Doing without chemical pesticides

Once released, they survive on the crop for weeks and reproduce, keeping the system going. The gerberas stay healthy, and the grower does not have to use chemical sprays against whitefly.

Messelink and colleagues at the WUR Greenhouse Horticulture business unit in Bleiswijk have collected many species of mirid predatory bugs in southern Europe, some of them knocked out of the vegetation in the wild, and some from collections at sister institutes. They are now studying which species performs best in which crop. Some species have a preference for whitefly, and others for aphids or thrips.

Such research is sorely needed. Worldwide, farmers and horticulturalists have increased their use of chemical pesticides by a factor of 15 to 20 in the past 40 years. Without crop protection, 85 percent of the harvest can be lost, but the current situation is anything but sustainable. A European directive of 2009 demands that the use of chemical pesticides be cut down drastically. Supermarket chains are even imposing criteria on their producers that go beyond the legal requirements, partly under pressure from environmental organizations that publish annual rankings of the ‘cleanest’ suppliers of fruit and vegetables.

Welcome alternative

A further reason for sharpening up the criteria for pesticides was related to the eff ect on drinking water. At the beginning of this year, the European Food Authority (EFSA) assessed a number of insecticides (known as the neonicotinoids) as a danger to bees, which are indispensable as pollinators in agriculture and horticulture. Of the roughly 1000 chemical substances permitted in the European Union, more than half will disappear from the market within a few years, mainly because of sharpened-up environmental regulations. And some chemicals have become dysfunctional because pests have become resistant to them. So biological pest control offers a welcome alternative.

In the Bleijswijk experiments, dozens of tomato plants stand in their individual gauze tents. A different species of mirid bug, sourced from Italy, Spain or Portugal, is at work in each of the tents. White granules have been scattered on the leaves. They are meal moth eggs, which the mirid bugs can feed on to start with. But then they are supposed to attack whitefly.

Messelink: ‘They need to be suited to the crop, the climate in Dutch greenhouses, and the prey they attack and suck dry. We look at the extent of the damage and their growth rate before the pest arrives. And we research whether the mirid bugs themselves damage the crops if they are present in great numbers. Pest damage to the leaves is not such a problem in gerbera and vegetables that are actually fruits, because the grower only harvests the flowers and fruit.’

Ornamental plant growers on the move

The mirid bug is not alone. Ichneumon wasps, predatory mites and numerous other natural enemies of pests and diseases are hard at work in greenhouses too. All growers of fruit vegetables such as tomatoes, sweet peppers, cucumbers and aubergines use biological pest control nowadays. Bumble bees have been released in greenhouses to take care of natural pollination ever since 1988, and bumble bees do not tolerate toxins. The ornamental plant sector is slower on the uptake because ornamental plants have to look flawless, but even these growers are on the move.

Messelink: ‘Our work as researchers is to collect and test suitable natural enemies and find out the optimal conditions for making use of them. What do they need in the way of food and shelter? What is the best way for them to settle and reproduce on a plant? We are working on this together with Koppert Biological Systems and other companies that are focusing on growing and trading in useful insects.’

In total, the Wageningen researchers have identified about 60 species of natural enemy for possible use for pest control in greenhouses. Besides the greenhouse whitefly, pests that have been studied include the tobacco whitefly, the two-spotted spider mite, the thrips, and the notorious tomato leafminer moth, originally from South America.

Alternative foods

Smart measures are making biological pest control in greenhouses more and more effective. To help them get a head start on their prey, the natural enemies are first given a ‘starter package’ of alternative foods such as Verbascum plants, pollen, bee pollen or whatever else they like, so that they reproduce fast.

Messelink: ‘We want to work towards a “standing army”: you shouldn’t wait until you notice a pest to put the natural enemies to work. They need to be at the ready in large numbers in advance. But meanwhile they shouldn’t starve, of course. Many people think a modern greenhouse is very sterile, but we actually building a whole ecosystem. We call that functional biodiversity. If, for instance, you want to have a small army of ichneumon wasps at the ready to attack aphids, you can produce them on grain aphids for the time being. They don’t damage the sweet pepper plant, but you do then have to put grain plants in your greenhouse. Some mirid bugs will feed on brine shrimp cysts, while others like cattail pollen.’

New diseases and pests

New natural enemies are continuously being introduced into the greenhouses, and the always highly innovationminded horticulturalists are quick on the uptake. But with globalization, new diseases and pests are arriving all the time too. ‘And then you have to look for new natural enemies to combat them,’ says Messelink. ‘Now, for instance, the tomato russet mite is suddenly becoming a huge problem, and the arrival of the sweet pepper beetle and the brown marmorated stink bug is only a matter of time. It also seems as though pests are settling more easily because crops are grown in the greenhouses all year round these days. The greenhouses are never empty.’

In the BINGO project funded by the EU Horizon programme, Wageningen researchers are looking at genetic variation in useful natural enemies. The aim is to select the most suitable candidates and to ‘improve’ them by cross-breeding them in a kind of breeding programme.

Abiotic factors such as the greenhouse climate, humidity and lighting are being studied too. For many natural enemies, the dark winter months are a diffi cult period, while the pest just goes on developing. ‘Hyperparasitism’ can be a big problem in the spring and summer. Hyperparasites are insects that attack parasites. For example, ichneumon wasps that parasitize aphids are themselves attacked by other, parasitic ichneumon wasps, which turn up in the greenhouse spontaneously.

Better plant resilience

In the worst case, there is no new generation of wasps and biological pest control fails. ‘We are also doing a lot of research on ways of combining biological control with better plant resilience and selective use of pesticides, which you can spray in emergencies,’ says Messelink. ‘You can make plants resilient against pests and diseases using fungi that grow into the plant and promote its growth. The use of all sorts of bacteria and microbiological communities in the root environment can be effective too.’

