Anthropocene Magazine

It’s unnatural to toss a fully loaded ice cream cone in the trash, but every year more than 500,000 tons of ice cream waste are thrown away by factories around the world. That’s enough to make a frozen pile larger than the U.S. Capitol building—complete with sled and toboggan runs. Scientists have now proposed that this waste could be recycled into a renewable supply of bio-diesel, aviation fuel, lubricants, or industrial solvents.

A new study published in Cleaner Engineering and Technology  demonstrates how dairy fats can be separated from factory ice cream waste and sold as raw material for making these other products that might otherwise come from petroleum. This seemingly simple problem is surprisingly hard to solve.

Your typical pint of vanilla contains a mishmash of water, ice, sugar, proteins, and fat. The fats are dispersed in microscopic droplets that are coated in milk and egg proteins. The protein coatings prevent the fat droplets from merging and rising to the top, the way oil often does in a jar of organic peanut butter. And this, in turn, keeps your cold dessert smooth and creamy—so it won’t separate into oil and crunchy ice, even if you thaw and refreeze it.

But this culinary engineering also makes those valuable fats difficult to extract and purify from ice cream waste.

In this new study, researchers tested two strategies for stripping away the protein coatings, so the fat droplets will join together and rise, allowing fat to be skimmed off the top.

 

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In one approach, they treated the ice cream waste with protease enzymes that slice apart the proteins coating fat droplets. In the other, they added acids or bases to either lower or raise the pH of the mixture, in order to unfold the proteins—causing them to fall off the fat droplets.

Both approaches worked to some degree; but the base treatment, raising the pH to 11, was faster and more effective. In as little as two hours, it recovered 95 percent of the fat from samples of ice cream factory waste, at purity levels up to 85 percent—while avoiding the expenses of intense heating or purchasing enzymes.

The authors calculated that this process could be done cheaply enough that the extracted fats could be sold for around $0.40 per gallon—making them cheaper than similar feedstocks that are often used to make fuels, solvents, or lubricants.

This strategy won’t eliminate the kilograms of ice cream fat that accumulate around our waistlines. But it could redeem the thousands of tons of fat that factories might otherwise throw away.

Ale-Enriquez, et al. “Low-cost fat recovery from industrial ice cream waste: Separation mechanisms, process modeling, and techno-economic feasibility.” Cleaner Engineering and Technology, 2026.

Image: ©Anthropocene Magazine

In a world of rising temperatures and growing energy needs, a new material made by researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign could be just the answer. The printable textile cools while also generating electricity by harvesting energy from human motion.

The advance paves the way toward smart fabrics that can keep people cool while also reducing the need for external power sources.

Others have previously created materials that provide cooling and energy-harvesting capabilities. Those attempts rely on assembling multiple layers with different functions. What’s novel about the new work is that the researchers combined cooling and power-generating into a single printable material.

The demand for cooling is expected to grow tenfold by 2050 as heatwaves due to climate change get more intense, and more people can afford air-conditioning and refrigeration. But conventional air-conditioning is stationary, energy-intensive, and uses gases that are harmful for the planet. There is an urgent need for innovative cooling technologies that do not consume much energy.

Researchers have stepped up to the plate with many personal cooling technologies. Cooling a person is more efficient than cooling entire living and working spaces. “Efficient personal thermal management remains a major challenge for next-generation wearable technologies,” mechanical science and engineering professor Lili Cai and colleagues write in a paper in the journal Advanced Science.

 

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Passive radiative cooling is an especially promising method. The method relies on materials that absorb heat and emit it at a wavelength that passes through the Earth’s atmosphere out into space. They also reflect nearly all the sunlight falling on them.

The UIUC team came up with a simple way to combine radiative cooling materials with devices that convert human motion into electricity. These devices, called triboelectric energy nanogenerators, produce power from the charges that build up when dissimilar materials contact each other and then separate.

The researchers made a composite textile using zirconium oxide. “We use direct ink writing so the material can be printed into flexible, breathable textile structures for wearable applications like athletic clothing, for example,” Cai said in a press release.

The material has just the right mix of properties for radiative cooling and triboelectric energy harvesting. It has a high refractive index, which means it’s excellent at scattering sunlight. And it has dielectric properties which help it accumulate charge.

The printed textile reflected 96% of incoming sunlight. In outdoor tests under direct sunlight, it maintained temperatures approximately 3–6°Celsius below the surrounding air.

Source: Yoon Young Choi et al. Intrinsic Coupling of Radiative Cooling and Triboelectric Responses in Dual-Function ZrO2 Nanocomposites for Adaptive Thermoregulation. Advanced Science, 2026.

Image: ©Anthropocene Magazine

In 2025, the Amazon rainforest shrank by exactly 1.63 million hectares. But nobody can say how much wildlife vanished with it.

This illustrates one of the biggest challenges confronting scientists and others working to stem the loss of biodiversity. While satellites offer a sweeping birds-eye view of the planet, it can seem like ecologists tracking the ebb and flow of species in a place like the Amazon are studying a distant galaxy through a pinhole.

“If a tree has fallen almost anywhere in the world we know it almost in a matter of days. But I can tell you almost nothing about how biodiversity is faring below the canopy,” said Amy Rosenthal, who heads conservation initiatives at Planet Labs, a U.S. company that specializes in producing satellite imagery for various purposes.

But technology has reached the point where scientists and more than two dozen organizations including Planet are betting that they can pierce the forest canopy and create a near real-time view of trends in wildlife across the vast Amazon.

Last week, they announced the project Amazon.ia (the “i.a.” is an acronym for “inteligencia ambiental” or “environmental intelligence”). The plan calls for a network of between 10 and 30 sites across the Amazon, equipped with wildlife-tracking instruments. Their output can then be fed into computer models. Other sites could be added on a temporary basis. The end goal is a high-resolution picture of the state of biodiversity across the region, updated continuously as new data flows in.

While the project is still in its infancy, and observers caution that it may not be able to make good on all of the grand promises, there is also a sense that tools developed in the last decade are now at the point where it’s reasonable to launch such an effort.

“We’ve been talking like ‘Oh, we need to take an ecosystem and just do it,’” said Tanya Berger-Wolf, an Ohio State University computational ecologist who isn’t part of the initiative. “We need to monitor everything everywhere all at once and make sense of it all, often in real time. … This is the holy grail.”

