SmartGreen Post | news about the environment

Crates of crushed ice and fresh catch line the quayside at Sciacca, a working port on Sicily’s south-western shore where commercial trawlers dock beside small-scale gillnetters. For decades, the ubiquitous white expanded polystyrene box has served as the default packaging for seafood landed here and across the Mediterranean basin. Lightweight, thermally efficient, and disposa...

High above the frozen expanses of the South Pole, sophisticated ground instruments and orbital satellites track an invisible chemical shift. The seasonal rupture in the stratospheric ozone shield, first documented by British researchers in 1985, is shrinking over multi-year averages. According to the quadrennial Scientific Assessment of Ozone Depletion backed by the United Na...

A cracked viaduct after an unseasonal cloudburst, warped steel tracks under a July heat dome, and dried-up irrigation canals idling hydroelectric turbines are no longer isolated anomalies across the Italian peninsula. By 2050, the cumulative physical degradation inflicted by global heating on Italy’s foundational networks will carry a direct price tag of five billion euros ev...

Bales of post-consumer polyethylene film are stacking up in storage yards across Southern Europe, untouched and unsold. Inside the reprocessing facilities, extrusion lines run at half capacity while plant managers monitor fluctuating spot prices on chemical commodity exchanges. A flood of cheap virgin polymer, produced from discounted fossil feedstocks in North America and th...

Heating and cooling account for roughly half of the European Union’s total energy consumption, with the vast majority still tethered to fossil fuels burned inside legacy residential boilers. In Rome, researchers at the National Agency for New Technologies, Energy and Sustainable Economic Development have advanced a pragmatic engineering alternative. ENEA has developed a dual-...