In practice, there are already dozens of such ‘biostimulators’ on the market. Microbes such as Trichoderma harzianum, which excrete hormone-like substances, can strengthen roots and thus increase the crop’s resilience. In nature, fungi, bacteria, unicellular organisms and nematodes that cause plant diseases are continuously fought by other species. This is known as ‘antagonism’, and it limits the damage done by plant diseases. But that natural equilibrium is disturbed when the plants are sprayed with chemicals.

Insect-plant relations

Of course, breeding resistant plant varieties remains another important line of attack. And this is helped by greater insight into insect-plant relations. Wageningen professor of Entomology Marcel Dicke discovered in the late 1980s that some plants ‘call for help’ when they are being devoured, by emitting signal substances which attract natural enemies such as assassin bugs.

‘We are now working with breeders, who are very interested in characteristics such as the production of “cry for help” odours and their molecular markers,’ says Dicke. His group will also soon be starting a research project on the effects of coloured light on biological pest control insects.

Compared with greenhouse horticulture, with its wellcontrolled conditions and high yields per hectare, the introduction of biological pest control in outdoor cultivation on fields and in orchards is a lot trickier. The conditions are less predictable. If you release a natural enemy into a field of onions, you run the risk that it will make its escape. What is more, the margins in this kind of cultivation are much lower than in greenhouse horticulture.

Ichneumon wasps and lemonade wasps

Dicke: ‘We are doing a lot of research in open-air situations on cabbage and mustard. It has become clear that plants are highly capable of “fending for themselves”: mustard seed plants on which we let butterflies lay eggs produce just as much seed as control plants that were not exposed to the butterfl ies.’ The plants react to the eggs with faster growth, flowering and seed dispersal. They attract ichneumon wasps and lemonade wasps, among other insects.

Helpful microorganisms

Outside the greenhouse, current biological pest control consists primarily of distributing helpful microorganisms. Biological growers work a lot with compost to spread those organisms over their land, and there are special mixtures for sale for boosting ‘soil resilience’. More and more growers also make use of flowery field edges in which useful natural enemies can take shelter and survive. Meanwhile they – like the greenhouse horticulturalists – are seeing their ‘medicine cupboard’ getting steadily emptier due to changing regulations and under pressure from their customers. In 2017, fi ve new biological pest control methods were approved, and only one new chemical pesticide.

‘The demand for non-chemical disease control is bigger than ever,’ says Wageningen plant disease expert Jürgen Köhl of Wageningen Plant Research. Köhl leads the large 12 million-euro collaborative programme Biocomes, in which 14 European institutes and 13 manufacturers have worked closely for four years in a public-private partnership on developing biological pest control for outdoor cultivation. ‘In Biocomes, we have mainly looked for useful fungi, bacteria and viruses as natural enemies of their pathogenic relatives,’ says Köhl.

Damaging tomato leaf-mining moth

‘Four years down the line at least 11 biological pest control products for use in open fields are set to come on the market.’ Swiss researchers are going to register a highly selective virus as a means of controlling the extremely damaging tomato leaf-mining moth, which has become resistant to a lot of insecticides. An Italian partner wants to register a microbiological treatment for wheat and maize seed. The seed gets a coating which controls the growth of harmful Fusarium fungi. In Belgium there is interest in new biological pest control organisms (parasitoids) for aphids in peaches and cherries.

Together with the industry, Wageningen researchers are developing a biological spray against powdery mildew in grains. And German researchers are getting good results with crossbreeding nematodes that combat harmful pine weevils in forestry.

Control of the Botrytis fungus

Promising candidates are being found in nature. Köhl himself did years of research on biological control of the Botrytis fungus, economically the most significant pest in a wide range of crops from grapes to cyclamens. After 15 years of field and laboratory research, he had selected the most successful microorganism: a species of fungus that was found in a field of onions. This fungus naturally growths on plants without causing any harm, and due to its competitiveness, it controls biologically the development of Botrytis.

Full of pride, the researcher presented his find to the business world. Problem solved? ‘The companies were not impressed,’ says Köhl with a wry laugh. ‘They thought the fungal spores were far too big. To spread enough fungal spores on the fi elds or in the orchards, you would have to produce a vast amount of valuable biomass. It was a no-go.’ According to Köhl, researchers in the lab focus mainly on effectiveness. ‘But there are many other factors involved in making biological control successful.

The researchers brought these criteria together in Select Biocontrol, a successful programme for the systematic screening of useful microorganisms. Köhl: ‘The candidate must be safe for humans and the environment. It must be genetically stable and production must be feasible and aff ordable. There has to be enough of a market for it, you’ve got to be able to protect it as intellectual property, and there mustn’t be an existing patent application by other parties. Of the many microorganisms that demonstrate a promising antagonistic eff ect, very few candidates make it to the commercial finishing line.’

Köhl applied Select Biocontrol successfully in his research on the biological control of apple scab, economically the biggest disease in the apple orchard. Common varieties such as Elstar and Golden Delicious get sprayed for this 20 to 30 times in the growing season. After some years of research, a new fungus was selected that combats apple scab while fulfilling the criteria, and now a company is working on production and registration.

Cumbersome admission process

In most countries, the registration process for admitting biological control microorganisms to the market is comparable to that used for chemical pesticides. Köhl: ‘It takes about four years and hundreds of thousands of euros, or even millions. In February last year, the European Parliament passed a motion proposing a faster procedure for admitting biological pest control methods to the market. Of course the organisms should be tested to see whether they cause any harm. But you sometimes have to fi ll in pointless, superfl uous details, such as their persistence in the environment, for instance. Companies are now lobbying in Brussels to speed up the registration process, but that is going very, very slowly.’

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There are countries such as Indonesia where as much as 70 percent of the wood on the market was felled illegally, shows a British report by Chatham House. Cameroon, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and the neighbouring Congo-Brazzaville are in the top five high-risk countries with more than 50 percent illegal wood.