In recent years, scientists have been working to devise ways to improve wildlife monitoring by marrying new tech with powerful artificial intelligence. Data from cheap, durable audio recorders and motion-activated cameras is crunched by computer programs capable of identifying individual species and discerning patterns. Increasingly, automated field labs can collect and sequence wildlife DNA from insect traps. Satellites equipped with hyperspectral imaging can see a broader light spectrum than visible light, enabling researchers to detect things like tree stress brought on by drought. Computer models can combine such data streams with a detailed map of a region’s geography to estimate what’s happening in places well beyond a specific research station.

Some of these new approaches were highlighted in a recent XPrize competition in which competing teams used drones, rapid DNA analysis, audio recorders and other technology to document hundreds of species in a patch of Amazon rainforest in 24 hours.

The new initiative would equip core sites with camera and audio recorders as well as insect traps and links to computers capable of making sense of the data. The organizers include several South American research groups already running field stations that will be among the first to feed into this network, including ones in Peru, Ecuador and Brazil.

The new initiative should help in part by enabling scientists to discern patterns across the entire region, rather than noticing them in one place and wondering what’s happening elsewhere, says Corine Vriesendorp, an ecologist and head of science for the Peruvian organization Conservación Amazónica, which operates a station on the Los Amigos River that’s in the new program.

One example of such blindspots is recent research showing that populations of birds in intact forests at a field station in Ecuador and another in Brazil have decreased. Based on scattered existing data, it’s not clear if it’s part of a broader trend. Nor do scientists know if insect populations – a food source for many of the birds – have also fallen.

Such region-wide insights could also help galvanize political action, she said. “Being able to say something about what’s going on in all of these places will be super important politically and also from a science research perspective.”

It remains to be seen whether Amazon.ia can live up to that hope. The organizers say they need $100 million to run the program for 10 years, with much of the expense in equipment, computers, staffing and training people in the various countries. So far, the group has raised around $20 million, said Rosenthal, with some $14 million of it from the philanthropic Bezos Earth Fund. They have recruited five locations to act as data-collecting points, including the Los Amigos site, leaving between five and 25 to be brought on board.

There are technical limitations that will almost certainly emerge. For instance, acoustic data can currently help scientists know whether a particular bird species has passed nearby. But it’s not very good at telling you how big that bird population is, says Justin Kitzes, a quantitative ecologist at the University of Pittsburgh who specializes in bioacoustics.

Then there is the challenge of producing a reliable, detailed view of things happening across a river basin spanning 7 million square kilometers, roughly the same size as the lower 48 U.S. states combined.

Even with advanced computer models and dozens of observation posts, Kitzes expects efforts to understand how biodiversity is changing across the Amazon will run up against a lack of data. “With 30 stations spread across the Amazon with that type of technology, will you know everything going on in the Amazon? Of course not,” said Kitzes. “Will you know a lot more than you used to? Probably.”

The average child born in the UK in the 1950s was toilet trained by the age of two years and four months. Five decades later, the average child wouldn’t reach that milestone until after their third birthday.

Those statistics are more than just a curious reflection of changing parenting practices. They also shed light on the growing plastic waste crisis. Later toilet training means more used diapers, and since the diaper market also shifted from mostly cloth to mostly disposable over the same decades, that all adds up to a lot more diapers being tossed in the trash.

Today, more than 300,000 diapers are thrown away every minute around the globe. In wealthy countries, the vast majority of disposable diapers and other absorbent hygiene products such as incontinence products and menstrual supplies wind up in a landfill or incinerator. In parts of the world that lack good waste collection systems, diapers are often dumped or burned, resulting in plastic pollution, contaminated water, and the risk of disease.

Absorbent hygiene product waste amounts to somewhere between 160 and 200 million metric tons each year and makes up nearly one-tenth of municipal solid waste by weight globally, according to a new paper in Nature Sustainability. “With a growing and ageing population this problem is only getting worse, so it is important we act now to reduce the waste, and find more sustainable solutions for the waste that is inevitable,” says study team member Elze Porte, a materials sustainability researcher at University College London.

Porte and her collaborator, UCL materials scientist Mark Miodownik, spent two and a half years (if their study were a child born in the 1950s, it would be toilet trained by now) talking with manufacturers of cloth and disposable diapers, government agencies, waste collection and processing companies, and caregiving and healthcare professional organizations. They even visited a factory and a diaper recycling facility.

The result is three broad strategies for making absorbent hygiene products more sustainable. (Their strategies focus on diapers but are more broadly applicable, they say.) One is to reduce the use of disposable hygiene products. That could be accomplished by switching to reusable diapers or earlier toilet training – or, more precisely, reversing the trend towards later toilet training.

Changes to workplace and childcare systems are needed to make this more feasible for parents, the researchers say. But earlier toilet training can also be better for children’s bladder and bowel health. “For us, this was interesting to learn, because it means that reducing diaper waste by bringing back down the toilet training age can save money for families, support children in their development, and is better for the environment,” Porte says. “It is rare to find such a win-win-win solution.”

 

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A second strategy is developing technologies to recycle absorbent hygiene products. This is challenging because disposable diapers are a complex mix of materials: different kinds of plastics, fibers, superabsorbent gels. So there needs to be a way to collect used diapers separately from other municipal waste, then separate the different materials and then recycle each one.

But recycling diapers isn’t as pie-in-the-sky as it might first sound. There are several diaper recycling facilities already operating in multiple countries, although they generally only recycle part of the diaper and often result in downcycling of materials.

The final strategy is developing fully compostable absorbent hygiene products. The challenge here is making products that will break down in an industrial composter, but not when exposed to the similarly warm, moist environment of the human body.

A separate group of researchers have developed a biodegradable material based on cellulose and citric acid that could replace the fossil-fuel based absorbent gels used in conventional disposable diapers.

Both recycling and composting will require new technologies to remove pathogens and medicine residues from used hygiene products. Some jurisdictions restrict composting of human waste, so regulatory changes may also be necessary. In the meantime, “We are now doing more work on understanding worldwide toilet training practices in the Big Toilet Project,” Porte reports. “We ask parents and carers around the globe to help us by sharing their toilet training journey, helping us to gain insights into how and when they toilet train their children, understand best practices and identify where support is lacking.”

Source: Porte E. and M. Miodownik. “Research priorities for addressing global absorbent hygiene product waste.” Nature Sustainability 2026.

Image: ©Anthropocene Magazine (baby photo: AndriyPorokhnenko/iStock.com)

Sit down to a plate of freezer-burned broccoli and beef, and the experience of chewing this mummified cardboard will remind you of a basic truth: unless you store your food in liquid nitrogen, it slowly deteriorates—even in the freezer. But a new study suggests that warming up our freezers by several degrees could cut millions of tons of greenhouse gas emissions—without compromising the safety or quality of our food.

