength and abrasion resistance as animal leather.

“We believe the concept has the potential to become a viable alternative to non-renewable synthetic leathers,” he says. “More broadly, the paper shows how the range of biotechnology derived materials expands beyond chemical building blocks, bioplastics and proteins towards new kinds of materials.”

Source: Pauliina Ahokas et al. Production of Mycelium-Based Nonwoven Fabrics via Submerged Fermentation. ACS Applied Bio Materials, 2026.

The power of birdsong to lift the human spirit has long been appreciated.

In Shakespeare’s Sonnet 29, a suffering person is revived when “Haply I think on thee, and then my state,/Like to the lark at break of day arising/From sullen earth sings hymns at heaven’s gate ….”

Today, the effect is evident in apps designed to soothe people with birdsong, and in a growing body of research showing that when people hear recordings of birds singing they cope better with stress and feel more restored.

But what happens when we hear those birds amid the clamor of urban life? After all, most of us can’t easily get away to a peaceful forest far from the nearest road.

Even relatively quiet traffic sounds well below thresholds recommended by the World Health Organization (WHO) take a toll, leaching away the bird-born calm, according to a new paper in the journal People and Nature.

Although we are creatures of the Anthropocene, apparently a part of our ancient brains that reacts to sounds didn’t get the memo.

“Traffic noise undoubtedly affects the psychological benefits of natural soundscapes. With urban planning now including more green spaces, it is important that steps are taken so that people enjoy such areas to their fullest,” said Eleanor Ratcliffe, a University of Surrey researcher who studies interactions between psychology and the environment.

Ratcliffe and colleagues at several United Kingdom universities conducted experiments to understand how urban noise affected the benefits of hearing birds singing. First, they conducted on online experiment in which more than 1,500 people listened to a series of 9 audio recordings. Each contained songs from three different species totaling five birds, many of them mixed with sounds of a city, such as traffic noise. The recordings varied by the loudness of the human sounds and the complexity and loudness of the bird recordings.

Afterwards, people answered questions about their responses, such as, “The variety of sounds in this recording make me feel ….”

 

.IRPP_ruby , .IRPP_ruby .postImageUrl , .IRPP_ruby .centered-text-area {height: auto;position: relative;}.IRPP_ruby , .IRPP_ruby:hover , .IRPP_ruby:visited , .IRPP_ruby:active {border:0!important;}.IRPP_ruby .clearfix:after {content: "";display: table;clear: both;}.IRPP_ruby {display: block;transition: background-color 250ms;webkit-transition: background-color 250ms;width: 100%;opacity: 1;transition: opacity 250ms;webkit-transition: opacity 250ms;background-color: #eaeaea;}.IRPP_ruby:active , .IRPP_ruby:hover {opacity: 1;transition: opacity 250ms;webkit-transition: opacity 250ms;background-color: inherit;}.IRPP_ruby .postImageUrl {background-position: center;background-size: cover;float: left;margin: 0;padding: 0;width: 31.59%;position: absolute;top: 0;bottom: 0;}.IRPP_ruby .centered-text-area {float: right;width: 65.65%;padding:0;margin:0;}.IRPP_ruby .centered-text {display: table;height: 130px;left: 0;top: 0;padding:0;margin:0;padding-top: 20px;padding-bottom: 20px;}.IRPP_ruby .IRPP_ruby-content {display: table-cell;margin: 0;padding: 0 74px 0 0px;position: relative;vertical-align: middle;width: 100%;}.IRPP_ruby .ctaText {border-bottom: 0 solid #fff;color: #0099cc;font-size: 14px;font-weight: bold;letter-spacing: normal;margin: 0;padding: 0;font-family:'Arial';}.IRPP_ruby .postTitle {color: #000000;font-size: 16px;font-weight: 600;letter-spacing: normal;margin: 0;padding: 0;font-family:'Arial';}.IRPP_ruby .ctaButton {background: url(https://www.anthropocenemagazine.org/wp-content/plugins/intelly-related-posts-pro/assets/images/next-arrow.png)no-repeat;background-color: #afb4b6;background-position: center;display: inline-block;height: 100%;width: 54px;margin-left: 10px;position: absolute;bottom:0;right: 0;top: 0;}.IRPP_ruby:after {content: "";display: block;clear: both;}Recommended Reading:Can you hear it? That’s the sound of a successful rainforest recovery program.

 

For a deeper dive in more controlled conditions, the researchers conducted similar experiments with 62 university students in a lab. There they also hooked the subjects up to a device that measured the variability in their heart rate from beat to beat. A more variable rate is associated with lower stress.

The results showed that traffic noises consistently eroded the benefits of the birds. Louder traffic, not surprisingly, had a bigger effect. But even traffic perceived at 43 decibels – roughly equivalent to a refrigerator’s hum or a quiet office – diminished the benefits. The rankings by the study participants were mirrored in their heart rate variability. When traffic mixed with the birds, the variability was lower.

There’s evidence that at least part of what’s going on is that the overall intensity of sounds can overload people. The negative effects of loud traffic were amplified when the nature sounds were also dialed up to greater intensity.

In some ways, it appears that humans prefer a sort of acoustic middle ground. When the natural sounds were at a mid-level of loudness and complexity, people generally reported feeling better than when natural sounds were high end or low end and mixed with city noise. Likewise, people perceived more bird diversity in that mid-range, even though the number and species of birds were the same in each recording.

The findings suggest that when organizations are designing urban refuges such as parks, they shouldn’t forget to shut their eyes and listen. Measures such as lower speed limits on nearby roads or thicker perimeter vegetation could help preserve the acoustic benefits of the sweet sounds of Shakespeare’s lark.

“It is important that people get to spend time in nature and are able to appreciate its benefits without being distracted by noise,” said Ratcliffe.

Uebel, et. al. “The influence of acoustic characteristics and anthropogenic noise on restorative perceptions of natural soundscapes.” People and Nature. Aug. 25, 2026.

Photo by Mateusz Walendzik/Pexels

Politicians overestimate opposition to climate action, as well as how polarized the public is on the issue, according to a new study. The findings suggest that a “spiral of silence” may dampen politicians’ willingness to go to bat for climate policies that are actually quite popular.

Previous research has shown that members of the public tend to underestimate support for climate action among their fellow citizens. But less evidence is available about the perceptions of politicians, whom one might expect to be dialed in to the nuances of public opinion.