The European Union is trying to combat the trade in illegal timber with the EU Timber Regulation that has been in force since 2013. ‘The success of the European timber regulation depends entirely on effective enforcement,’ says Arjan Alkema, deputy director of FSC Netherlands. FSC is one of the labels aiming at promoting trade in timber from sustainably managed forests. ‘But it is only on paper, and there are massive financial interests at stake. Legal and illegal consignments can get mixed up, people can fiddle the paperwork, and many EU countries don’t take enforcement of the regulation very seriously. Spain only allocated staff to policing this in 2016.’

Establishing origins with DNA-tests

There may be a glimmer of hope. Researchers at Wageningen University & Research developed a genetic method for establishing the origins of wood. ‘We used and improved on existing DNA techniques,’ says head researcher Pieter Zuidema of the Forest Ecology and Forest Management chair group.

The forest ecologist, who has a long track record in sustainable forest management and environmentally responsible felling, has been working with a team on this research for over two years. They are focusing on tali, a common and commercially popular tree species from West Africa. Tali is solid hardwood and is used for parquet floors and lintels, as well as for heavy outdoor structures such as bridges and waterworks.

The researchers collected over 300 samples from five different timber concessions in Cameroon and Congo-Brazzaville, and isolated DNA from them. They obtained a unique DNA profile for each timber sample.

Evidence that would stand up in court

In a blind test using the DNA method on 12 new samples of tali, genetic ecologist Arjen de Groot of Wageningen Economic Research was able to trace the exact source of the wood in 11 cases. ‘There was one I couldn’t place and I was sweating when I reported that to the team,’ says De Groot. ‘It turned out they had deliberately put in one sample of tali wood from a totally different concession in the Congo.’

This genetic method can locate the origin of timber to the nearest 14 kilometres. ‘This has never been seen before,’ says Zuidema. ‘We can trace the wood right to the concession.’

‘If we create a database with the most popular tropical wood species from the main timber concessions, or alternatively from the areas where most of the illegal felling goes on,’ adds Zuidema, ‘then we can find out whether a piece of timber comes from that area. I think we would then be able to provide evidence that would stand up in court.’ Much-traded species such as tali, and the similar azobe in Africa, as well as teak, merbau and meranti in South East Asia, and cedar in South and Central America, should be the first in line when putting together a database, says Zuidema.

A DNA database

Setting up a database for the whole distribution area of every tree species is a time-consuming job. And an expensive one. ‘It is not the actual establishment of the genetic profile that is costly,’ explains Arjen de Groot. ‘We’ve got the equipment and the software ready.’

The difficulty lies more in obtaining good samples, delivered by independent scientists or staff at amenable companies. ‘To arrive at a global system with a legal status, the procedures at laboratories have to be standardized and we must collaborate with others in universities specializing in such analyses, especially in Germany, Australia and the US, and in commercial firms,’ says Zuidema. ‘And that can be difficult because scientists only want to share that kind of data once they have published their findings. And commercial firms make their living from their databases.’ Also, the different universities work on different species of wood.

But FSC’s Alkema still sees the use of building up a database with money and participation from the timber industry. ‘At FSC we are working ourselves on taking samples in the 1500 concessions certified by us, so as to make a contribution to a DNA database.’ To this end, FSC works with Kew Gardens (the Royal Institute of Botanical Gardens in Britain) in forests in Central America.

Why DNA gives the best results

‘We think the genetic fingerprint is highly promising. We do think it’s a disadvantage that you need living matter from the leaf or the cambium, the tissue that makes the tree grow larger in diameter. What we really want to know is where does the wood come from that is processed into planks, panels and paper. If you are unlucky, there is no more DNA to be found in those.’

So FSC thinks that wood anatomy, mass spectrometry and isotope research can also be useful for tracing the species and the global origin of wood. The easiest of these is the wood anatomy, using microscopes to try and identify the species and origin of wood. Mass spectrometry is a cheap technique with which the chemical composition of wood and its source at the level of country and region can be established. The analysis of isotopes – chemically identical substances such as oxygen atoms, which can vary regionally in the number of neutrons in the atom nucleus – can make it possible to pinpoint the source even more precisely, down to the local level.

Pieter Zuidema and Arjen de Groot confirm that the DNA analysis works best with living cambium material. ‘But in this project we have directed a lot of efforts precisely at improving on the feasibility of extracting DNA from the core wood. With tali, that delivers really usable results,’ says De Groot.

Precise source

‘We also did chemical origins analyses with isotopes but those results for tali were not usable enough,’ adds Zuidema. ‘Isotopes of trees growing next to each other can be more different than those on different concessions. That meant we couldn’t trace the wood to its precise source adequately.’

And of course, adds Zuidema, it takes a long time to establish solid databases. ‘But the procedure for certification, checking documents, visiting concession holders, sawmills and transporters is a time-consuming and expensive job too.’

Bona fide areas

Zuidema is working on a proposal for follow-up research. ‘We want to make a start on a database of the places where the most-traded wood comes from. Preferably, that would also cover the ecologically endangered zones in the high-risk countries.’

If that is a bridge too far, perhaps because the researchers are at risk in those regions, Arjen de Groot has another approach up his sleeve. ‘If the lack of a database for the sensitive regions means we cannot say exactly where the wood comes from, at least we can confirm that possibly illegal wood does not come from the area mentioned on the label. We can do that because we have all the data on the bona fide areas. So with the confidence of Sherlock Holmes, we can say, ‘you are trying to take me for a ride, old fellow.’

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‘Highly sensitive measurements on such a small scale, of a few molecules deep inside a material or a cell, are not possible with large measuring equipment,’ explains Joris Sprakel. He is a researcher at the Wageningen Physical Chemistry and Soft Materials chair group.

In order to sidestep this problem, his team developed molecules which function as measuring equipment themselves. In order to read this measuring instrument, which consists of a single molecule, and to identify the force it records, the researchers shine a laser light on it. The molecule then sends light of another colour back. Using that colour, the research team then figures out how much force is being exercised on the molecule.