The idea of dialing down our freezers has been percolating for yeas now. A 2024 report estimated that if the worldwide standard food-freezing temperature was dialed back just three degrees, from -18°C to -15°C, the reduced energy consumption would avoid 17 million tons of CO2 equivalent emissions per year. 

The new study, published in NPJ Science of Food, addresses the next logical question: whether freezing at warmer temperatures would negatively impact the quality or shelf-life of food.

The authors subjected nine frozen foods, including crispy chicken, fish fingers, salmon fillets, vegetables, pizza, and plant-based meat balls, to 18 months of freezing at temperatures of -18°C, -15°C, -12°C, and -9°C. Every month, samples of each food at each temperature were thawed and evaluated on several measures of quality, including bacterial abundance, nutrient content (vitamin C), fat degradation or rancidness, and attributes affecting palatability, including appearance, aroma, taste, and texture.

 

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Compared to -18°C, none of the higher temperatures caused significant increases in bacterial abundance—considered an indicator of food spoilage. Meanwhile, for measurements of palatability, fat degradation, and vitamin C contents, the quality did gradually decline over time in at least some of the foods; and these declines were incrementally more rapid at warmer temperatures.

But overall, for most of the products stored at -15°C, all quality measures remained within acceptable limits until after the “use-by” date—which varies from product to product, but is generally less than 18 months.

The authors concluded that raising the standard food-freezing temperature from -18°C to -15°C was feasible, and would reduce the direct energy requirements for cooling by roughly 7 percent.

These savings may seem small on a global scale, but for nations without extensive electric grids, they could be pivotal–reducing the demands on local energy sources, such as generators, solar, and wind turbines. Combined with nascent technologies for more energy-efficient cooling systems, it could allow the global food cold chain to reach into new areas.

This could reduce food waste in local communities, where the food supply is already stretched. It could also improve the incomes of poor farmers, by allowing their crops to reach boarder, more distant markets without spoiling.

Serena, et al. “Increasing storage temperature of frozen foods: effect on sustainability and food quality.” NPJ Science of Food. 2026.

Image: ©Anthropocene Magazine

Flying is one of the fastest-growing sources of greenhouse gas emissions, according to the European Commission. And while road transport emits more carbon over, flying is energy-intensive per person. Flying from Lisbon to New York and back produces roughly the same emissions as an average European Union citizen heating their home for a year.

The aviation industry has adopted several measures to cut its emissions. But data on the impact of these measures has been limited.

Researchers from the German Aerospace Center provide some new insights in a study in the journal Science Advances. The researchers estimated the effects of sustainable aviation fuels and modern efficient engines on aircraft pollution.

“Our findings demonstrate that a substantial reduction of particle emissions requires a synergistic approach, combining the use of alternative fuels with modern engine technologies,” the team writes. “The results may support the optimization of future engine technologies for lower particle emissions…and thereby help to reduce the impact of aviation on climate and public health.”

In addition to carbon dioxide, jet engines emit ultrafine particle pollution, composed mainly of tiny soot and sulfate particles. These emissions impact human health on the ground. Under the right atmospheric conditions, the particles also lead to contrails. That’s because hot water vapor in engine exhaust condenses on the tiny solid particles and freezes. Contrails can persist for hours and trap heat in the atmosphere.

Reducing aviation’s non-carbon dioxide emissions will be key to meet the Paris Agreement’s goal of limiting global warming to 1.5°C, past studies have shown. Sustainable aviation fuels and modern lean-burn engines, which use a higher air-to-fuel ratio, should both reduce particulate emissions.

 

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But “the influence of the fuel composition…on particle emissions in rich-burn and lean-burn combustor conditions has hardly been explored in flight experiments,” Rebecca Dischl and colleagues write in the paper.

So the team analyzed measurements of in-flight particulate emissions from two Airbus airplanes. Both planes flew on lean-burn engines, but one used conventional fuel while the other used sustainable aviation fuel.

As the airplanes cruised, a smaller test aircraft equipped with inlets on the fuselage followed. The test craft had various instruments for measuring aerosol particles and trace gases. Two instruments mounted under the wings detected ice particle number and size. The test flights were conducted in November 2021 and March 2023.

Earlier this year, the research team reported that aircraft made contrails even when they produced less soot. Liquid particles such as engine oil droplets, it turns out, led to contrail formation.

Their new analysis shows that the advanced engines reduce soot particle emissions by three orders of magnitude compared with conventional engines. Further, under the rich-burn conditions, soot particle emissions depended exponentially on the hydrogen content of the fuel burned.

Meanwhile, volatile particle emissions from sustainable fuels increased with the sulfur content of the fuel. And the emissions varied considerably even between engines of the same type, the authors found.

By comparing particle emissions from different aviation fuels and aircraft engines, the findings enhance the understanding of aircraft emissions in the low-soot regime. This data should serve as valuable input for advancing jet engine model development, the researchers write. Optimizing fuel composition and engine technology would reduce particle emissions, improve airport air quality, and mitigate contrails.

Source: Rebecca Dischl et al. Mitigating aviation’s environmental impact through alternative fuels and cleaner engines. Science Advances, 2026.

Image: ©Anthropocene Magazine

Planting a tree in the Amazon does a lot less for the rainforest than simply leaving one alone. That’s the uncomfortable arithmetic in new research on Brazil’s jungles.

Faced with a dollar to spend on the rainforest, scientists found, you’re almost always better off protecting what’s already standing than paying to regrow what’s gone. The gap isn’t small: preventing deforestation or stopping logging and fires delivered far more carbon storage and biodiversity than restoration did, for a fraction of the cost, according to new research in Science.

And while efforts to save rainforests often focus on halting the conversion to open land, it turns out squelching logging and fires could bring even more benefits for biodiversity.

“Protection must go beyond avoiding deforestation,” said Leonardo Miranda, the study’s lead author and a biodiversity researcher at the United Kingdom’s Lancaster University. “Avoiding forest disturbances from wildfires or logging delivered the greatest benefits for forest biodiversity.”

The insights are based on the fate of more than 3 million hectares of land across Santarém and Paragominas, areas in northern Brazil, between 2010 and 2020. Using satellite images to track the condition of the forests there down to the level roughly a square kilometer, the scientists found that during the decade, nearly 160,000 hectares were entirely deforested, 273,000 were either burned or logged, and almost 130,000 hectares regrew into forest.

