Marketplace

Tesco is set to make all its tea bags compostable via food caddies by the summer – more than one billion bags a year - ditching the plastic sealant within bags for a plant based alternative.

While steps to manage fishing in Marine Protected Areas are welcome, Greenpeace campaigners say the consultation process, launched today (17 January) is too sluggish and cumbersome to match the urgency of the oceans crisis. The campaign organisation say the government's approach to reef protection doesn't go far enough, as they're not proposing site-wide bans and therefore don't address the damage caused to the whole ecosystem by other forms of industrial fishing.

The number of new homes that could be built on brownfield land has reached record levels, new research by CPRE, the countryside charity, has found. They point out that to help address a growing housing crisis, over 1.2 million homes could be built on 23,000 sites covering more than 27,000 hectares of previously developed land. But just 45% of available housing units have been granted planning permission and 550,000 homes with planning permission are still awaiting development.

Offshore renewable energy company Ørsted has teamed up with Yorkshire coast based marine farmers SeaGrown to explore the potential of using seaweed farms to boost ocean biodiversity. The new partnership aims to develop biodiversity monitoring and measurement guidelines for offshore seaweed farms.

A "kickstart" is required from government to encourage faster electric van adoption by businesses, says the Association of Fleet Professionals. Paul Hollick, chair at the industry body, said that its members were reporting a range of issues with the introduction of electric vans and some form of financial incentive was needed that would help to overcome these objections, playing a similar role to the boost provided by low benefit-in-kind taxation for electric cars.

Glass Futures, a not-for-profit research technology organisation, has published its report for the Department of Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS) which answers some of the fundamental questions surrounding low carbon fuels within the UK glass industry, with learnings applicable to the global industry.

A Northern English biodiversity tech start-up company, AgriSound, has won European funding for a research and development project set to change the pollination of commercial crops to harness the power of mason bees, claiming they will exist sustainably in the wider ecosystem.

Million pound digital technology, which captures 1,000 data points every 10 seconds, is giving Tata Steel technicians an uninterrupted 3D view of the material being laid into the top of its two Port Talbot blast furnaces saving costs, energy and CO2.

Manchester Airport is on track to be the first in the UK with a direct low carbon hydrogen fuel pipeline, thanks to a landmark partnership with HyNet – one of the UK Government-backed industrial decarbonisation projects.

A new 'one million phones for the planet' programme has been launched by Vodaphone, and environmental group WWF, to eliminate e-waste and encourage a more circular economy for mobile phones by increasing the number of traded-in, refurbished and recycled devices.