‘It was very difficult to build the apparatus for measuring that properly. Very little light is reflected back from just one molecule,’ explains Sprakel. He was also working on a small budget; no financier saw any future in his research proposal at the time. The researchers therefore had to use all their creativity to cobble together their experimental apparatus. ‘We’ve got a team of young, enthusiastic colleagues, all with different areas of expertise. Without their cooperation I don’t think we would ever have succeeded.’ The research led to a publication in the scientific journal Chem in January.

One millionth of a millimeter

The sensor molecules that were developed measure forces hundreds of times more precisely than the existing instruments for measuring minuscule forces. Previously, it was only possible to ascertain whether or not force was being exerted between molecules. ‘With this new method, mechanical force can be measured not just in black and white, but in 50 shades of grey,’ says the research leader.

Expressed in scientific terms, the force sensor reaches a resolution of 100 femtonewtons (0.0000000000001 newtons). One newton is more or less how 100 grams feels. ‘A molecule is itself unbelievably small, roughly a nanometre, one millionth of a millimetre,’ says Sprakel. ‘The force of 100 femtonewtons pressing on a molecule of one nanometre is comparable to the force a grain of sand exerts on a human shoulder. So we can now measure such small forces in proportions that are one trillion times smaller.’

Embryonic development

The new method of measuring makes it possible to get a better grasp of the forces that are significant in the living cells of plants, animals and humans at the molecular level. Scientists know that these physical forces play a role in many processes, but because the forces could not be measured precisely, or at all, they couldn’t really make use of them.

‘With this technique we can literally shed light on these processes. Take the embryonic development of plant cells, for instance. We know that minuscule forces determine when a cell is going to divide and in which direction. So ultimately, those mechanical stimuli are very important to how the plant embryo develops; but up to now that couldn’t be measured,’ explains Sprakel. ‘Then it is also practically impossible to understand how those forces play out.’

Self-repairing spaceships

If you know the role of the minuscule forces in biological processes, you might eventually be able to understand how you can combat certain diseases caused by little faults in those forces. But that is all still in the future; for now we have demonstrated how we can measure these kinds of “unmeasurable” forces. Together with Dolf Weijers from the Biochemistry chair group, we are now working on applying this approach to cellular processes.’

Sprakel is also thinking about applications beyond the traditional Wageningen domain. He is working with the Technical University of Delft, for example, on further developing material for spaceships that repairs itself
after being damaged, just like the human skin. Although such materials are already being made in Delft, no one understands quite how they function. ‘Research is often largely a matter of trial and error. If we can see precisely how it works, then we can also develop and improve that kind of material with more precision.’

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During his stay there, Bush spent most of the time indoors. ‘In my job, being out in the field usually means meeting rooms, where we talk with various stakeholders such as small, local fisheries as well as large shipowners with boats that sail all around the world. For an interview for our study in the Pacific Ocean we went to see an importer in Brabant. More often than not, we don’t see a single tuna during the fieldwork,’ says Bush.

Tinned

There is a lot of pressure on tuna stocks. In market value, tuna fishing is one of the most important fisheries in the world. It includes different species within the mackerel family, including the yellow fin tuna, the blue fin tuna and the bigeye tuna. All these species are suffering from overfishing. The striped tuna, also known as true bonito or skipjack tuna, is doing a lot better, says Bush. ‘Tinned tuna is nearly always this species,’ he explains.

But when it is caught, threatened species of tuna or dolphins get caught as bycatch too. Especially when fishing boats use ring nets or fish aggregating devices (objects such as buoys floating on the surface to attract fish) rather than rods. Overfishing is a hard nut to crack. The Pacific Ocean, where about 60 percent of all tuna is caught, stretches over many thousands of kilometres and dozens of different countries, each with their own system of governance. Many of these local economies are largely dependent on their fisheries. ‘For some islands in the Pacific Ocean, 70 percent of the national revenue comes from tuna fisheries,’ says Bush. And some of the larger fisheries have nothing to gain from becoming more sustainable. ‘They have grown big and rich thanks to this fishing system.’

Not a purely ecological problem

Bush and his team are studying how agreements on sustainability are reached, and also what effect such agreements have. That approach deviates from the way most research groups outside Wageningen work. ‘They might study what the maximum is that fisheries can catch, and which fishing methods work best to avoid getting unwanted bycatch. But this is not purely an ecological problem. You might know which fishing methods are best, but if they are not implemented, you still can’t do much. There are people working here in Wageningen who know what works best ecologically, but we then also look at the policy implementation.’

He tries to get this approach across to his PhD students, most of whom come from the region. ‘After getting their PhDs they often carry on in their home countries, where they use their scientific approach to help make the fisheries more sustainable. Agnes Yeeting of the Kiribati archipelago is a nice example. She studied how the fisheries policy in the region has changed over the years. Now she is working for the Department of Fisheriesin Kiribati.’

Protecting tuna

Bush is seeing a shift from fisheries policy that is primarily determined by and between governments, to public-private initiatives in which environmental organizations, governments and fisheries enter into agreements to protect the tuna. This might take the form of agreements on better monitoring of how much fish is caught, or on establishing labels, such as the Marine Stewardship Council (MSC) set up by Unilever and the Worldwide Fund for Nature. This label, now found on almost all Dutch supermarket fish, is only granted if fisheries can prove that their fish stocks are being exploited sustainably.

BESTTuna

Bush is monitoring the developments in the fisheries policy very closely. He is also interested in how the various businesses in the supply chain can collaborate. In the BESTTuna research project, a study was done on the traceability of the tuna that is sustainably fished by small fisheries in Indonesia. ‘Previously it was not known exactly how much tuna these fisheries catch, or what species they catch. They are very small fisheries, often with just one boat, so it is very hard to obtain all that data. But between them, they do catch an awful lot of fish.’