In the new study, researchers surveyed 100 members of the House of Commons in the United Kingdom, first asking about the politicians’ own support for four different climate policies: providing grants and loans to improve home energy efficiency; taxing consumer products according to their environmental impact; imposing a “frequent flyer tax” that increases the cost of air travel depending on how often people fly; and raising taxes on red meat and dairy products.

The politicians were then asked to estimate support and opposition for the home energy efficiency and consumer product tax policies among the general public, among voters of different parties, and among their fellow MPs. The researchers compared the answers with recent public polling results on the same policies.

The MPs underestimated public support for climate policies, pegging support for the product tax at 14.9 percentage points and for the energy efficiency subsidies at 7.1 percentage points less than poll results suggest.

They also overestimated public opposition by three-fold for the energy efficiency subsidies and almost two-fold for the consumer product tax.

“MPs who are personally less supportive tend to underestimate public support more, while even highly supportive MPs still underestimate on average,” the researchers write.

 

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The MPs overestimated how far apart voters of different parties are on climate policy, judging a 25 percentage point difference between Labour and Conservative Party voters on support for the insulation and product tax policies when the actual spread is just 12 percent.

The politicians thought that Conservative voters in particular are much more likely to oppose climate action than these voters actually say they are.

MP perceptions of public attitudes shape their own choices as politicians. Individual MPs who thought public support for the consumer product tax was lower were also less willing to advocate for it publicly, regardless of their own stance on the issue. MPs who perceived the tax as less popular among fellow parliamentarians were also less willing to promote it, again regardless of their own opinions.

This is what’s known as a “spiral of silence,” in which the misperception that a policy or position is unpopular dampens an individual’s willingness to advocate for it.

For half of the MPs, the researchers presented information about public polling results on the first two policies before asking the politicians to gauge public support for the second two. They wondered if this information might cause the MPs to consider that climate policies in general might be more popular than they had assumed.

But this wasn’t the case. The intervention didn’t improve politicians’ estimation of public support for climate policies; neither did it increase their willingness to advocate for the policies in public or in Parliament – even among MPs who personally supported the policies.

“Together, these findings suggest that misperceptions of others’ preferences at the elite level within Parliament are structured in a way that may actively discourage climate leadership, by presenting public opinion on climate policy as both weaker and more polarised than it actually is,” the researchers write.

Source: Tanase L.-M. et al. “Perception gaps in the British Parliament reveal a possible pathway to stronger climate action.” Communications Sustainability 2026.

Image: Based on an image by Yutthana Gaetgeaw/iStock.com. ©Anthropocene Magazine.

As summers grow hotter, we’ll need new solutions for agriculture and the people who keep this industry going. Now, a study finds that the practice of coupling solar panels with farmland, known as agrivoltaics, isn’t only cooling for crops, but for people, too—decreasing heat by several degrees for both.

Many agrivoltaics studies have investigated the pros and cons of these hybrid landscapes in specific, real-world field scenarios. This study took a different approach, using a computer model to simulate the unique microclimates that develop beneath solar panels.

“We wanted to build a model so people can test these physics and new design ideas before spending money on hardware,” say Erfan Hosseini, PhD candidate at Princeton University, and Elie Bou-Zeid, researcher in civil and environemtal engineering at the university, and both authors on the new study. The model simulated the movement of air, heat and moisture between panels, soil, and plants, and then looked at the effects on those crops, panels—and the people tending to them. 

In this case, using data from tomato farms and simulating the effect of a typical New Jersey summer’s day, the model compared open-field tomatoes with crops grown under solar panel shading, and found something extraordinary. Tomato leaves would be at least 1.84 °C cooler under a patchwork of solar panels, it found, but up to 7.56 °C cooler during the heat of the day, compared to unshaded plants. 

This cooling effect would also reduce water loss from the leaves by 22.4% per day, and by 42.6% daily from both crops and soil. In turn, the air-cooling effects of this evapotranspiration would chill the solar panels themselves by 5.6 °C, reducing heat-related efficiency losses by 15%.

 

.IRPP_ruby , .IRPP_ruby .postImageUrl , .IRPP_ruby .centered-text-area {height: auto;position: relative;}.IRPP_ruby , .IRPP_ruby:hover , .IRPP_ruby:visited , .IRPP_ruby:active {border:0!important;}.IRPP_ruby .clearfix:after {content: "";display: table;clear: both;}.IRPP_ruby {display: block;transition: background-color 250ms;webkit-transition: background-color 250ms;width: 100%;opacity: 1;transition: opacity 250ms;webkit-transition: opacity 250ms;background-color: #eaeaea;}.IRPP_ruby:active , .IRPP_ruby:hover {opacity: 1;transition: opacity 250ms;webkit-transition: opacity 250ms;background-color: inherit;}.IRPP_ruby .postImageUrl {background-position: center;background-size: cover;float: left;margin: 0;padding: 0;width: 31.59%;position: absolute;top: 0;bottom: 0;}.IRPP_ruby .centered-text-area {float: right;width: 65.65%;padding:0;margin:0;}.IRPP_ruby .centered-text {display: table;height: 130px;left: 0;top: 0;padding:0;margin:0;padding-top: 20px;padding-bottom: 20px;}.IRPP_ruby .IRPP_ruby-content {display: table-cell;margin: 0;padding: 0 74px 0 0px;position: relative;vertical-align: middle;width: 100%;}.IRPP_ruby .ctaText {border-bottom: 0 solid #fff;color: #0099cc;font-size: 14px;font-weight: bold;letter-spacing: normal;margin: 0;padding: 0;font-family:'Arial';}.IRPP_ruby .postTitle {color: #000000;font-size: 16px;font-weight: 600;letter-spacing: normal;margin: 0;padding: 0;font-family:'Arial';}.IRPP_ruby .ctaButton {background: url(https://www.anthropocenemagazine.org/wp-content/plugins/intelly-related-posts-pro/assets/images/next-arrow.png)no-repeat;background-color: #afb4b6;background-position: center;display: inline-block;height: 100%;width: 54px;margin-left: 10px;position: absolute;bottom:0;right: 0;top: 0;}.IRPP_ruby:after {content: "";display: block;clear: both;}Recommended Reading:Do solar panels hurt crop yields? It depends on where you farm. 

 

Despite the shaded tomatoes receiving 47% less direct sunlight, their photosynthesis declined by 31%—a figure that was lower than the researchers expected. This suggested, as other studies also have, that the benefits of a cooler microclimate offset the productivity losses of less sun. 