What would have happened to the carbon and wildlife on that land if policies had prevented all deforestation, or all logging and wildfires, or if reforestation had sped up to hit established government targets? To compare those scenarios, the scientists built computer models showing alternate versions of the jungle in 2020. They then used detailed measurements of wildlife and carbon taken in 2010 at 381 locations scattered across the jungle to estimate how these different “2020” worlds would have affected biodiversity and carbon storage.

 

.IRPP_ruby , .IRPP_ruby .postImageUrl , .IRPP_ruby .centered-text-area {height: auto;position: relative;}.IRPP_ruby , .IRPP_ruby:hover , .IRPP_ruby:visited , .IRPP_ruby:active {border:0!important;}.IRPP_ruby .clearfix:after {content: "";display: table;clear: both;}.IRPP_ruby {display: block;transition: background-color 250ms;webkit-transition: background-color 250ms;width: 100%;opacity: 1;transition: opacity 250ms;webkit-transition: opacity 250ms;background-color: #eaeaea;}.IRPP_ruby:active , .IRPP_ruby:hover {opacity: 1;transition: opacity 250ms;webkit-transition: opacity 250ms;background-color: inherit;}.IRPP_ruby .postImageUrl {background-position: center;background-size: cover;float: left;margin: 0;padding: 0;width: 31.59%;position: absolute;top: 0;bottom: 0;}.IRPP_ruby .centered-text-area {float: right;width: 65.65%;padding:0;margin:0;}.IRPP_ruby .centered-text {display: table;height: 130px;left: 0;top: 0;padding:0;margin:0;padding-top: 20px;padding-bottom: 20px;}.IRPP_ruby .IRPP_ruby-content {display: table-cell;margin: 0;padding: 0 74px 0 0px;position: relative;vertical-align: middle;width: 100%;}.IRPP_ruby .ctaText {border-bottom: 0 solid #fff;color: #0099cc;font-size: 14px;font-weight: bold;letter-spacing: normal;margin: 0;padding: 0;font-family:'Arial';}.IRPP_ruby .postTitle {color: #000000;font-size: 16px;font-weight: 600;letter-spacing: normal;margin: 0;padding: 0;font-family:'Arial';}.IRPP_ruby .ctaButton {background: url(https://www.anthropocenemagazine.org/wp-content/plugins/intelly-related-posts-pro/assets/images/next-arrow.png)no-repeat;background-color: #afb4b6;background-position: center;display: inline-block;height: 100%;width: 54px;margin-left: 10px;position: absolute;bottom:0;right: 0;top: 0;}.IRPP_ruby:after {content: "";display: block;clear: both;}Recommended Reading:To protect rainforests, do people need to be kept out?

 

The results showed the biggest benefits came from avoiding deforestation (61% more carbon and 24% more biodiversity compared to the real 2020) or preventing logging and fires (47% for carbon and 69% more biodiversity). Both far outranked the benefits of the newly regrown forest (15% more carbon and 7% more biodiversity).

The differences between deforestation and what the scientists called more subtle “disturbance” probably come down to the different dynamics influencing carbon and wildlife, and what patches of land were affected by each kind of forest damage. Full deforestation can wipe out much more of the carbon stored in trees and the forest floor, but it tends to occur at the edges of places that have already been cleared. Those areas already have less wildlife in them, so saving that land came with fewer biodiversity benefits, the scientists concluded. By contrast, even disturbed forest held onto more carbon. But wildfires and logging tended to hit more remote, intact forests filled with more wildlife.

Still, to increase both carbon and wildlife levels in the jungle it takes more than one strategy, the scientists found.  “Net-gains in biodiversity and carbon storage were only achieved” when both deforestation and disturbance were halted, said Miranda. “Combined interventions will be even more important as climate change progresses, especially as forest restoration can be particularly vulnerable to wildfires.”

In addition to being more effective, preventing forest loss is also cheaper. The researchers calculated the cost of each strategy, both in terms of money spent and lost opportunities, such as earnings from crops grown on former forests. For every Brazilian real (the country’s currency) it cost, the biodiversity and carbon benefits of regrowing forest were a tiny fraction of the gains from protecting existing forests.

In other words, it might be politically easier to replant abandoned pastures than to tell large companies and land speculators they can’t touch the forest, or to establish new fire-fighting programs. But economically and environmentally, it’s foolhardy.

“Investing in new forests makes little sense if, at the same time, we fail to protect existing forests,” said Joice Ferreira, a co-author and scientist at Embrapa, a Brazilian research organization. “Otherwise, we are pouring money into a leaky pot.”

Miranda, et. al. “Protecting tropical forests is more cost-effective for biodiversity and climate than restoration.” Science. Sept. 17, 2026.

Image: ©Anthropocene Magazine

Wetland plants grown on the surface of wastewater treatment lagoons can reduce greenhouse gas emissions from these water bodies by more than one-quarter, according to a new study. These so-called “floating wetlands” may be an elegant solution that works with existing infrastructure to address a growing emissions hotspot.

Wastewater treatment is responsible for 1.6% of global greenhouse gas emissions. As economic development brings better sanitation to more of the world’s population, this climate impact is also increasing. “Wastewater treatment solves one environmental problem by cleaning dirty water, but creates another by emitting greenhouse gases,” says study team member Lukas Schuster, who studies nature-based climate solutions at RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia.

Floating wetlands, in which native reeds and other marsh plants are planted on buoyant artificial structures with their roots dangling in the water, are becoming a widespread tool for soaking up excess nutrients such as nitrogen and phosphorus in wastewater lagoons. These open-air ponds temporarily store treated water before it is released into adjacent waterways, reused for irrigation, or undergoes further treatment to be recycled into drinking water.

Researchers have suspected that floating wetlands might also reduce greenhouse gas emissions from the surface of wastewater lagoons. In the first large-scale, real-world test of this hunch, Schuster and his collaborators constructed a floating wetland the size of one-and-a-half tennis courts on portion of a wastewater lagoon in southeastern Australia. They monitored water quality and greenhouse gas emissions from the surface of the water for two years.

The floating wetlands reduced carbon dioxide emissions off the surface of the lagoon by up to 36%, methane up to 66%, and nitrous oxide by up to 18% compared to an adjacent portion of the lagoon without a floating wetland, the researchers found. Overall greenhouse gas emissions are reduced by up to 31%.

