Many animals provide ingenious inspirations for new materials and their production. Spiders, for instance, produce silk that withstands enormous forces and which has since been artificially generated in a laboratory setting. Similarly, mussels secrete byssus threads that can attach strongly to any material underwater – a long sought-after property. Velvet worms, small animals somewhere between an earthworm and a caterpillar, are equipped with an equally unique material: a sticky liquid that wards off enemies or catches prey.

Mosses are the second largest group of land plants today, and arguably the oldest. For millions of years, these plants have been producing highly complex molecules out of simple chemical building blocks, in a sustainable, efficient and cheap manner. Many of these chemical substances are used in medicine and the perfume industry today.

Biochar is a carbon-rich, charcoal-like substance made from oxygen-deprived plants or other organic material. It can store large amounts of carbon and when applied as a fertilizer it slowly releases nutrients into the ground. However, the exact mechanisms how biochar stores nutrients and promotes plant growth have not been identified yet, which also severely limits its commercial potential. An international team of researchers, led by the University of Tübingen in Germany, deciphered the storage and release mechanisms of biochar.

Air pollution is most commonly associated with traffic and car emissions. However, there are a number of other sources for pollution, such as agricultural emissions due to fertiliser use. According to researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry in Mainz, Germany, reducing ammonia (NH₃) emissions by 50% could avoid the deaths of more than 250,000 people each year that are caused by air pollution worldwide.

An international research team involving scientists from Brain AG has succeeded in extracting nearly the entire copper content from local shale deposits by applying a novel bio-leaching process. In the early extraction phase, microbes that are used for the bio-leaching process first convert insoluble ore minerals into water-soluble salts. Downstream, a bio-chemical precipitation process then recovers up to 97% of the dissolved copper.

24 leading academic institutions and inter-governmental agencies have been working together to track current progress on the relationship between public health and climate change, and their implications for governments’ commitments under the Paris Climate Agreement. The Lancet Countdown’s 2017 report was launched on the October 31st.

Clariant, a specialty chemicals company based in Switzerland and with a demonstration plant in Straubing, Germany, will invest in a new full-scale commercial biorefinery for the production of cellulosic ethanol from agricultural residues using its sunliquid® technology. The new plant, with an annual production capacity of 50.000 tons, will be built in the south-western part of Romania.

Climate change and global warming not only decrease air quality and cause rising sea levels, but also affect how plants grow. An international team of researchers headed by the Technical University Munich (TUM) demonstrates for the first time that trees in urban areas grow faster than in rural areas.

Innovations that advance a sustainable economy are not only difficult in their technical realisation, but also require financial support. In order to bring them to the market, oftentimes large investments become necessary. The aim of the new Green Finance Cluster in Frankfurt, which was opened recently, will be to connect innovations and funding possibilities. In the middle of November the Secretary of State for Trade and Industry in Hessen, Tarek Al-Wazir said: “A focus on sustainability is indispensable for the financial sector.

Mussels produce and use one of the strongest biobased adhesives known to date, because they live in the tidal and shelf areas of the oceans and must therefore withstand strong currents and salt water. Exactly such a strong and biobased super glue would also be very useful in regenerative medicine: biocompatible adhesives could be used to treat superficial wounds, and could replace plates and screws, which are commonly used to treat bone fractures.