Bush was convinced it ought to be possible to obtain data from these fisheries. ‘Their fresh fish can reach American supermarkets in no time, so the chain is capable of a complex level of organization. So why would it be impossible to produce the figures?’ The project started by persuading small fisheries to collaborate and provide data on the fish species they catch. ‘To persuade them, you have to be able to show that it is important for their long-term food security not to fish too much now. And that selling fish that they can prove was sustainably fished will generate a better income.’

The researchers developed a system in which the tuna that is caught by small fisheries can be traced throughout the entire chain. Through an app with a barcode, a consumer in, say, the United States can now see precisely where the tuna comes from. The system can also be used to check whether a fishery isn’t overfishing.

Meanwhile, there are several other systems in use which are intended to reduce the pressure on tuna stocks. A lot of fisheries in the Pacific Ocean work with a maximum number of days they are allowed to fish. These tradable fishing rights are linked to an information system with data about the size of the catch on a given day, and this is then used to improve the regulation of the fisheries.

That extra information brings dilemmas with it too: who does all that information that is collected belong to? On the one hand, it should all be freely available, Bush thinks, but data can also be misused. They could, for example, provide illegal fisheries with information about precisely where tuna can be found. And the information could affect the competition among companies. ‘I think this will be the big bone of contention in the future.’

Sustainable fishing

Bush nonetheless believes that publicprivate partnerships and better traceability can help make fisheries more sustainable. ‘Since fisheries and environmental organizations have been playing a big role themselves, the attitude of the governments has begun to change. At first countries mainly sought to hold on to their maximum catches. Now it is a much more dynamic process which also looks at how much tuna can be caught and by whom.’

Influential parties

As soon as fish stocks pick up again, those quota can be raised. That has already been done for the skipjack tuna, whose population is going up. ‘Through the partnership they are now studying whether it would be okay to catch more. I am very curious how that process will unfold and how the public-private partnerships will hold up against pressure from influential parties who want to see more fishing. It is clear that influential tuna importers are putting more pressure on the Marine Stewardship Council nowadays, rather than on a government.’

Bush works a lot with fisheries and environmental organizations in his research, partly so as to gather information. As a result, those partners get the chance to learn new things in turn. ‘Our scientific articles are read not only by scientists, but also particularly by environmental organizations. Our research is obviously taken into account when new policy is developed.’

Critical attitude

‘The stakeholders don’t always like what we do. For instance, we recently published an article about the effectiveness of a label aiming at preventing bycatch of dolphins. It turned out not be very effective.’ At the same time, that critical attitude ensures that the research gets taken seriously, Bush thinks. ‘What we do is valid and in the end that is appreciated. And if you notice that someone really isn’t happy with what you are doing, that also means your work is having an impact.’

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In spite of the head start the Netherlands has gained in Europe, we need to give serious thought to how we are going to collect and process waste in the coming years, says Ulphard Thoden van Velzen, who works at Wageningen Food & Biobased Research. He does research on the separate collection of plastic waste. Several analyses show that it is still only a small proportion of the packaging plastic that is recycled to make pure material for new packaging. ‘We are still a long way from the ideal, circular-economy picture,’ says Thoden van Velzen.

Mechanical recovery plants

In spite of waste sorting, valuable materials such as paper, cardboard, plastic and organic matter still end up in the non-recyclable household waste. So Dutch wasteprocessing companies such as Omrin, Attero, HVC, AEB and AVR have recently been installing mechanical recovery plants: huge halls with conveyor belts on which packaging foils, plastic bags and packaging are sorted into main categories: polyethylene (PE), polypropylene (PP), polyethylene terephthalate (PET), foils and mixed plastics. The plastics are usually shredded and washed to remove dirt. In the sorting and mechanical recycling process, unusable and polluted plastic is left over, and this is incinerated with the rest of the non-recyclable waste.

Plants in amongst the plastic

We also throw all sorts of things into the plastic container that do not belong there. ‘You find all kinds of non-plastic material in there: metal objects, a bit of glass, some textiles,’ says Thoden van Velzen. ‘Sometimes that category is small, and sometimes it is very big, even up to 30 percent and including house plants and wine bottles. Also, as well as packaging plastic there is non-packaging plastic such as toys and PVC building materials. This is often as much as 10 percent. What is more, some of the rest of the packaging plastic is not what is wanted, such as blister packs for medication, polystyrene, silicon filler packaging and bottles that have had chemical waste in them.’ Then there are food remains such as sour milk or orange juice stuck to the packaging. And to cap it all, one item of packaging is never made of just one kind of material: a bottle usually has a top and a label of a different kind of plastic.

Contamination

If you look at the kinds of plastic that are wanted for recycling – polyethylene, polypropylene and PET – less than 50 percent of the collected material is left once you’ve extracted all those contaminating materials, says Thoden van Velzen. Plastic packaging is a very different matter to glass in that respect, because plastic is relatively light compared to the contaminants. ‘In glass packaging, the weight of the labels, corks and food remains is relatively light. For plastic and drinks cartons, however, is it really problematic because it often doubles the gross weight of what you collect. That gives a contradiction between what a scientist measures and the official statistics based on gross collected weights.’

Contamination and combinations of types of plastic mean that a lot of effort needs to be made to process the waste into pure, clean material. ‘An overview of the whole system shows that 340 kilotons of new packaging plastic was marketed in the Netherlands in 2014. The plastic waste collected added up to 130 kilotons, mostly consisting of mixed plastic and foils. The proportion of pure recycled polyethylene, polypropylene and PET is small, while those are precisely what you really need for circular-economy recycling.’

Reasonable price

Thoden van Velzen’s research shows that the separate collection of plastics produced 9.1 million kilos of polypropylene, for example, as opposed to 35 million kilos of mixed plastic. ‘For companies that want to purchase recycled plastic, it is very difficult to obtain large quantities of recycled polyethylene, polypropylene or PET for a reasonable price,’ says the researcher.

Even if the packaging industry succeeds in sourcing clean recycled plastic, using it to package food is not always allowed, says chemical technologist Karin Molenveld, who does research on the processing of recycled plastics at Wageningen Food & Biobased Research. The regulations for food packaging are quite clear.

