News on Energy and Environment from Europe

The winner of the 'Water Innovator of the Year' award was announced during the online conference Water Vision 2021. The three ideas selected were Mid Mix, Mezt and the DUCAM project (Avebe and Wafilin: Sustainable Concentration of Potato Juice with Membranes). The winning finalist: Avebe and Wafilin's DUCAM project

La cadena valenciana Mercadona ha eliminado las bolsas de plástico de un solo uso de todas las secciones de sus tiendas físicas, en el servicio a domicilio y online, con lo que cumple el primer hito de la Estrategia 6.25, que ha llevado a cabo a lo largo de 2020.

In one year, a Scottish potato company removed almost 27 tons of plastic from its packaging.

Dutch Potato Starch cooperative Royal Avebe today publishes its integrated annual report 2019/2020.

Irish potato grower and packer Meade Potato Company has entered the starch commodity market by extracting starch from surplus potatoes and potato processing by-products.

Pepsico UK has joined forces with British clean-tech firm CCm Technologies to reduce their carbon footprint by turning their potato waste into fertiliser.

After much discussion and planning by the CUPGRA Executive Committee, it has been decided, owing to COVID-19 restrictions, to go ahead with a virtual conference to continue the unbroken run of 30 successful CUPGRA Cambridge Potato Conferences.

TOMRA Food, a global provider of sensors, equipment, and digital solutions for the food supply chain, joined over 200 forward-thinking companies as the newest project member of the World Business Council for Sustainable Development (WBCSD). 

Preparations for NewCold's second UK deep freeze storage facility are fully on course, says the company and following the build commencement next month, the operation is expected to go live just one year later.

Public appreciation of the food and agriculture sector is greater in 2020 than it was two years ago. This applies to all sub-sectors, apart from pig farming, which is held in the same esteem as it was in 2018.

Nitrous oxide emissions (300 times more powerful than CO₂) are jeopardizing Earth's future climate. Agriculture caused almost 70% of global N₂O emissions in the decade to 2016.

Essex potato grower, Fairfields Farm, is excited to announce that it will be supplying HelloFresh with its low carbon footprint potatoes from October.

Fast food giant McDonald's is working with McCain Foods and Prince's Countryside Trust to help farmers in the United Kingdom improve soil health and boost resilience to climate change and Brexit

The Consumer Goods Forum (CGF) has recently launched a CEO-led Coalition of Action on Food Waste, bringing together 14 of the world's largest retailers and manufacturers with the goal of halving per capita global food loss at the retailer and consumer levels.

The Faculty of Life Sciences of the University of Vienna coordinates a consortium of 17 European leading academic research institutions, potato breeders, a non-profit EU association, a government agency and a screening technology developer.

Throughout last spring we were dealing with historically poor soil structure in Western Europe, with clods as hard as concrete. Will harvests of potato and onion reflect this? The chances of that seem high, so what can you do to keep clods out of your storage?

'Llevamos varias semanas ofreciendo ya al consumidor patata nacional de esta campaña, hemos sido la primera empresa en dar ese paso' Juan Manuel Coello, Patatas Meléndez

Starch Europe today welcomed the much-anticipated publication of the European Commission’s EU Farm to Fork Strategy. Starch Europe and its members strongly support the Commission’s climate neutrality ambition and the important role a more sustainable food system plays to achieve that objective.