Most uniquely, the model revealed that the overall cooling influence had a benefit for people. Farm laborers would experience this as a 4.46 °C decline in average temperatures. In the simulated scenario, installing solar panels on tomato farms brought down perceived temperatures from 39 °C to around 35 °C. 

That’s a significant reduction in a warming world. “Outdoor workers bear the brunt of this heat, and their drop in productivity has wider socio-economic repercussions,” say Hosseini and Bou-Zeid. “Our results show that shading dominates and results in improved thermal comfort, improving workers’ health, wellbeing, and productivity.”

Solar panels are emerging as a key climate solution for energy, crops, and people. But before we roll them out across farmland at large scales, we’ll need to weigh up their pros and cons. “Agrivoltaics design is not one-size-fits-all,” the two researchers say. “That’s exactly why a tool like this is needed. It lets you find out before you build your first prototype.”

“We’d welcome working with growers and developers who want to try it on real sites.”

Bou-Zeid et. al. “Food, Energy, and Health Implications of Agrivoltaic Farms.” Journal of Advances in Modelling Earth Systems. 2026.

Image: Werner Slocum / NLR

In the late 1980s, the city of Phoenix, Arizona made a bet: If residents no longer had to sort glass from paper from plastic, more of them would recycle. Single-stream recycling was born—one bin, one truck—and it spread fast. By 2010, nearly two-thirds of U.S. recycling programs had switched. Europe and Japan, however, didn’t follow suit; they opted for multiple bins and consumer sorting, betting that purity rather than convenience was the real prize.

Then came 2018. China upended the recycling world with the “National Sword,” a policy with an intimidating name that slammed the door on contaminated imports. Overnight, single-stream’s hidden costs became visible.

At first, it looked like the end of the debate between single stream and dual stream. But it turned out to be an inflection point. What followed has been a period of experimentation. Some materials recovery facilities are adapting, investing in optical sorters and robotics. A handful of cities have reversed course to dual-stream, reigniting the debate.

The stakes are far bigger than sorting logistics. The EPA estimates recycling a ton of mixed materials avoids nearly 2.8 metric tons of CO2-equivalent versus landfilling it. In 2018 alone, recycling and composting kept an estimated 193 million metric tons of CO2-equivalent out of the atmosphere—roughly the annual emissions of 42 million cars.

Contamination undermines this emissions math; convenience and greater participation shores it up. So what combination of technology, economics, and human behavior will bend the emissions curve further—now and in the future? 

 

Source: Statista by CC • • • The Climate Case for Single Stream 

1. Quantity over quality. Contamination is single-stream’s Achilles heel—but it might be offset if more material is recycled. A number of municipalities that switched to single stream have reported increased collection rates ranging from 20% to as high as 84%.  And if the numbers are right, this can translate into carbon savings. A 2022 life-cycle analysis paper focusing on Virginia found that single stream actually saved about 4% more carbon thanks to the higher participation rate. 

2. Robots could sort it out. Single-stream recycling doesn’t ask people to sort their recycling, but that doesn’t mean the recycling doesn’t get sorted. It just happens at the collection center instead. AI-powered sorting robots equipped with cameras and trained to recognize and grab different types of plastic promise to make the process extraordinarily efficient. One manufacturer boasted their machines were able to help the facility hit a 99% purity rate and pick out as many as 55 items per minute. 

3. Less trucks, lower emissions. Picture a recycling truck in a single-stream set-up, trundling through a neighborhood. By the time that truck has completed its route and gone down each and every street, it may have burned 100 miles worth of fuel. As Quartz pointed out, garbage trucks are basically the worst vehicle possible in terms of fuel efficiency. That may be bad enough, but since multi-stream set-ups often need multiple trucks to keep waste streams separate, they need to run that 100 miles several times to finish the job, increasing their emissions level well over the single-stream truck’s route. That said, electric trucks do exist and are starting to roll out. And since these don’t produce emissions themselves, the distinction may soon be moot.

• • • The Climate Case for Multi Stream  

1. Quality over quantity. Multi-stream recycling turns out cleaner material. This is important since contaminated recycling often ends up in a landfill where paper and other organic material decomposes and emits methane and other greenhouse gases. U.S. landfills overall spew the equivalent of 24 million cars worth of emissions per year—and this might be a severe underestimate. High-end landfills do capture some of this methane, but most don’t. Refuse could also go into an incinerator to generate energy. But waste-to-energy schemes have been held back by high costs and big questions around how much they actually save in emissions. The BBC called them as bad as coal.

2. Less downcycling. So let’s say you throw a clear plastic PET bottle into a single-stream recycling bin. It is then mixed with all kinds of other plastic, and unfortunately once melted down, it can never be a drink bottle again. Instead, it’s turned into other, less valuable things like tote bags. That’s what’s known as downcycling. In terms of carbon, downcycling is better than a landfill. But it’s not that much better. One analysis put downcycling’s savings at only 4% compared to incineration (even in the best case waste-to-energy scenario), compared to 27% savings if it was same-cycled. And, as Grist pointed out, downcycling may ultimately be more about delaying landfill, not wholly preventing it. Multi-stream recycling, with its cleaner end products better avoids this problem.

3. Participation is an American problem. Single-stream schemes might seem to boost participation rates, but you know what else does? Being German. The EU as a whole, which mandates multi-stream recycling, enjoys an average municipal recycling rate of about 40%. Germany in particular hits a whopping 69%, thanks to very clear guidance on bin usage as well as pay-as-you-throw schemes, where households pay for garbage by weight, rather than a flat fee. Meanwhile, the single-stream-loving US lags behind at only about 32%.

 

• • • What to Keep An Eye On

1. Shipping and handling. Shipping raw materials can add significant emission costs and even cancel out the benefits of recycling. One report found that the emissions from truck transport outweigh the emissions benefits for recycled fiber after only 360 miles. Glass was better, at 1,150 miles, and metals could go upwards of 3,200 miles before their benefits petered out, but there was always a limit. Similarly, making a special trip in your car to return reusable containers to the store could end up producing more greenhouse gases than you save using the containers in the first place.