Nasty smells

‘Plastic is not allowed to contain any contaminants that could end up in food if they are in contact with it. In the recycling of household plastics, you often end up with an element of plastics not intended for contact with food. They can potentially contain nasty substances such as heavy metals from colourants. It’s very hard to get a grip on, because when you collect plastic, you get plastic of many different colours. The plastic ends up the same colour as the rubbish bin, and even smells like it. It soaks up the smell of rotting food, and you can still smell it even after it’s been processed into a new product.’ This smell can only be removed from the plastic with hot water and chemicals, but that is relatively expensive and not every recycling company does it.

The recycling of PET bottles with a deposit on them is an exception to the rule that recycling hardly produces any new food packaging. The collection and processing of these bottles are so well-organized that new PET bottles are made out of old ones. Recycled PET granules are heated to above 200 degrees in vacuum conditions to remove any potential contamination.

Sustainable substitute for tropical hardwood

Molenveld: ‘That treatment is specific to PET, and it means you can get rid of anything nasty. The structure of the plastic is repaired, making it suitable again for new food packaging.’ The chemical properties of plastics are key to what you can do with them after recycling, says Molenveld. Plastics such as polyethylene and polypropylene absorb grease and odours from waste more readily than PET does, limiting their usefulness for new packaging. Currently, the recycling of household plastics mainly produces mixed products which are processed into items such as sustainable substitutes for tropical hardwood in waterway bank shoring or scaffolding.

More decontaminated products can be used for rubbish bags and for the black buckets you can buy at a hardware store.

The limits to the scope for processing plastics into new products do not make recycling pointless, however. The requirements for recycled plastic for packaging items such as wall paint or compost are less strict that those for food. ‘But the plastic must still be pretty pure, otherwise you can’t process it,’ says Molenveld. ‘If there is too much of a different type of plastic in the mix, you get holes in a bottle or bucket. Actually there is not enough of that kind of high-quality recycled material on the market. We collect enormous volumes of it, but if you look closely, you can see that there is not much pure recyclate available.’

Another way of organizing the recycling of packaging material is to make use of biodegradable bioplastics. These are not made out of mineral oil, and the waste can go into a digester or a composter. The market for those kinds of plastics is not very big yet in the Netherlands, says Molenveld. ‘Maybe half a percent. One of the reasons is the low cost price of standard plastics made of oil.’

Biodegradable bags

‘Bioplastic tends to be much more expensive so the consumer has to be really committed to it. And for many consumers, plastic is just plastic,’ says the researcher. ‘There is a range of applications, such as packaging for organic vegetables, cups at festivals or pots for herb plants. The Coop recently introduced meat trays made of polylactic acid. Another application is the biodegradable bags used to collect organic household waste.’

Biodegradable plastic is a relatively new category of household waste, and it really belongs in a different recycling process: the compost heap. Molenveld: ‘It is actually quite possible for waste processors to select biodegradable plastic and put it into the composting process, but they would need sufficient quantities.’

Plastic cups

‘Composters are keen to dispose of biodegradable plastic cups at festivals, because they are easy to digest into biogas. But if households were to throw biodegradable plastic into the organic waste, the processors would be afraid of contamination with non-biodegradable plastic waste. That is already a problem now. For consumers it is not always clear what is allowed to go in the organic waste bin and what is not. The costs of sifting out contamination mount up because compost has to meet strict quality criteria.’

Besides plastic waste, our organic waste is collected in large quantities too. Digesting and composting offer ways of processing organic waste into biogas and compost. But these are quite low-value forms of recycling. Jeroen Hugenholz of Wageningen Food & Biobased Research is doing research with Spanish colleagues within the EU URBIOFIN project, to find out whether organic waste can be turned into more valuable materials by fermenting the waste using microorganisms.

This is based on the fact that, apart from water, the main constituent of organic waste is carbohydrates such as the woody fibres and cell walls in peel and other food and plant waste. The first step is to break down those carbohydrates into sugars by adding enzymes. ‘That mixture is then digested without oxygen, and in the process bacteria convert the sugars into short-chain fatty acids. At that point our technology for making bioplastics comes into play.’

Plastic from organic waste

In recent years, a lot of experience has been gained in Wageningen with making polyhydroxyalkanoate (PHA), a substance used by microorganisms for energy storage for times of shortage, but which also turns out to be a perfectly good biodegradable plastic in itself. Two microorganisms are used to do this. The first (Cryptococcus curvatus) feeds on short-chain fatty acids and turns them into long-chain fatty acids. The second microbe (Pseudomonas putida) works on long-chain fatty acids to make the bioplastic PHA, which can be purified later.

Hugenholz: ‘We know that we can convert more than half the carbon present in the organic waste into plastic. But that is based on ideal circumstances, and the composition of waste can change so you might not always achieve that. We want to investigate that further with this project.’

URBIOFIN has been up and running for a year now. Parts of the process are currently being studied in the lab. Larger scale tests with household waste are expected around 2020. Since the researchers are starting with unsorted Spanish waste, the circumstances will be far from ideal, says Hugenholz. ‘But if the technology development with this kind of waste is successful, there is a good chance you can also apply it in countries with a better organized waste-sorting system.’

Bio-etanol from waste

The sugars from household waste can also be converted into other resources, says Hugenholz. As an example, bio-ethanol is currently being made out of household waste on a small scale in Spain. ‘There is also a study going on here, in collaboration with a British consortium, on making butanol and propanol from household waste. These alcohols are of interest as biofuels, and as the basis for conversion into high-value raw materials for the chemical industry.’

Meanwhile, large quantities of household waste are being collected in separate, sorted categories. Molenveld: ‘There is increasing awareness of the benefits of waste-sorting, and increasing quantities of sorted waste are being collected. We are collecting more and more, but the system is not perfect yet. We must communicate about that honestly and openly, otherwise consumers will start wondering whether all their efforts are worthwhile.’

