Sustainability needs green growth
Long ago, in the seventies of the last century, environmentalists like myself were faced with a dilemma, in short: pollution or frugality. Wealth brought along pollution, and in the last resort therefore, a less wealthy and more frugal lifestyle was the alternative to pollution. Nowadays this problem need not be valid any more: sustainability and
What is biomass anyway?
What is biomass? Biomaterial, a source of energy or both? The answer depends on who you are, and where and when you live. Traditionally defining biomass was the domain of ecologists and agricultural scientists. Ecologists are likely to say ‘biomass is the total mass of living matter within a given area’. However, plant physiologists and
Multiple use of biomass
Cascading biomass is the latest policy term for a multiple use of biomass, a use that starts ‘at the top’, in some material form (e.g. furniture or bioplastics) and ends up in the least valuable form: energy. Cascading biomass receives much policy support, at least in words. However, actual policies drive biomass to the least
The shelf life of green chemistry
Green chemistry is threatened both from without and within. In the heydays of classical organic chemistry, in a way many researchers overestimated their powers: they could synthesise anything, even from the drawing board, and better than nature. That overconfidence has silently faded away. In actual practice, the desired properties appeared to be just slightly different,
Hemp, a very versatile crop
‘Hemp is a very versatile crop,’ says René Sauveur of Pantanova, a Dutch consultancy company in the area of growing and processing hemp. But the market is difficult and needs to be conquered. No, our subject is not the hemp variety that yields THC, the well-known marihuana; it concerns industrial hemp, that has its versatile
