PHA business case still shaky
Last week, we wrote about the versatile and biodegradable plastic PHA. The Dutch Platform Agro-Chemistry-Paper reacted to it: could you also highlight the pitfalls? Do you recognise the danger that most Dutch PHA projects start from waste as a feedstock, whereas there is no market demand for a product with such a background? In other
PHA: promising, versatile, biodegradable
PHAs are a family of naturally occurring polymers – no plastics in the usual sense of the word, but energy reserves of microorganisms. A very versatile family: we can process them to hard or soft plastics, and to both crystalline and amorphous polymers. And, very important: all members of the PHA family are biodegradable; not
Micronutrients, small but essential
Plants need nutrients, among which minerals. Modern agriculture has given much attention to macronutrients: nitrogen, potassium, calcium, sulphur, magnesium and phosphorus. And much less to micronutrients, elements like boron, iron, copper, manganese, molybdenum and zinc. Essential for plant life, albeit in very small quantities. But soils get depleted in them, and increasingly, this will pose
Diversity is the key to new agriculture, says Louise Vet
‘In agriculture, much diversity has been lost, and as a consequence soils deliver less ecosystem services,’ says Louise Vet. ‘Just recently, we developed the tools to establish this – we can now analyse the DNA profile of soils. We have opened up the black box of the soil, and now discover many new opportunities that