 

.IRPP_ruby , .IRPP_ruby .postImageUrl , .IRPP_ruby .centered-text-area {height: auto;position: relative;}.IRPP_ruby , .IRPP_ruby:hover , .IRPP_ruby:visited , .IRPP_ruby:active {border:0!important;}.IRPP_ruby .clearfix:after {content: "";display: table;clear: both;}.IRPP_ruby {display: block;transition: background-color 250ms;webkit-transition: background-color 250ms;width: 100%;opacity: 1;transition: opacity 250ms;webkit-transition: opacity 250ms;background-color: #eaeaea;}.IRPP_ruby:active , .IRPP_ruby:hover {opacity: 1;transition: opacity 250ms;webkit-transition: opacity 250ms;background-color: inherit;}.IRPP_ruby .postImageUrl {background-position: center;background-size: cover;float: left;margin: 0;padding: 0;width: 31.59%;position: absolute;top: 0;bottom: 0;}.IRPP_ruby .centered-text-area {float: right;width: 65.65%;padding:0;margin:0;}.IRPP_ruby .centered-text {display: table;height: 130px;left: 0;top: 0;padding:0;margin:0;padding-top: 20px;padding-bottom: 20px;}.IRPP_ruby .IRPP_ruby-content {display: table-cell;margin: 0;padding: 0 74px 0 0px;position: relative;vertical-align: middle;width: 100%;}.IRPP_ruby .ctaText {border-bottom: 0 solid #fff;color: #0099cc;font-size: 14px;font-weight: bold;letter-spacing: normal;margin: 0;padding: 0;font-family:'Arial';}.IRPP_ruby .postTitle {color: #000000;font-size: 16px;font-weight: 600;letter-spacing: normal;margin: 0;padding: 0;font-family:'Arial';}.IRPP_ruby .ctaButton {background: url(https://www.anthropocenemagazine.org/wp-content/plugins/intelly-related-posts-pro/assets/images/next-arrow.png)no-repeat;background-color: #afb4b6;background-position: center;display: inline-block;height: 100%;width: 54px;margin-left: 10px;position: absolute;bottom:0;right: 0;top: 0;}.IRPP_ruby:after {content: "";display: block;clear: both;}Recommended Reading:Designer bacteria clean wastewater and generate power—at the same time

 

“One of the biggest surprises was how quickly greenhouse gas emissions declined after the floating wetland was installed,” Schuster says. The researchers expected that emissions would only be dampened after nutrients were removed from the water. In fact, greenhouse gas emissions declines were seen four to seven months into the experiment, but nutrient reductions only emerged after about a year.

It’s not yet clear exactly how the plants work their magic. “We suspect that interactions between plant roots, microbial communities, and greenhouse gas production and consumption may be important, but targeted measurements are needed to test these mechanisms,” says Schuster.

And there are still some kinks to be worked out. Trimming the plants—necessary to promote regrowth and maximize nutrient uptake—tends to trigger spikes of methane release, so the researchers want to figure out how to minimize that result. The harvested material, which amounted to nearly one metric ton in the current study, also needs to be converted into some form of longer-term carbon storage to make sure the system truly benefits the climate (the researchers suggest biochar).

Schuster and his team are now looking at adding floating wetlands to farm ponds. “These systems receive substantial inputs of nutrients and organic matter from livestock and can have high greenhouse gas emissions relative to their size,” Schuster says. The new study will help assess whether floating wetlands are a climate solution that could be applied to various types of aquatic systems, he says.

Sources: Schuster L. et al. “Constructed floating wetlands cut greenhouse gas emissions from wastewater lagoons.” Journal of Environmental Management 2026.

Image: Courtesy of Lukas Schuster.

 

Picture a world where half the planet’s cattle ranches simply aren’t there anymore. Where does all that land go? What do farmers grow instead? And who wins or loses in the process? A major new analysis in Nature finally puts real numbers behind those questions.

The team modeled what would happen if the world actually switched to sustainable diets, rather than sticking with business as usual. The results are dramatic: cattle production could fall by half by 2050. The amount of land devoted to farming fruits, vegetables, nuts, and legumes could rise by 1.5 million square kilometers—more than twice the area of France—while the land area used to farm wheat, corn, rice, and other grains might fall by a similar amount.

The goal was “to recognize, a little more honestly, what would be the magnitude of these changes,” says Daniel Mason-D’Croz, an economist at Cornell University and one of three lead authors on the study. And importantly, “what kind of disruptions and dislocations it would mean for [food] producers?”

 

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The work grew out of a string of findings over the past few years. In 2018, a team that included Mason-D’Croz predicted the environmental footprint of global food production would grow 50 to 90% by 2050, driven by growing populations, rising wealth, and more meat-eating. They also found that staying within planetary boundaries would take multiple fixes at once: less food waste, better agricultural technologies, and worldwide dietary change. Around the same time, the EAT-Lancet commission reported that eating less meat and more plants would cut rates of obesity, diabetes, heart disease, and some cancers—while also helping the planet.

So what does the reshuffled map actually look like? They found that by 2050, reduced livestock farming would free up vast stretches of grassland unsuitable for most crops—land that might go to wind or solar power, rewilding, or other uses. Production of sugar crops, such as cane, could drop by roughly a third. Some farming would shift to entirely new locations, depending on the crops and the health of local soils and water supplies. Prices of meats, dairy, and grains could fall by 15 to 30 percent, while those of fruits, vegetables, nuts and legumes might rise a few percentage points.

“The challenges are really big,” says Mason-D’Croz—and if the food transition is to succeed, it will need to address them. “Livestock is a really important source of income in rural communities,” he says, citing one example. Any food transition will need to find new pathways and futures those local economies. “If you ignore these things, you probably won’t have the political will to make some of these changes.”

Gibson, et al. “Food systems transformation would reshape global agriculture.” Nature. 2026.

Image: ©Anthropocene Magazine

A new ultra-black wool could make it desirable to be a black sheep. The specially dyed wool could be a low-cost, biodegradable material for producing potable water from saltwater using only sunlight.

The material reflects less than 0.5% of visible light falling on it and helps to purify saltwater by evaporating it. It produces water that exceeds both World Health Organization and Environment Protection Agency drinking-water standards, says Larissa Shepherd, a professor of human centered design at Cornell University. Shepherd and her colleagues reported their new ultrablack solar water evaporator in the journal Advanced Science.

Nearly half the world’s urban population is projected to face water scarcity by 2050. Conventional desalination technologies can convert seawater into potable water. But they are “too infrastructure-heavy and energy-intensive to reach the communities that need it most,” Shepherd says.

Distillation is one of the simplest ways of purifying water. It involves heating water into a vapor to separate any solid impurities such as salts, and then cooling the vapors to give fresh water. Researchers have been developing many methods and novel materials to distill water using only sunlight.

Most solar vapor generation devices that perform well, however, “rely on complex 3D fabrication or synthetic nanomaterials that are costly, hard to scale, and risk leaching into the water they produce,” Shepher says.