2. Better recycling through chemistry. Many plastics can’t really be recycled currently, no matter how they’re sorted. But new tech using advanced chemistry, enzymes, or even microbes might change that. Recently, for example, a team at Cambridge University built a solar reactor that turns old plastic bottles into clean hydrogen fuel. Another group of chemists in China developed a process to convert hard-to-recycle styrofoam waste into high quality jet fuel at a cost competitive with petroleum-based fuels. And still another lab announced a new chemical process transforms plastic waste into an effective carbon capture material. Many more such innovations are are making their way into commercial markets.

3. What’s powering the recycling plant? Recycling plants require energy to operate and where this energy comes from may end up mattering more than any of the material that actually passes through its doors. When researchers ran the numbers for paper recycling, for example, the results were sobering. If all wastepaper was recycled, emissions could increase by 10%. That’s because recycling paper uses more fossil fuel electricity than making new paper. The emissions would drastically go down if paper production and recycling were powered by renewable energy.“In our analysis,” they note, “landfill practices mattered more than material flows, and energy use mattered the most.”

 

Top image: by Dropflare/Adobe Stock

Cement is one of the most-used manmade materials in the world. And the kilns that produce this in-demand building material belch about 8 percent of the global carbon dioxide emissions.

But a team from ETH Zurich and the US company Heirloom Carbon Technologies now propose a way to dramatically cut emissions from future cement factories. By employing established technologies, cement factories could not only capture their own emissions, the researchers write in the journal Chem Circularity, but also remove additional carbon dioxide from the atmosphere

The world produces about 4 billion tons of cement every year. Manufacturing cement, which is the key ingredient of concrete, is notoriously difficult to decarbonize. That’s because it requires heating limestone at high temperatures in large fossil fuel-burning kilns. And the chemical reaction itself releases carbon dioxide.

The ETH team proposes powering kilns with clean electricity rather than fossil fuels. That would cut the carbon emissions from heat production. Heirloom Carbon’s direct air capture technology would then capture the carbon dioxide released during limestone conversion. The gas would be compressed and permanently stored underground.

The company’s DAC technology, called calcium looping, is “uniquely positioned for such integration,” the team writes in the paper. That’s because the process cycles calcium between two compounds: calcium carbonate and calcium hydroxide. These are the same materials and chemical conversion steps used in cement manufacturing.

 

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Limestone, or calcium carbonate, is the starting point. When heated, the limestone breaks down into calcium oxide, also known as quicklime, and carbon dioxide. In the proposed system, adding water to the quicklime would make it absorb more carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and turn back into limestone, and the loop would continue.

According to the researchers’ calculations, electrifying the kiln and using calcium-looping DAC could reduce the climate impact of cement production by 78% by 2050.

Heirloom has been running a plant in California since 2023. The plant can capture 1,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide a year. “Heirloom was an ideal partner for us because the company is already operating the first calcium looping DAC systems on a commercial scale,” said Vittoria Bolongaro, a graduate student and lead author of the paper, in a press release.

The team analyzed various energy scenarios. These included operating the plant using the current US electricity mix; using a clean electricity mix consisting of wind and solar energy; and a fully autonomous clean-energy system with photovoltaics and battery storage.

“We were able to show that the technology has a net-negative carbon footprint,” Bolongaro said. “In other words, commercial calcium looping DAC plants with carbon dioxide storage remove more carbon dioxide than they generate over their entire lifecycle.”

Source: Vittoria Bolongaro et al. Life cycle assessment of solid calcium-looping direct air capture and its synergistic dual use for net-negative cement. Chem Circularity, 2026

Image: Getty images for Unsplash+

When logging companies cut down trees to thin overcrowded forests, they are left with a costly headache: giant mounds of limbs and spindly trunks worth so little that it’s easier to burn them.

But they could turn this biomass trash into carbon-rich treasure, both making money and trapping much of the carbon dioxide that rises into the atmosphere from these blazing slash piles, according to new research.

In many parts of the arid western United States, companies could earn billions of dollars by simply burying the wood debris underground and selling carbon credits, according to research published today in Science Advances.   

The new work shows that “pairing these two pathways together could enable more forest restoration as well as carbon storage,” said Sinéad Crotty, an ecologist and manager at the Carbon Containment Lab, a Connecticut-based nonprofit that studies ways to reduce greenhouse gas pollution.

The strategy is deceptively simple. Plants are the ultimate carbon capture device, sucking carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and storing it in wood and leaves. But the long-term fate of that carbon hinges on what happens when those plants are cut down or die.

Burn them, and much of it goes back into the atmosphere, where it contributes to global warming. Let them decay, and the same thing happens. But if you stick them underground and shield them from the air, much of that carbon should stay put. After all, that’s basically what happened with all that oil and coal we are now burning. It was once ancient vegetation buried under sediment.

 

.IRPP_ruby , .IRPP_ruby .postImageUrl , .IRPP_ruby .centered-text-area {height: auto;position: relative;}.IRPP_ruby , .IRPP_ruby:hover , .IRPP_ruby:visited , .IRPP_ruby:active {border:0!important;}.IRPP_ruby .clearfix:after {content: "";display: table;clear: both;}.IRPP_ruby {display: block;transition: background-color 250ms;webkit-transition: background-color 250ms;width: 100%;opacity: 1;transition: opacity 250ms;webkit-transition: opacity 250ms;background-color: #eaeaea;}.IRPP_ruby:active , .IRPP_ruby:hover {opacity: 1;transition: opacity 250ms;webkit-transition: opacity 250ms;background-color: inherit;}.IRPP_ruby .postImageUrl {background-position: center;background-size: cover;float: left;margin: 0;padding: 0;width: 31.59%;position: absolute;top: 0;bottom: 0;}.IRPP_ruby .centered-text-area {float: right;width: 65.65%;padding:0;margin:0;}.IRPP_ruby .centered-text {display: table;height: 130px;left: 0;top: 0;padding:0;margin:0;padding-top: 20px;padding-bottom: 20px;}.IRPP_ruby .IRPP_ruby-content {display: table-cell;margin: 0;padding: 0 74px 0 0px;position: relative;vertical-align: middle;width: 100%;}.IRPP_ruby .ctaText {border-bottom: 0 solid #fff;color: #0099cc;font-size: 14px;font-weight: bold;letter-spacing: normal;margin: 0;padding: 0;font-family:'Arial';}.IRPP_ruby .postTitle {color: #000000;font-size: 16px;font-weight: 600;letter-spacing: normal;margin: 0;padding: 0;font-family:'Arial';}.IRPP_ruby .ctaButton {background: url(https://www.anthropocenemagazine.org/wp-content/plugins/intelly-related-posts-pro/assets/images/next-arrow.png)no-repeat;background-color: #afb4b6;background-position: center;display: inline-block;height: 100%;width: 54px;margin-left: 10px;position: absolute;bottom:0;right: 0;top: 0;}.IRPP_ruby:after {content: "";display: block;clear: both;}Recommended Reading:The idea of burying wood to store carbon is so simple it almost sounds absurd. But is it?

