BrightFarms, which builds greenhouses in urban areas, announced that it has raised $4.9 million in Series B funding from NGEN Partners, Emil Capital Partners, BrightFarms founder Ted Caplow, and others.
The European Union on Monday (16 December) reached a tentative deal on limiting the use in fridges and air conditioners of fluorinated gases that have a global warming potential thousands of times greater than carbon dioxide.
Two decades after international action led to the phasing out of ozone-depleting chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), the European Commission last year proposed a law to eliminate the climate-harming "F-gases" that replaced CFCs.
Under Monday's deal, the new rules introduce a cap to achieve a 79% reduction by 2030 on the group of gases known as hydroflurocarbons (HFCs).
The European Parliament yesterday (9 January) voted for three binding energy and climate targets in 2030, audaciously backing a 40% energy savings improvement, but EurActiv understands that a meeting of nine EU commissioners this morning is set to endorse a far weaker text.
A joint meeting of the Parliament’s environment and industry committees yesterday backed a motion that also called for a 40% cut in greenhouse gas emissions, and 30% market share for renewables by 2030.
Planet-warming carbon dioxide emissions hit a record high of 35 billion tonnes in 2012 and are poised to grow by another billion tonnes this year, according to a new study.
Global CO2 emissions were 2.2% higher than in 2011 and are expected to soar by another 2.1% this year, according to the Center for International Climate and Environmental Research in Oslo (Cicero).
The European Union generates €1.60 of economic value for each kilogramme of material consumed, compared to €1.34 a decade ago, but progress towards resource efficiency remains “volatile”, according to the EU’s statistics office.
The data, released by Eurostat on Thursday (12 December), suggests that the European Union gradually ‘decoupled’ economic growth and its use of resources between the years 2000 and 2011.
The €0.26 gain in efficiency came because EU gross domestic product (GDP) grew faster than the average household’s consumption of materials.
Europe's abdication from climate leadership would stunt growth in the region and hand a huge economic advantage to China and the United States as they carve out their share of a multi-billion low-carbon market, a German think tank said today (14 November).
The report's release coincides with UN climate talks running until the end of next week.
They are hosted by Poland, one of the EU member states to have embraced the counter-argument that the European Union should be only a part of, not the leader of global climate efforts and that acting alone will damage competitiveness.
Waste not, want not" says the old proverb and industry and policymakers are increasingly working together to better exploit the potential of waste as a resource, create new jobs and industries and clean our environment.
Because better waste management in the context of a competitive, circular economy is one of the key challenges facing many companies today and we want to ensure that waste policies are designed to drive sustainable growth and jobs going forward, European Commission - Enterprise & Industry commissioned a study "Treating Waste as a Resource for EU Industry: Analysis of various waste streams and the competitiveness of their client industries" that we are pleased to share with you.
Better insulation could shave 4% off European industry’s total fuel consumption and emissions bill, a sum worth €3.5 billion a year, says an unpublished report by the Ecofys consultancy.
The total cost-effective energy savings potential amounts to 620 petajoules (PJ), the equivalent of 37 million tonnes of CO2 emissions, according to the paper, ‘Climate protection with rapid payback’, which is due to be published next week.
"The lack of awareness of the energy savings potential of industrial insulation is surprising all around,” said Andreas Gürtler, director of the European Industrial Insulation Foundation, which commissioned the research.
Simple measures to reduce pollution from cooking stoves in developing nations could save a million lives a year and help slow global warming, a World Bank study showed today (4 November).
Tighter restrictions on diesel emissions, for instance from car exhausts, could also avert 340,000 premature deaths annually by reining in soot and other heat-trapping pollutants that are also stoking climate change, it said.