 

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So she and her colleagues took commercial white merino wool fabric and dyed it with polydopamine, a light-absorbing polymer inspired by melanin. The researchers took cues from the deep-black feathers of the riflebird, a type of Bird of Paradise. They etched the dyed wool to create spiky microscopic growths that mimic the tiny structures on the bird’s feathers that help absorb most of the light that hits them. They reported this “darkest fabric ever made” last year in the journal Nature Communications.

The team has now used the material as a solar water evaporator. The researchers created three wool structures with horizontal, one-sided vertical and two-sided vertical configurations. While the tiny spike fibers trap light, the polydopamine converts near-infrared light into heat.

In tests under simulated sunlight, the two-sided vertical system produced 2.43 liters of water per square meter of fabric each hour. That is the range of high-performing 3D architectures that require far more elaborate fabrication, Shepherd says. And it is lower than more complex systems and those using microplastics or nanomaterials.

But this material is 100% natural, simple, and low cost. The material weighs about 281 grams per square meter, and costs roughly $0.62 in materials for a 20 × 20 cm piece, she says. “Our modeling suggests a single square meter could yield around 4,700 liters of vapor a year in a sun-rich location like Mokha, Yemen. That makes off-grid, textile-based water purification realistic for vulnerable communities. I see it being used as an off-grid water source for communities that conventional infrastructure doesn’t reach.”

The researchers have already tested the material outdoors on a partly cloudy day in Ithaca, New York, on water three times saltier than seawater and it performed well. They now plan to test its performance on brackish ground water and wastewater.

Source: Kyuin Park et al. Polydopamine-Wool Textiles for Sustainable Interfacial Solar Vapor Generation. Advanced Science, 2026.

Image: ©Anthropocene Magazine

 

Just as humans head indoors for warmth in the winter and shade in the summer, tree-dwelling animals use the arboreal equivalent of caves for refuge from temperature extremes.

At a time when climate change is supercharging heatwaves, holes and crevices in trees offer potentially life-saving cool spots for bats, birds and other creatures around the world, according to new research. When peak temperatures cross into heatwave territory, these holes are often more than 4°C cooler than the outside, according to a review of dozens of studies recently published in Forest Ecology and Management.

“Everywhere we looked, trees were great for buffering outside air temperature extremes,” said Joy O’Keefe the paper’s senior author and a professor at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC).

There are growing reasons for animals to try to escape the heat. In recent years, scientists have documented mass die-offs of various species in the midst of heatwaves. In 2014, a heatwave led to the deaths of some 46,000 flying foxes on a single day in eastern Australia. Four years later, another scorcher claimed 23,000 gray-headed flying foxes in the Australian city of Cairns, a third of the species’ population on the continent.

For years, O’Keefe has studied roosts for bats, chiefly in the eastern United States. The work revealed that natural resting spots often provided more protection from extreme temperatures than artificial ones, such as bat boxes. Did those findings apply elsewhere and for other kinds of animals?

To find out, the team combed through the scientific literature. They found 36 studies from five continents that contained data necessary to compiling a more complete picture, including measurements of maximum temperatures both inside and outside the crevices being studied.

Their analysis revealed that these natural shelters consistently provided a buffer against both high and low temperatures. Daily maximum temperatures were around 2.7°C cooler in the refuges than outside. On hotter days, when temperatures climbed above 30°C, that cooling difference grew to 4.1°C. These abodes also offered protection against cold. Compared to the lowest temperatures outside, the resting places were 2.8°C warmer. On days when the mercury dropped below 10°C, the difference was slightly greater at 3.1°C.

 

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The beneficiaries weren’t confined to bats. Among the various studies were places occupied by birds, insects, bats and other mammals such as squirrels.

The new findings offer yet another reason for keeping trees standing, especially ancient ones that tend to be more riddled with gaps and gashes where critters can find shelter.

“Forest managers should focus on protecting and regenerating natural habitats for animals, especially in areas where you get heat waves that can result in mass mortality events,” said co-author Reed Crawford postdoctoral researcher at UIUC.

It’s also clear that today’s artificial replacements for these trees, such as boxes, don’t offer the same benefits. If people are going to use them, the results suggest a need to rethink their design to better mimic the thermal performance that nature offers.

“We know bat boxes almost always exceed outside air temperature, and then they don’t retain that heat at night,” said Crawford. “If people are compelled to use artificial roosts in their conservation plans, we need to improve their design to better replicate what’s happening in nature and try to keep those animals safe.”

Cotten, et. al. “A global review of the capacity of tree cavities to buffer temperature extremes.” Forest Ecology and Management. Aug. 25, 2026.

Image: ©Getty for UnSplash+

What humans have wrought is heavy. In a new study, researchers calculated the weight of more than 600 million buildings in cities across the world and came up with a total of 835 billion metric tons, or gigatonnes (Gt) [1]. That’s almost as much as the weight of all the world’s plants.

All of that weight—in steel, wood, glass, cement, stone, and other materials—means carbon emissions. “If rapidly urbanizing regions follow historical development pathways, this stock could grow by another 419 Gt by 2050,” says study team member Jinchao Song, a research fellow at the University of Michigan’s Center for Sustainable Systems.

Conventional life-cycle analyses and green building certification programs like LEED are built on the principle of material efficiency and less is more. But reducing the environmental impacts of buildings isn’t just about making them lighter, according to a second paper [2].

In that work, Fernanda Cruz Rios, a built environment scientist at Drexel University in Pennsylvania, argues that what matters is how resilient a building is to fires, earthquakes, storms, floods, and so on —especially in the current age of increasing climate disasters.

Consider two otherwise identical buildings: one built directly on the ground and one on a raised concrete platform. The concrete platform increases the carbon emissions involved in construction. But when a major flood comes, the building on the concrete platform stays high and dry, while the one on the ground is inundated requiring costly and time-consuming repairs.

When all the impacts of the flooding are added up—new materials, mold remediation, the need for the building’s occupants to decamp to an alternate location for months—the building on the concrete platform may well come out ahead.

“Once you account for what happens when a building actually gets hit by a disaster, designing it to stay functional can prove to be the sustainable choice, not a trade-off against it,” says Cruz Rios

 

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Existing life-cycle analyses sometimes account for the impact of the materials necessary for repairs. But when Cruz Rios analyzed 40 previously published life-cycle analyses focusing on flood, wind, heat, and seismic hazards she found that none of them captured all dimensions of building resilience.

