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Farmers chase profit in all kinds of ways. In the Corn Belt, it usually means growing a good crop and selling it for profit. But what if your main profit driver came from carbon removal?

At the recent World Agri-Tech Innovation Summit that scenario was laid out by David Babson, director of Advance Research Projects Agency at the U.S. Department of Energy.

“We no longer have the luxury of just reducing emissions to meet our climate targets,” says Babson. “We have to reduce our emissions down to zero and then go negative.”

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Back in 2009, Win Phippen had this idea. If he could just raise a better pennycress, he might have another biofuel cash crop. So Phippen, a plant breeder at Western Illinois University, loaded up his wife and kids in the family minivan and hit the road.

“We’d just drive, and every 50 miles or so, I’d stop. We’d get off the interstate and weave up and down farmers’ fields, looking for a little pennycress,” he says. Around a telephone pole, near an old silo. Next to a field. Phippen, his wife, and their three young kids.

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Rain forests may be known as the planet’s lungs, but it’s when standing before the seas, with their crashing waves and ceaselessly cycling tides, that we feel the earth breathe. The ocean, say scientists, is the source of all life on earth. It is also, say philosophers, the embodiment of life’s greatest terror: the unknown and uncontrollable.

This duality has become increasingly manifest in the climate discourse of recent years, as ice melts, seas rise, and shores everywhere face storms of a ferocity unseen in living memory. But even as the ocean has become the subject of hand-wringing over what we’ve wrought, it has also become a keystone of hope that we may limit the damage if we act now.

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The U.S. Department of Interior will phase-out the use of single-use plastics from areas it manages, including all national parks, within 10 years.

Interior Secretary Deb Haaland mandated the move, which aims to reduce waste, by 2032 in an order issued on June 8. Products that will be phased out include “plastic and polystyrene food and beverage containers, bottles, straws, cups, cutlery and disposable plastic bags.”

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Enteric methane, which animals release into the atmosphere by belching or exhaling, is a significant source of direct greenhouse gas emissions. The Greener Cattle Initiative, an industry collaborative created by the Foundation for Food & Agriculture Research (FFAR) and Innovation Center for U.S. Dairy, is issuing a request for applications to advance enteric methane reduction research. The initiative specifically seeks research to develop scalable technologies that reduce enteric methane emissions and enhance sustainable production of beef and dairy.

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Rotting seaweed has plagued the Caribbean for more than 10 years – but our research shows how we could clean up beaches and emissions at the same time, by turning what’s now rubbish into renewable electricity and fertiliser.

Pelagic sargassum is a brown seaweed that floats at the surface of oceans, particularly in the Atlantic.

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Because next-generation biofuels will depend on the growth and hardiness of woody feedstocks, scientists have sought to better understand how leaf cells quickly respond to environmental cues such as light, temperature and water. These rapid responses take the form of “post-translational modifications” that occur when a plant cell chemically modifies a protein to alter its function within seconds.

Scientists at the Center for Bioenergy Innovation, or CBI, have studied this phenomenon in leaves from poplar trees during normal daily cycles of daylight and darkness. Until now, the effect of these modifications at the cellular protein level was not well understood, partly because of the technical limitations of the analytical tools available.

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A UK-French startup just announced a $17 million funding round to make a variety of products that will allow large producers to cut out their share of microplastic pollution.

With biodegradable microplastic capsules for products like laundry detergent and agriculture chemicals, and special lubricants that prevent plastics from breaking down into microplastics, the firm could save companies and consumers tens of millions in work-around costs and higher prices in the face of an upcoming European Union ban on microplastics in 2022.

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An estimated 5.7 billion metric tons of discarded plastic has never been recycled—more weight than food produced every year globally. Though a fraction of that plastic waste has been landfilled, much has escaped waste management, becoming a pollutant that can persist for centuries in forests, lakes, and oceans.

That hard reality is prompting the global community to rethink how plastic is created, managed, and recycled. A circular plastics economy—facilitated in part by chemical technologies designed to break apart and upcycle all kinds of plastics—could help lower greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and save energy relative to virgin plastics manufacturing. That way, the world might reap the substantial benefits that plastics offer, while reducing environmental costs.

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With mountains of plastic waste piling up in landfills and scientists estimating that there will be more plastics by weight than fish in the ocean by 2050, the growing environmental challenge presented to the world by plastics is well understood. What is less well understood by the scientific community is the lost energy opportunity. In short, plastic waste is also energy wasted.

Scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) calculated the energy value of landfilled plastic waste in 2019 was enough to supply 5% of the power used by the country’s transportation sector, or 5.5% by the industrial sector.

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