Would you eat industrial byproducts? One food tech company from Estonia certainly hopes so. Think about sawdust. Eating it is probably the last thing that comes into your mind, but that may be about to change. ÄIO, set up in 2022, has created a way of producing fats and oils from industrial waste “What we have developed is very similar to brewing beer, where yeast is used to convert sugars from barley into alcohol, and hops are added for taste,” Petri-Jaan Lahtvee said. “We are using a different type of yeast that coverts sugars from industrial sidestreams, but not into ethanol – into fats and oils instead,” he added. …Timber, agricultural byproducts like straw, and even food waste, can be turned into ingredients for the food or cosmetic industries.
VANCOUVER, BC — VIDA AB, owned 70% by Canfor Corporation, announces it will acquire a 50 million board foot sawmill from Ingarp Träskydd for 50 million SEK (CAD$6.0 million). The sawmill has the potential for expansion to 100 million board feet and the transaction is expected to close on October 3, 2023. The strategic acquisition marks a continued investment in the area around Vida’s sawmills in Hjältevad and Vimmerby.
WestRock and Smurfit Kappa announced the signing of a definitive merger agreement. …In our view, this deal will bring important changes to paper packaging markets throughout the Americas and solidifies international consolidation as a major supply trend for global packaging. Although it is tempting to view the combination as a significant increase in global market concentration, the combined company will have a global containerboard market share of just over 6%. For comparison, the global market shares of leading pulp producers are 9-12% for the very largest softwood kraft pulp producers. …Nonetheless, the prospect of cross-border ties offers significant advantages, which can partly be seen in each company’s already diverse portfolio of paper packaging offerings. …The combination of assets will give Smurfit WestRock an estimated Mexican market share of 36%. Thus, the Mexican market has the potential to present some of the most significant obstacles to the merger.
[A not so convincing pitch by a recycled plastic lumber producer: Tree Frog Editor] A study found that 97% of people working in the construction industry believed air quality was an ‘important’ environmental concern. With the growing concern among workers, we need to put on a united effort to reduce the industry’s impact on the environment. Perhaps it may come as a surprise to some, but
Emissions from Canada’s record-breaking wildfire season are probably triple the country’s annual carbon footprint, experts warn, as climate systems reach a “tipping point”. The trajectory of the country’s wildfires has raised questions about how Canada can better tackle the blazes – and whether the issue is a global problem as nations race to reduce the volume of greenhouse gases emitted into the atmosphere. Werner Kurz, a recently retired scientist with Natural Resources Canada, estimates nearly 2bn tonnes of carbon have already been released into the atmosphere from the record-breaking wildfire season, which federal officials warn could persist into the winter. …The figure far exceeds all of the emissions tied to Canada’s economy each year, which emit a total of 670m tonnes. …“We could shut down our economy to zero emissions, and we would still have all these wildfire emissions,” said Kurz.
This year has been a challenging one for Phil Schneider, who hasn’t seen wildfire behavior like this in his 47-year firefighting career. Blazes raged through more than 2,000 acres of wildland in recent months in his county deep in the woods of Oregon, where a wet climate once made forest fires unthinkable. That’s an increasingly common scene around the world — from Canada to Greece, global warming has helped fuel larger and more destructive blazes, pushing firefighting services to the brink. But Schneider has a new recruit to help manage the growing risks: artificial intelligence. “It’s a huge game changer for the fire service,” says Schneider of the technology created by Pano AI, which acts as a second set of eyes looking out for fires. While AI alone won’t completely ease the burden of wildfire management, it’s one of a growing number of tools firefighters have at their disposal to detect and combat blazes.
The world is increasingly hearing a simple mantra for mitigating the climate crisis: plant trees. Forests are our largest terrestrial sinks for carbon dioxide. In 2018, the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change stated that significant afforestation can contribute to efforts to limit global average temperature rise to 1.5C. Hundreds of millions of hectares of new trees would be needed for this. South America is among the world’s leading regions in plantation forestry, with the second largest area of tree plantations globally, behind only Asia, concentrated in Brazil, Argentina, Chile and Uruguay. However, even though 15% of the world’s approximately 131 million hectares of tree plantations are in South America, they have neither helped to solve the region’s deforestation problems, nor proven greatly effective in reducing greenhouse gas emissions. This is because South America’s tree plantations are almost exclusively for industry and are, in most cases, based around pine or eucalyptus monocultures. 
LONDON – Global investment of $2.7 trillion a year is needed to achieve net zero emissions by 2050 and avoid temperatures from rising above 1.5 degrees Celsius this century, a report by consultancy Wood Mackenzie said on Thursday. Scientists have said the world ideally needs to limit global average temperature rise to 1.5C this century to avoid catastrophic effects from climate change. Many governments have pledged to reduce emissions to net zero by mid-century to help achieve this. However, most countries are not on track to even meet emissions targets by 2030, let alone 2050, the report said. …Renewables such as wind and solar power need to become the world’s main source of power supply to support the electrification of transport and production of green hydrogen, the report said.
Major forest blazes broke out in Bejaia and Tizi Ouzou provinces in northern Algeria on Friday, two months after huge areas of woodland in the North African country were devastated in fires sparked by a heatwave. While the flames in Tizi Ouzou were tackled by firefighters, the battle to control forest fires in Bejaia continues. Fires were reported in the Mahoui forest near the town of Tichy on the outskirts on Bejaia city, and another in the Ash Al-Baz forest in Bejaia province, according to a statement released on Saturday by the Civil Defence. A third fire was reported in the forest of Igdasn village in Tizi Ouzou province.