Design for recycling

Molenveld says one of the solutions starts at the source: design for recycling, which means avoiding combinations of diverse packaging materials that effectively obstruct recycling. The multi-layered foils used to package crisps, pre-baked bread and processed meats are especially difficult to deal with. Those layers can’t be separated later on, explains Molenveld.

Tricky combinations

‘Polypropylene, polyethylene and PET can easily be recycled separately, but as soon as they get mingled together it gets tricky. You can’t say: let’s just make packaging out of one type of plastic from now on. Because which one should that be? Each plastic has its own unique properties and materials are also chosen for transparency and moisture permeability.

There is a lot of talk of “design for recycling” but we are not seeing much of it in reality.’ Take cardboard packets of rice with a plastic window in them. If I see them I think: you can also pick up the box at home and feel how much there is still in it.’

It is time for a rethink, says Thoden van Velzen. ‘What are we aiming at? We can leave the waste processing system as it is, but then it will remain difficult for companies that want to purchase recycled inputs to find adequate supplies. We have mainly focused on quantity up to now, and the main achievement is that more sorted waste is being collected. Now it is time to work on the quality of the recycling system.’

Stricter sorting

This means, among other things, that waste collection companies need to check more stringently whether consumers are actually putting the correct materials in their plastic container. ‘Sorting companies should start sorting more strictly than they have been used to doing up to now. Recycling companies should make more effort to create better quality materials out of recycled plastics. And not least, all packaging companies must get serious about design for recycling.

There are a few small producers making a huge effort to develop ecologically sound, recycled packaging. And on the other hand, there are the importers for the large retail chains, for whom the design is of no interest because they want to sell a cheap mass product. We’ve still got a long way to go.’

www.wur.eu/wastetomaterials

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At least, that is what the start-up BunyaVax promises. This little company is a spinoff of Wageningen Bioveterinary Research (WBVR). When it was launched in 2017, a dream came true for virologist Jeroen Kortekaas. ‘This brings more dynamism to Lelystad. If you are not enterprising yourself, you miss out on knowledge about exactly what pharma companies want. Through BunyaVax we are learning what it takes to get a product, in our case vaccines, onto the market.’

Just a small piece of DNA is injected

Kortekaas, who is also professor by special appointment at Wageningen, is scientific director at the new company. Jochem Bossenbroek was appointed as CEO. BunyaVax does not have facilities of its own. Partly thanks to grants from the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO), the ministry of Economic Affairs and the EU, testing will start at the end of this year in the Lelystad laboratories with the aim of proving that the company really does have the technology to develop eff ective, safe vaccines fast. First for livestock, and then for people.

The classic method of vaccination is over two centuries old: an injection with a weak form of a virus. The virus proteins provoke an immune response in the body and the immune cells go on stand-by. If the actual virus gets into the body, the immune system is ready and knocks it on the head.

Kortekaas is working on an alternative approach. The idea is relatively simple: only a piece of genetic material (DNA or RNA) from the pathogen is injected. That piece of genetic material – at BunyaVax it is RNA – settles into the body’s cells, causing those cells to produce a virus protein themselves, which puts the immune system on alert.

Worldwide, this new approach has been attracting a lot of attention in recent years. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation invested tens of millions of euros in the German company CureVac, which uses this method to develop vaccines for diseases including flu and malaria. The key to this approach to vaccination is to really get the RNA of the pathogen into the body’s cells – which requires a delivery service of some kind. Each company looks for its own solution to this. Kortekaas uses a system found in nature: he works with ‘bunyaviruses’, which specialize in penetrating immune cells in mammals. The most promising candidate is the virus that causes Rift Valley Fever (RVF) in humans and ruminants.

Deactivating the dangerous virus

That might sound scary, but Kortekaas starts by deactivating the dangerous virus in the lab. Once injected into a subject, the virus does penetrate the body, but it cannot multiply there. What it does deliver, like an envelope, is a piece of the pathogen’s RNA, which the virologist has built in. Mice vaccinated in this way against a lethal form of influenza all survived an infection with the disease.

So the idea works, although it hasn’t been tested outside the lab yet. If the results are confirmed in a trial at the end of this year, in which pigs will be vaccinated against pig flu, commercial interest will be aroused, expects CEO Bossenbroek. ‘Then we’ll have delivered the proof of concept. And then, in early 2019, we can start talking to the big players.’

Vaccines for humans

To get vaccines on the market requires the help of venture capital and big pharma companies. In this case, we are not just talking about pigs and other farm animals. BunyaVax’s technology is most probably also suited to the development of human vaccines, a much more lucrative market.

‘Our strategy is first to develop vaccines for the veterinary market and later for human application too,’ says Bossenbroek. ‘That generates income for the company and at the same time, through the research on animals we build up a portfolio of data that we also need for the human application.’

The advantage of the BunyaVax technology is what Kortekaas and Bossenbroek call ‘plug and play’: swap a piece of RNA from one pathogen for that of another in a vaccine, and in no time you have a new vaccine. Proposed new legislation would seem to play into BunyaVax’s hand in this. Once a vaccine based on a bunyavirus has been passed by the licensing agencies as safe and efficacious, Bossenbroek expects that similar vaccines will be approved for marketing without much additional safety research. Ideal when an unexpectedepidemic threatens.

www.bunyavax.com

Background image: Shutterstock / Illustration: Steffie Padmos

The idea of returning came up last year after they got back in touch with Veronica, from Brazil, via Facebook. Veronica had helped them with their interviews. ‘We wanted to visit the people we worked with then, and we were curious about the changes of the past 30 years,’ says Inge. They went back to the village for a few days together with Veronica, who lives in a nearby town.

Reminiscing with the locals

‘It used to be accessible only via an unmade road of thick red clay. If it rained the village was cut off. The village square was bare then; now there’s a little park there. The school has been renovated and has a playground,’ says Inge. ‘And part of the road to the village has now been tarmacked. There are a lot of brick houses and the villagers have running water, electricity and even Wi-Fi.’