“Almost no studies look at what happens during a disaster response (the emergency actions like evacuations, temporary fixes, and workarounds a building or community relies on while the event is unfolding),” says Cruz Rios. “Those actions clearly carry environmental costs, but they’re essentially invisible in the data.”

In the paper, Cruz Rios sketches out a new approach to life-cycle analysis that foregrounds resilience, making the benchmark of sustainability a building’s material use in relation to the function it delivers over its lifetime. Cruz Rios reports that her lab is now “working to gather the kind of data that could make this analysis fully usable in practice.”

At the same time, no building is an island. According to the first study, urban form—meaning the height, density, and uniformity of buildings across a city—makes a big difference in material use. Cities with a dense, uniform arrangement of low-rise buildings maximize per capita floor space per pound of building material.

“I was also surprised by how much urban form could influence future material demand,” Song says. Going forward, if rapidly growing cities in the Global South adopt the dense, low-rise arrangement they could require about 30% less material than if they were to adopt the least efficient urban form (a sparse arrangement of uniformly high-rise buildings).

The finding “suggests that early urban planning decisions can substantially shape a city’s long-term material needs,” says Song—underlining the need to consider building sustainability across multiple levels of space and time.

Sources:

[1] Song J. et al.  “Weighing 600 million buildings reveals global urban material inequality and efficiency paths.” Nature Cities 2026.

[2] Cruz Rios F. “Resilience in building life cycle assessment: a critical review and framework for time‐integrated functionality.” Journal of Industrial Ecology 2026.

Image: John Fleck/FEMA.

Microplastics are a scourge on the environment, accumulating in farm soils and wriggling their way into the food supply—reducing harvests and harming human health. But what if discarded plastics could be used instead, to improve crop yields and make farming more sustainable?

Researchers are trying to do just that. They’re working to develop a new generation of polymers that can be converted into farm fertilizers at the end of their life—rather than shoved into landfills.

A new study, published August 18 in Scientific Reports, documents an important new step in this effort: engineers have found a way to make plant-based polymers whose stiffness can be tuned for different uses such as shopping bags or fidget toys. These new plastics aren’t themselves biodegradable—so no one has to worry about sandwich bags rotting in the kitchen drawer. But when they’re discarded they can chemically converted into fertilizers.

People have spent years using isosorbide, a chemical building block produced from plant-derived glucose, to create experimental plastics that could do this. A study published by the same team in 2021 produced isosorbide-based polymers that could be recycled into fertilizers. But these plastics were too hard and brittle most uses.

Chemists who developed conventional plastics faced similar problems. So they tuned the mechanical properties of their polymers by incorporating other agents to either soften or harden them. But the chemicals that they used often turned out to be harmful to humans—like the now-infamous bisphenol-A (BPA).

In the new study, scientists created a novel derivative of isosorbide that functions as a softening agent—allowing them to concoct isosorbide-based plastics that were softer and stretchier. They could then recycle these bioplastics by treating them with ammonia—releasing the original isosorbide building blocks as well as urea—a chemical frequently used for industrial nitrogen fertilizers.

 

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These recycled mixtures improved the growth yield of Arabidopsis thaliana, a plant belonging to the mustard family, and komatsu, a Japanese mustard spinach that is cultivated as food in Asia, by 5-fold and 2.5-fold respectively, compared to no fertilizer at all.

In the experiments with Arabidopsis, the recycled mixture of urea and isosorbide also improved the yield by about 1.3-fold compared to standard urea fertilizer alone.

Based on experiments published by the same team in 2025, isosorbide appears to stimulate plant growth independently of urea, by increasing tolerance to nitrogen deficiency and salt stress.

More research will be needed to explore the usefulness of these plastics. For example, the plastics produced in this study were deemed appropriate for use in plastic bags or clear plastic wrapping—but not for other uses, such as book shelves or bike parts that require greater strength. The authors also cite the need to conduct a ‘lifecycle analysis’ of these plastics—to quantify their overall water usage, energy consumption, and greenhouse emissions and compare these to standard plastics, and standard fertilizers. They’ll also need to show that bioplastic-derived fertilizers don’t add to microplastic pollution. But at least these new plastics are designed to avoid that problem.

Fujimata, et al. “Plastics to fertilizer: A polymer system based on isosorbide as a monomer, plasticizer, and fertilizer.” Scientific Reports. 2026.

Agrahari, et al. “Novel role of isosorbide as a biostimulant in enhancing plant growth and development in Arabidopsis thaliana.” BMC Plant Biology. 2025.

Image: ©Anthropocene Magazine

There are many ways to cut the carbon emissions of concrete. One is to mix conventional Portland cement with limestone or other similar materials. Another route is to blend cements with cementitious binding materials such as fly ash from coal-fired power plants and granulated blast furnace slag from iron and steel production. Yet other ways include using microorganisms orenzymes in concrete that soak up carbon dioxide.

The problem is what these formulas do to durability. Low-carbon concrete absorbs more carbon dioxide from the air than conventional concrete, a process that lowers its internal alkalinity and leaves the steel reinforcement inside more vulnerable to rust. Because today’s building codes are written to prevent exactly that kind of corrosion, they effectively discourage engineers from using greener concrete in the first place—even though it’s better for the climate.

A new study out of ETH Zurich, published in Nature Communications, offers a way past that impasse. Rather than treating corrosion as a fixed property of a given concrete mix, the researchers modeled how it actually unfolds in the real world. They tested three concrete formulations in four cities with very different climates—Zurich, Bergen, Manaus, and Huailai—feeding detailed local weather data into a model that tracks how moisture moves through concrete over time and how that moisture drives corrosion.

 

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The finding reframes the problem: climate, not chemistry, is the main variable. Wet concrete can corrode up to 100 times faster than dry concrete, while differences between concrete mixes had a comparatively minor effect. In other words, the same low-carbon concrete that might degrade quickly in a humid, rain-soaked city could hold up fine in a dry one.

That points to a fix that’s more about policy than materials science: building standards that account for local climate, rather than applying identical rules everywhere. As lead researcher Ueli Angst put it, engineers need “a better understanding of how environmentally-friendly types of concrete behave over the long term under different weather conditions.” If codes were calibrated to a structure’s actual location, low-carbon concrete could be deployed far more widely in the climates where it holds up—without waiting for a new chemistry breakthrough first.

Source: Christhiana Albert et al. Rethinking concrete durability for low-carbon concretes through climate-informed corrosion modelling, Nature Communications, 2026.

Image: valentinplugarug/magnific.com

Probiotics are a popular dietary supplement, promising to boost people’s health by populating their guts with healthy microbes.