 

While people are wrestling with the climate crisis, there is a simultaneous forest health emergency. Many western U.S. forests are overgrown and filled with flammable vegetation, thanks to a combination of dense forests that regrew after logging and decades of suppression of wildfire and Indigenous burning. Pair that with the current mega drought gripping much of the region and you have a recipe for the massive wildfires that blanket states in smoke this time of year.

Crotty and her collaborators wanted to see how viable it would be to tackle both the climate and forest problems by finding a revenue stream to help pay for forest thinning while simultaneously capturing some of the carbon inside the vegetation.

They compared the costs and carbon emissions from different scenarios: the conventional approach of burning the wood waste; burying it in a specially made landfill; burning it for energy and capturing the carbon rising from the smokestacks; letting it rot; or cooking it into a charcoal-like substance called biochar.

To make the calculations more realistic, the scientists considered factors that could affect the cost and effectiveness. They estimated the distance from forest thinning to sites where the wood could be buried or burned. They mapped variables such as rainfall that would influence how deep the wood needed to be buried to avoid rotting and emitting greenhouse gases.

The modeling revealed that in many cases, burying the vegetation made the most sense. Over a century, burning keeps just 4.5% of the carbon stored. Letting it rot is nearly as bad. Biochar stored 44% of the carbon. By contrast, burial in a special landfill captured 78% of the carbon, on par with the 81% from burning and carbon capture. With such carbon capture projects extremely rare, burial appears more realistic in the short term.

The financial math backed up these findings. Burning is the costliest, losing $49 for every ton of carbon dioxide due to expenses such as manpower and planning. If companies can sell carbon credits for $100 per metric ton—a common benchmark in the carbon credit world—burial would earn around $21 per ton, bioenergy would earn $12 and biochar would break even if the leftover char is sold.

With the federal government proposing to treat 3.5 million acres of forest this year, those cost differences add up. Rather than costing $3.1 billion to burn the leftovers, burial could store some 60 million tons of carbon dioxide and earn around $2 billion, the scientists found.

Some companies already see the possibility of spinning this wood waste into buried gold. One company, Graphyte, is turning wood into solid blocks, encasing them in plastic and burying them. It plans to open a plant in Arizona using wood from forest thinning. Colorado-based Woodcache is burying slash on a small scale, while Mast Reforestation is entombing dead trees left after wildfires.

Still, the researchers caution that burial won’t always be the right answer. Factors like soil conditions and rainfall can affect whether the carbon, once buried, will stay in the ground.

“In the wrong soil, digging a burial chamber can release more carbon than the wood could ever store,” cautioned Leah Clayton, the paper’s lead author and incoming Ph.D. student at Stanford University who previously worked at the carbon lab.

That puts a premium on detailed planning for individual sites.

“No single pathway is a silver bullet,” said Clayton. “But there are promising opportunities everywhere.”

Clayton, et. al. “Near-term, geospatial opportunity for biomass carbon storage to address the wildfire and climate crises.” Science Advances. Aug. 26, 2026.

Image: ©Anthropocene Magazine

Strategically placed greenbelts in the suburbs could cool some of the world’s biggest cities by almost half a degree across at least half their area, according to a new analysis.

The findings suggest an old but often overlooked strategy to manage the urban heat island effect, the tendency for cities to be a few degrees hotter than surrounding landscapes due to their extensive pavement, concrete and steel buildings, and lots of people packed together.

In recent years, many cities have tried planting trees to help mitigate heat. But some are still sweltering through increasingly warm summers. The new study suggests a solution might be found outside the cities themselves.

“For urban cooling, where we place vegetation can be just as important as how much vegetation we have,” says study team member Shi-Jie Cao, director of the Center for Sustainable Built Environment at Southeast University in Nanjing, China.

Cao and his collaborators were inspired by an urban planning pattern characteristic of traditional Chinese villages known as the mountain-water-forest (MWF) framework, in which “settlements are backed by mountains, facing water bodies, and are embedded within surrounding forests,” the researchers write in Nature Cities.

The team set out to explore whether this approach could also apply to today’s large, heterogeneous metropolises. They used a computer model to gauge how temperatures in the urban core on a hot summer day would be affected if suburban areas upwind of a city were converted to either woodlands or built-up areas.

The strategy could help cool both Beijing, a city built on a plain at the base of mountains, and Shanghai, located on the coast, the researchers found. Analysis based on these two cities revealed the mechanisms involved: first, the suburban vegetation creates a cool mass of air, and then prevailing winds sweep the cooler air from the suburbs into the city.

 

.IRPP_ruby , .IRPP_ruby .postImageUrl , .IRPP_ruby .centered-text-area {height: auto;position: relative;}.IRPP_ruby , .IRPP_ruby:hover , .IRPP_ruby:visited , .IRPP_ruby:active {border:0!important;}.IRPP_ruby .clearfix:after {content: "";display: table;clear: both;}.IRPP_ruby {display: block;transition: background-color 250ms;webkit-transition: background-color 250ms;width: 100%;opacity: 1;transition: opacity 250ms;webkit-transition: opacity 250ms;background-color: #eaeaea;}.IRPP_ruby:active , .IRPP_ruby:hover {opacity: 1;transition: opacity 250ms;webkit-transition: opacity 250ms;background-color: inherit;}.IRPP_ruby .postImageUrl {background-position: center;background-size: cover;float: left;margin: 0;padding: 0;width: 31.59%;position: absolute;top: 0;bottom: 0;}.IRPP_ruby .centered-text-area {float: right;width: 65.65%;padding:0;margin:0;}.IRPP_ruby .centered-text {display: table;height: 130px;left: 0;top: 0;padding:0;margin:0;padding-top: 20px;padding-bottom: 20px;}.IRPP_ruby .IRPP_ruby-content {display: table-cell;margin: 0;padding: 0 74px 0 0px;position: relative;vertical-align: middle;width: 100%;}.IRPP_ruby .ctaText {border-bottom: 0 solid #fff;color: #0099cc;font-size: 14px;font-weight: bold;letter-spacing: normal;margin: 0;padding: 0;font-family:'Arial';}.IRPP_ruby .postTitle {color: #000000;font-size: 16px;font-weight: 600;letter-spacing: normal;margin: 0;padding: 0;font-family:'Arial';}.IRPP_ruby .ctaButton {background: url(https://www.anthropocenemagazine.org/wp-content/plugins/intelly-related-posts-pro/assets/images/next-arrow.png)no-repeat;background-color: #afb4b6;background-position: center;display: inline-block;height: 100%;width: 54px;margin-left: 10px;position: absolute;bottom:0;right: 0;top: 0;}.IRPP_ruby:after {content: "";display: block;clear: both;}Recommended Reading:Planting the wrong trees in the wrong places can diminish their cooling benefits

