Industrial Technologies

Dyeing fabric is one of the most environmentally damaging steps in making clothes: it uses huge amounts of water, and a lot of the dye never binds to the textile and stays in the water. A team led by Filipe Natalio at the NOVA University of Lisbon is taking a completely different route and wants cotton to take on its colour while the plant is still growing. The HYDROCOLTON project combines chemistry, plant biology and hydroponics – and at the end you can check how eco-friendly your wardrobe is.

Wind turbines, electric vehicles and mobile phones share a hidden ingredient: magnets made with rare earth elements. Yet less than 1 % of REE magnets in Europe are currently recycled. The EU-funded REEPRODUCE project is testing how to take them out of end-of-life products, such as electric scooter wheels, and turn them into new metals in a way that makes economic sense – and at the end, you can check what you do with your own old electronics.

Farmed salmon owe their pink flesh to astaxanthin, and most of that pigment still comes from petrochemical processes. The EU-funded ASTEASIER project engineered microalgae that make it without the stress they normally need, scaled production up with industrial partners and tested the pigment in trials on fish farms. Now a project spin-off wants to take the idea to market — and at the end you can check whether industrial biotechnology could be your thing.

Ground engineering usually starts with a truck full of cement. A Swiss research team asked a different question: what if the soil could bind itself? In the CEBREWA project, microorganisms injected into the ground produce calcium carbonate simply by living, and limestone crystals grow between the grains until loose soil holds together like weak rock. Eighteen months took the idea from a single pore to a full-scale slope — and at the end you can check how far you would carry an idea of your own.

Half of a student flat is made of wood-based panels: the desk, the wardrobe, the shelf above the bed. When one of them gives up, it usually ends in a skip, because turning an old fibreboard into a new one is far harder than the word recycling suggests. The EU-funded EcoReFibre project spent four years showing that it can be done at industrial scale, and how - sorting, defibration, mixing ratios, markets - which is also a decent test of how you yourself look at the things around you.