People trying to help coral endure heatwaves might soon be reaching for something similar. Infusions of a special probiotic cocktail helped coral stay healthier as they stewed in overheated water in the Red Sea near Saudi Arabia, scientists reported last week in Cell Reports. Even a mix of dead microbes, a so-called postbiotic, proved beneficial.

While scientists have seen promising lab results that such microbial tweaks might help ailing corals, this is the first report from real world conditions: wild coral in the open ocean during a real underwater heatwave.

“When an innovative idea like this actually works—particularly under field conditions—we are positively surprised,” said Erika Santoro, a postdoctoral researcher at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) in Saudi Arabia. “The most exciting takeaway is that this study opens a new avenue for coral microbial therapies.”

People might picture coral as rigid, brightly colored underwater sculptures. But they are so much more. This “skeleton” is just the mineral home to colonies of thousands of tiny coral polyps, identical clones resembling little sea anemones. Then there are the symbiotic algae that live inside the polyps, providing much of the coral’s energy through photosynthesis. Finally, there’s a stew of microbes living in an around the coral.

Scientists are experimenting with each of these kinds of organisms in a desperate bid to help coral endure the underwater heatwaves proliferating across the world. Without help, most corals are expected to be killed by the end of the century, as the oceans absorb much of the excess heat generated by global warming. That would lay waste to one of the most productive and diverse marine ecosystems on Earth.

 

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Researchers are altering coral genetics in hopes of boosting heat tolerance by measures such as crossbreeding coral from different parts of the world. They are working to find and breed strains of algae that will do the same, in some cases accelerating evolution in overheated laboratory waters. They are also studying the microbial communities surrounding coral, in search of mixtures that might help coral stay healthy.

In this new research, Santoro and colleagues tested two different microbial mixtures collected from Red Sea corals and identified as likely candidates based on their genetic profiles and performance in earlier experiments. In 2022, during a prolonged underwater heatwave in the Red Sea that pushed temperatures to nearly 32° Celsius (90° Fahrenheit), the scientists dosed colonies of spiky Acropora valida in a reef near KAUST with one of five mixtures. Two got different probiotics. Two received dead “postbiotic” combinations of the same blends. The last got a salt water placebo with no microbes.

Over 15 days, the scientists watched for changes in color that indicated the coral might be ejecting their algal companions, a response to heat stress. They also measured how efficiently the algae were using sunlight for photosynthesis.

The results were encouraging. While they saw little difference in color changes, coral treated with the placebo and one postbiotic experienced a big drop in their photosynthetic performance. By contrast, corals that got either probiotic or one of the postbiotics showed no decline in photosynthesis over the 15 days.

A survey of the microbial population around the corals at the end of the experiment showed that the communities in the healthier corals looked different than in the sicklier ones. That difference was also reflected in chemistry tied to their metabolic activity.

The success of one of the postbiotics was “particularly exciting,” said Santoro. That’s because dead microbes could be more practical to use on a large scale, because they can be stored more easily since they aren’t alive.

A single 15-day experiment is hardly evidence of a silver bullet. There likely won’t be a single measure that gives coral the key to surviving, and no one is talking of measures that could rescue coral if climate change continues on its current trajectory.

Take this as a glimmer of good news amid an ocean of bad news for coral.

Santoro, et. al. “Probiotic and postbiotic treatment improves coral health and promotes specific metabolic and microbiome changes in situ during a heatwave.” Cell Reports. Sept. 3, 2026.

Image courtesy of Coral Probiotics Village

An integrated, nationwide system for recycling and reusing old EV batteries could save 6.1 billion tons of carbon emissions and 3.9 trillion Chinese Yuan over 30 years, according to a new study.

The savings depend on resolving a conceptually simple but logistically profound problem: a geographic mismatch between where old batteries get switched out of EVs and where they could be reused.

China has the world’s largest EV market that is also growing faster than anywhere else, leading to a flood of old EV batteries, which are typically retired from use once they can hold only 80% of their original charge. The most common method for recycling these batteries recovers only a limited set of metals and sends the rest of the battery material to the landfill.

Recently reuse of old EV batteries as part of stationary storage for solar or wind power has emerged as an alternative solution. New recycling methods are also being developed that remanufacture battery components without breaking down their chemical structure.

But retired batteries aren’t always where they need to be in order to get a second act. And moving lots of old EV batteries around isn’t straightforward since they are hazardous materials that can catch fire, be damaged, or leak toxic materials into the environment if not transported properly. Is it worth it?

The answer is a resounding yes, according to the new study, the first to systematically explore how to optimize battery reuse and advanced recycling.

The researchers modeled the supply, demand, and disposal of retired EV batteries for each province in China from 2020 through 2050. They calculated the life-cycle greenhouse gas emissions and economic costs associated with a dozen different scenarios involving varying levels of battery collection and post-disposal pathways.

 

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Retired batteries mostly accumulate in the wealthier eastern provinces of China with high rates of EV ownership, the researchers report. But demand for battery storage is mostly in the western part of the country where there is a lot of renewable energy potential. And demand for advanced recycling is mostly in battery manufacturing regions with the necessary specialized factories.

Absent any intervention, the mismatch will become more acute in the coming decades, as EV adoption accelerates in the east and renewable generation expands even further in the west.

Study scenarios that prioritize either advanced recycling or storage reuse are associated with three to five times greater cost savings and one to three times greater emissions reductions compared to a system that continues to route batteries mostly to conventional recycling, according to the researchers’ model.

Put another way, the business-as-usual pathway leaves 50-97% of potential cost savings and 26-53% of emissions reductions on the table.

Realizing those savings will require establishing efficient networks for transporting retired batteries between provinces: investing in specialized trucks, streamlining permitting, and so on.

The impact of building out that system would be pretty minimal, eating up just 2.3% of the cost savings and 0.03% of the emissions savings.

The optimal scenario according to the analysis, involving a balance of storage reuse and advanced recycling and moving away from conventional recycling after 2030, would save about 6.1 billion tons of carbon emissions and 3.9 trillion Chinese Yuan over three decades.

Other regions such as Europe and the United States have similar spatial mismatches between EV adoption and renewables generation, so the findings have relevance beyond China. “These results demonstrate that early, coordinated planning can convert spatial barriers into scalable climate and economic benefits, offering a transferable pathway for other rapidly electrifying markets,” the researchers write.

Source: Xie H. et al.  “Spatial mismatches constrain high-value utilization of retired batteries for decarbonization in China.” Environmental Science and Ecotechnology 2026.

Image: Based on Getty for UnSplash. ©Anthropocene Magazine.