 

The researchers then analyzed six additional mega cities—Cairo, Kinshasa, São Paulo, Houston, Sydney, and London—to see how widely applicable the approach might be. “One of the most striking results was how robust the basic cooling mechanism was across cities with very different climates, topographies, and urban forms,” Cao says.

Across the eight cities, the upwind greening approach could reduce temperatures on a hot summer day by an average of 0.4 °C across at least half the city area. The exact magnitude, timing, and spatial extent of the cooling varied from city to city, “but the underlying pathway—creating cooler air upwind and transporting it into the city—remained remarkably consistent,” says Cao.

The analysis shows not just the potential but the limits of the strategy. The cooling effect is more modest and localized in Shanghai than in Beijing because Shanghai’s cooling sea breezes don’t align perfectly with the locations where suburban trees could be planted.

“This is not simply a call to plant more trees everywhere,” Cao says. “The strategy works best where cities have relatively persistent wind pathways and sufficient space for greening on the upwind side.”

Of course, that space for suburban greening might already be taken up by houses, roads, and industry, so creative approaches to creating multi-functional landscapes—and getting local governments and others stakeholders on board—will be necessary.

But the real lesson from traditional village design is a more general one, Cao says: “We hope the study encourages cities to think beyond isolated green spaces and consider vegetation, wind, topography, water, and the surrounding landscape as an interconnected climate-regulation system.”

Source: Yang M. et al. “Overlooked upwind greening for urban cooling.” Nature Cities 2026.

Image: ©Anthropocene Magazine.

If all food waste in the US found a second life as biogas and compost, this would almost completely offset its climate impact. But, it would also create a microplastic problem spread over a gigantic area.

This is the catch-22 described in a new study from Nature Food, which explores both the massive potential and the overlooked risks of tackling food waste. There is however a solution, say its authors, which is to design packaging and get much better at separating our waste.

The research, produced by the University of Vermont, was inspired by local recycling laws which require Vermont businesses and residents to keep food waste out of their bins, ensuring that landfills remain food-scrap-free. What would that look like, scaled up to the whole of the US? The researchers found out by gathering food waste recycling data from across the US, then running a detailed lifecycle analysis on anaerobic digestion to make biogas, and food waste composting measures. For each one they looked at the associated climate emissions, nitrogen and phosphorus loading on waterways, and plastic pollution. Then they compared these two recycling measures with the alternative and all its associated impacts: dumping food waste in a landfill. 

This revealed that food recycling brings some seriously big wins for climate and nutrient pollution. Firstly, it would reduce the climate burden of food waste by between 89 and 99% in the US. Converting food waste into biogas and compost cuts nitrogen pollution by between 49 and 54%, and phosphorus loading by 78 to 98%, compared to current landfill-focused measures. 

However there’s a huge polluting underbelly to this otherwise logical solution: that is the 20,000 extra tons of plastic pollution that would be tilled into the soil as compost and organic byproducts from anaerobic digestion each year. How does plastic even come into it? Because so much of our food is now coated and packaged in this material, and it is a challenge to completely remove it. 

 

.IRPP_ruby , .IRPP_ruby .postImageUrl , .IRPP_ruby .centered-text-area {height: auto;position: relative;}.IRPP_ruby , .IRPP_ruby:hover , .IRPP_ruby:visited , .IRPP_ruby:active {border:0!important;}.IRPP_ruby .clearfix:after {content: "";display: table;clear: both;}.IRPP_ruby {display: block;transition: background-color 250ms;webkit-transition: background-color 250ms;width: 100%;opacity: 1;transition: opacity 250ms;webkit-transition: opacity 250ms;background-color: #eaeaea;}.IRPP_ruby:active , .IRPP_ruby:hover {opacity: 1;transition: opacity 250ms;webkit-transition: opacity 250ms;background-color: inherit;}.IRPP_ruby .postImageUrl {background-position: center;background-size: cover;float: left;margin: 0;padding: 0;width: 31.59%;position: absolute;top: 0;bottom: 0;}.IRPP_ruby .centered-text-area {float: right;width: 65.65%;padding:0;margin:0;}.IRPP_ruby .centered-text {display: table;height: 130px;left: 0;top: 0;padding:0;margin:0;padding-top: 20px;padding-bottom: 20px;}.IRPP_ruby .IRPP_ruby-content {display: table-cell;margin: 0;padding: 0 74px 0 0px;position: relative;vertical-align: middle;width: 100%;}.IRPP_ruby .ctaText {border-bottom: 0 solid #fff;color: #0099cc;font-size: 14px;font-weight: bold;letter-spacing: normal;margin: 0;padding: 0;font-family:'Arial';}.IRPP_ruby .postTitle {color: #000000;font-size: 16px;font-weight: 600;letter-spacing: normal;margin: 0;padding: 0;font-family:'Arial';}.IRPP_ruby .ctaButton {background: url(https://www.anthropocenemagazine.org/wp-content/plugins/intelly-related-posts-pro/assets/images/next-arrow.png)no-repeat;background-color: #afb4b6;background-position: center;display: inline-block;height: 100%;width: 54px;margin-left: 10px;position: absolute;bottom:0;right: 0;top: 0;}.IRPP_ruby:after {content: "";display: block;clear: both;}Recommended Reading:This 3-ingredient film made from food waste may actually beat regular plastic packaging?

 

Much of our food goes bad while still encased in plastic, and people can’t always be relied upon to peel plastic off rotting food and put it into a different bin. Equipment designed to separate old food and plastic in commercial settings involves a degree of mechanical error, which could result in potentially industrial scales of plastic entering food waste streams. Ultimately, countrywide food waste recycling would increase plastic soil pollution “by an order of magnitude, even with highly effective (99% efficient) separation technologies in place,” the researchers write. 

So how to unpick this mess? A starting point would be to design better packaging, and the researchers find that encasing our food in biodegradable materials would decrease the 100-year accumulation rate of plastic in agricultural soils by up to 99%. But biodegradable materials aren’t the whole solution and they bring challenges of their own. 

Others may argue that the more effective approach lies in reducing how much single-use packaging we use, and questioning how much of it we need in the first place — a solution that requires global systems change, far beyond the US.

Porterfield et. al. “Food waste recycling in the USA can reduce climate and nutrient pollution impacts yet risks plastic accumulation in soils.” Nature Food. 2026.

Image: Based on Karolina Grabowska/Unsplash

Solar power is in its heyday, with installations growing rapidly around the world as costs drop. Recent studies have suggested that photovoltaics could be the dominant power source by 2050.

Those shiny sun-harnessing panels have a dark side right now though. They are slated to become a major waste problem at the end of their lives. Anywhere from 297 to 402 million tonnes of solar panels will be discarded by 2060.

But all that PV waste could deliver almost $1 trillion in economic benefits if recycled properly, according to a new study published in Nature. And with international cooperation and foresight, these benefits could be distributed globally, writes the international team from China and Sweden.

“Effectively recycling [end-of-life] PV modules is therefore not only an environmental imperative but also a strategic necessity to secure material supply chains for future PV deployment and sustain global decarbonization goals,” they write.

Right now when solar panels become ineffective or break, they typically end up in landfills. There, they can leach toxic heavy metals such as lead and cadmium into soils and groundwater systems.

 

.IRPP_ruby , .IRPP_ruby .postImageUrl , .IRPP_ruby .centered-text-area {height: auto;position: relative;}.IRPP_ruby , .IRPP_ruby:hover , .IRPP_ruby:visited , .IRPP_ruby:active {border:0!important;}.IRPP_ruby .clearfix:after {content: "";display: table;clear: both;}.IRPP_ruby {display: block;transition: background-color 250ms;webkit-transition: background-color 250ms;width: 100%;opacity: 1;transition: opacity 250ms;webkit-transition: opacity 250ms;background-color: #eaeaea;}.IRPP_ruby:active , .IRPP_ruby:hover {opacity: 1;transition: opacity 250ms;webkit-transition: opacity 250ms;background-color: inherit;}.IRPP_ruby .postImageUrl {background-position: center;background-size: cover;float: left;margin: 0;padding: 0;width: 31.59%;position: absolute;top: 0;bottom: 0;}.IRPP_ruby .centered-text-area {float: right;width: 65.65%;padding:0;margin:0;}.IRPP_ruby .centered-text {display: table;height: 130px;left: 0;top: 0;padding:0;margin:0;padding-top: 20px;padding-bottom: 20px;}.IRPP_ruby .IRPP_ruby-content {display: table-cell;margin: 0;padding: 0 74px 0 0px;position: relative;vertical-align: middle;width: 100%;}.IRPP_ruby .ctaText {border-bottom: 0 solid #fff;color: #0099cc;font-size: 14px;font-weight: bold;letter-spacing: normal;margin: 0;padding: 0;font-family:'Arial';}.IRPP_ruby .postTitle {color: #000000;font-size: 16px;font-weight: 600;letter-spacing: normal;margin: 0;padding: 0;font-family:'Arial';}.IRPP_ruby .ctaButton {background: url(https://www.anthropocenemagazine.org/wp-content/plugins/intelly-related-posts-pro/assets/images/next-arrow.png)no-repeat;background-color: #afb4b6;background-position: center;display: inline-block;height: 100%;width: 54px;margin-left: 10px;position: absolute;bottom:0;right: 0;top: 0;}.IRPP_ruby:after {content: "";display: block;clear: both;}Recommended Reading:What happens to obsolete oil rigs in a green future? This study has a smart answer.

 

Solar modules also contain valuable materials such as silicon, silver, copper, and tellurium, which could be reused to make new panels. Silicon and silver are the most valuable metals in PV panels. But today’s commercial recycling technologies typically cannot recover either at sufficient purity to justify the cost of recycling. And there simply aren’t enough industrial-scale recycling operations in place today.

Veolia runs PV recycling facilities in France and Michigan. China, which is the world’s biggest PV producer, has a directive for manufacturers to take responsibility for collecting and treating end-of-life panels. Many Chinese solar PV manufacturers now have pilot recycling projects.

“The global landscape is far from uniform, characterized by an uneven distribution of recycling capabilities,” the authors write. High- and middle-income regions such as the EU, the United States, China, Japan and South Korea have the capacity to recycle most of the world’s solar panels. Meanwhile, low-income regions lack the expertise and capacity for recycling so they rely on outsourced recycling.

So the researchers created a computer model that examined 1,708 recycling scenarios across 32 global regions. They took into account recycling technologies, material prices, international trade and subsidy policies. They found that combining region-specific recycling technologies with outsourced recycling strategies gives the highest benefits. It would reduce greenhouse gas emissions by up to 3.32 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide-equivalent. And it would generate a net benefit of around US $530 to over 935 billion by 2060.

But these benefits would concentrate in upper-middle-income regions with advanced technologies. One strategy that would help make recycling more equitable is a declining subsidy model, the researchers found. This approach gradually reduces financial support as recycling becomes commercially viable.

International cooperation mechanisms, such as the Paris Agreement, should also prioritize technology transfer and targeted funding to develop recycling capacity in low-income regions, they write.

“We suggest that regionally adapted recycling strategies and international cooperation, with a focus on technology transfer and funding for recycling capacity in low-income regions, provide effective ways to achieve equitable and scalable PV waste circularity,” the team writes.

Source: Chen Wang et al. Towards an equitable future of global photovoltaic waste recycling. Nature, 2026.

Image: AI-generated / by Magnific

 

The North American plains bison stands as a symbol of both rampant devastation wrought by colonizing powers and of the potential to bring a species back from the brink of extinction.

The legacy of that destruction, and the promise and perils of the recovery, are indelibly etched in the DNA of the survivors and their ancestors, according to research just published in Science.

“Ancient DNA is rewriting the story of one of America’s most iconic conservation successes,” said Beth Shapiro, a University of California Santa Cruz researcher and the paper’s senior author. The new results show “both what the 19th-century collapse actually did to bison genomes and what a smarter, genomically informed path forward could look like.”

For millennia, an ocean of bison numbering in the millions swept across the center of North America, shaping ecosystems and the Indigenous peoples who lived there. But by the early 20th century, there were just a few hundred left, their numbers depleted by overhunting, habitat loss and systematic slaughter sanctioned by the U.S government to help subjugate bison-dependent tribes.

Since then, conservation work by some of these same tribes, and others, has led to a modest recovery. Today, more than 20,000 bison live in the wild, largely in protected land such as Yellowstone National Park. More than 400,000 are raised for commercial uses such as meat.

But the recovery has been dogged by questions. Since current bison are descended from such a small population, have they lost genetic diversity or become inbred? Did a quixotic attempt to breed bison with domesticated cattle irreversibly tamper with their genetics? Similarly, did a decision to move thousands of plains bison into the territory of wood bison break down the genetic wall between the closely-related species?

To answer these questions, Shapiro and colleagues turned to the latest scientific tools for deciphering a species’ history in its DNA. They collected samples from 115 ancient bison, dating back as much as 20,000 years and as recently as 100 years ago, when the last survivors of the slaughter remained. They also gathered tissue from 45 modern-day bison.

When they sequenced the genomes, the results offered both good news and cautionary lessons about the current state of bison conservation.

 

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Among the ancient samples, the genetics of plains bison were remarkably similar regardless of their location. That suggests a genetic flow across the landscape relatively uninhibited by geography. By contrast, today’s wild plains bison are confined to small pockets of land. There are at least four groups with distinct, shared genetic fingerprint that differs from the other groups.

The findings point to the need for managing the remaining bison more as a single herd, the authors write. Given the geographic barriers, that could mean using modern reproductive techniques to help blend the DNA of these different herds, much as modern cattle are carefully bred using tools such as artificial insemination.

While this points to the potential risks of continuing with traditional management methods, the findings also show reasons to be hopeful. Although the modern herds are distinct from each other, collectively they contain levels of genetic diversity similar to their ancestors.

Fears of contamination from cattle also appear to be overblown. The analysis turned up traces of livestock DNA in roughly a third of the modern-day bison genomes. That means the majority of bison hadn’t been tainted. And in those that did contain evidence of cattle, it represented less than 2% of their genomes.

The news is slightly more complicated for wood bison, the larger relative of the plains bison that lives in Canada’s boreal forest. In the 1920s, the Canadian government moved around 7,000 plains bison into Wood Buffalo National Park, which at the time was home to the last surviving 1,500 wood bison.

The legacy of that transplant remains today. The study showed that wood bison are genetically distinct – having diverged from plain bison approximately 3,000 years ago. But it also revealed that today’s wood bison carry significant plains bison DNA. The individual wood bison genomes were between 7% and 64% from plains bison.

Despite this, the results show “that wood and plains bison are substantially distinct and should continue to be managed separately,” said Parks Canada bison ecologist Greg Wilson, a coauthor of the study.

Now, thanks to DNA, bison managers have a clearer roadmap for moving forward, and the tools to know if they are veering further off course.

“Until now, managers didn’t have a genetic baseline for what ‘healthy’ bison diversity looked like before the 20th-century collapse and management,” said Shapiro. The new study “is a great example of using ancient DNA to facilitate management decisions in the present.”

Oppenheimer, et. al. “Paleogenomic insight into the collapse, recovery, and management of American bison.” Science. Aug. 6, 2026.

Photo: Getty Images for Unsplash

Before people can reduce their carbon footprint, they need to know what actions will most help them do so. Research has shown that this domain of knowledge, known as “carbon competence,” is relatively low among the general public. But until recently there hasn’t been much investigation of why, or how to improve it.

A new study identifies two familiar cognitive biases as psychological barriers to improving carbon competence, “meaning inaccurate understanding of climate impact is not just a knowledge gap but also a behavioral and communication challenge,” says study team member Claudia Schneider, a psychologist at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand.

The team’s findings suggest that simply telling people which climate actions are most effective—until now the gold standard of climate communication—won’t move the needle for everyone. Instead, boosting carbon competence might require an individualized approach.

Schneider and her collaborators conducted an online study of more than 500 U.S. citizens in which they asked participants to estimate what percentage of the average North American’s carbon footprint could be saved by each of 34 different actions.

“Many people misjudge which personal climate actions cut emissions most, often overrating familiar actions like recycling and underrating higher-impact changes such as flying less and eating less red meat,” Schneider says. Those findings are in line with previous studies.

 

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In the new work, people tended to overestimate the effectiveness of actions that were top of mind and those they themselves participated in, and people with higher environmental values were likely to rate all actions more highly, reflecting optimism about the impact they can have as individuals.

Taken together, the results suggest that two well-known cognitive biases, the availability heuristic and motivated reasoning, distort people’s understanding of the effectiveness of climate actions.

The researchers then designed two more studies, each involving about 1,200 participants, to test strategies to overcome these psychological barriers. Reasoning that people like heuristics—rules of thumb used to speed and simplify decision-making—the researchers decided to offer more accurate ones.

They told one group of participants that more effective climate actions tend to have higher costs in terms of time, money, or comfort. Another group was informed that more common climate actions tend to be less effective at reducing emissions. For a third group, the researchers simply listed the four most impactful personal climate actions.

The researchers found some heartening evidence that people are willing to try to overcome a tendency for motivated reasoning: in one of the studies, people who were told that more common actions tend to be less effective were then able to avoid overestimating the impact of their own actions.

But overall, the interventions didn’t improve people’s ability to assess the effectiveness of climate actions as much, or at least as reliably, as hoped. Surprisingly, even straight-up telling people which actions were most effective didn’t necessarily enable them to later identify which actions were most effective.

Instead, the impact of the interventions varied a lot from person to person. “Our data suggests that there is no ‘one-size-fits-all’ solution to overcoming these psychological barriers,” Schneider says.

As well as figuring out how to tailor messages for different audiences, the search for a broadly effective strategy to improve carbon competence needs to continue, the researchers say.

“An important follow up question concerns the factors that drive engagement in climate actions, above and beyond judging their impact,” Schneider adds. She and her collaborators are investigating the role that perceptions of fairness play in these decisions, she says.

Source: Herberz M. et al. “Psychological barriers to improving carbon competence.” Nature Sustainability 2026.

Image: Based on photo by Am on Unsplash.