It was a warm reunion. ‘Somebody got his guitar out straightaway to make music. Older people still remembered us, “as holandesas”. They invited us in and were eager to have a chat. Back then we had no idea how much of an impression our visit made,’ says Inge. She and Andrea brought along photos from their earlier visit. Inge: ‘People loved that. They immediately started reminiscing and talking about the people in the photos.’

Someone with a pistol to his head

To find a good internship position, Andrea and Inge had written to various institutes in South America. In the end they got a letter back from CETESB, the government institute for Public Health and Environment in São Paulo, offering them the opportunity to conduct a broad comparative study of the differences in health between Apiaí Mirim, a village that lacked drinking water and sanitation, and Ferreira dos Matos, a village with better facilities.

The government was conducting a large-scale campaign to bring clean drinking water and sanitation to the countryside. The two students took a course in Portuguese and arrived in the big city of São Paulo at the beginning of 1987, just in time for the carnival.

‘It was our first experience of the Third World. It was overwhelming. There were slums, cardboard shacks under the bridges and a lot of drug addicts. We were walking down our street in the evening once when we saw someone being pushed up against a wall with a pistol to his head,’ recalls Inge. At the same time, there were gated communities with tall fences and security guards, and department stores that were so luxurious the students’ eyes were on stalks. What is more, São Paulo was extremely cosmopolitan with big Chinese and Italian neighbourhoods, for example. ‘And it is always party time: people are cheerful and positive, But you never know how they are really doing,’ adds Andrea.

Andrea and Inge spent most of their eight months in Brazil in São Paulo. The city hasn’t changed very much after 30 years. There are some cycle paths now, though. ‘We even went out cycling for a day. Thirty years ago that was unthinkable and deadly dangerous because of the traffic,’ says Inge.

Toilet paper, leaves or corn cobs

In Apiaí Mirim, the two friends interviewed the village’s 60 households. They asked how people were placed for work and income, and whether they could people read and write. They weighed children and enquired about people’s health. ‘Some questions were a bit out of the ordinary. For instance, we asked people how long they had had diarrhoea for and whether they used toilet paper, leaves or corn cobs to wipe themselves,’ laughs Inge. The students also looked at the sanitation and collected faeces samples that were examined in the lab at the regional health office for gut bacteria and parasites.

The second village, Ferreira dos Matos, was easily accessible and close to the city. There were far more brick houses and protected wells in the forest, as well as piped water and more toilets. Here the pair stayed with an equally hospitable host family, but this time without cockroaches in their room.

The final outcomes of their research were in line with expectations: the poorer quality drinking water supply in the poorer village had an impact on health. These villagers suffered more from gut parasites, for example. After eight months of research, Andrea and Inge travelled another two months through Peru, Bolivia and northeastern Brazil.

Wageningen was a candy store

Back in Wageningen, Inge and Andrea wrote their extensive final report in English and Portuguese. They had been so enthused by their time in Brazil that they both did a second internship in a developing country. This time alone. At that time, development cooperation was a major theme in Wageningen and the Brundtland Report of 1987 was an important source of inspiration. It related environmental pollution in the rich west to poverty in the countries of the south.

There was also a lot of interest in Wageningen in various emancipation movements, and the university gained a department of Women’s Studies. ‘Wageningen was like a great big candy store because of all the interesting courses and electives. And then on the initiative of students we also set up the course on the Environment and the Third World,’ explains Inge. ‘We took a whole lot of extra courses, just because we could and because we were interested. But of course we also took all the normal modules on water quality and purification, and on soil chemistry,’ adds Andrea.

Reforestation and traditional birth control

On her second internship, Andrea worked for the international environmental organization ELCI in Kenya, on the visibility of initiatives in the field of environment and development. There she met the famous environmental activist Wangari Maathai, an advocate of reforestation. Inge went to Zimbabwe, where she did research together with local women’s cooperatives on traditional birth control methods among Shona women.

Both women were keen to continue working in development but when they graduated in 1990, jobs were not growing on trees. Nevertheless, they both found work. Andrea became a project officer for the environment at Oxfam Novib in The Hague, and prepared for the Netherlands’ participation in the international conference on sustainable development in Rio de Janeiro in 1992. She then moved on to the then ministry of Housing, Spatial Planning and the Environment (VROM). ‘As a policymaker, I was involved on behalf of the ministry in UN negotiations about the environment and development, and that meant travelling all around the world.’

Inge travelled a lot too. She became a consultant and led research projects at WASTE, an organization that works on sanitation and waste processing in Africa, Latin America and Asia. In 2000, Inge too joined the same ministry as head of a programme in which she worked with municipalities and provinces on issues related to recycling, saving energy, looking after the environment, and corporate social responsibility.

She went on to become policy coordinator for international environmental policy, programme manager for sustainable development and in 2008, head of the Global department. She had a wide range of topics in her portfolio, from the green economy and the sustainable use of natural resources to plastic soup and waste treaties. She also coordinated international meetings and was a member of the delegation to Rio+20 in 2012. ‘That was a high point, the biggest ever UN conference on sustainable development.’

Learning humility in Utrecht

By then Andrea had left The Hague a long time ago. After she had her first baby she wanted to travel less. In 1998 she became the Clean and Green project leader in Utrecht, where she lives. Andrea: ‘That was a good place to learn humility. At VROM I met lots of young graduates. In Utrecht I worked with “ordinary people” on waste-sorting, green space, playgrounds and the irritations of urban life such as dog poo on the pavements.It is brilliant to work for the city where you live.’ After seven years she became clerk to the municipal council. And since 2013 she has been community coordinator for the city centre quarter.

She heads the neighbourhood office and tries to get the voices and initiatives of residents heard in the municipal organization. ‘Some situations are tricky, like when there are issues around long-term construction projects or the arrival and reception of refugees,’ says Andrea. ‘It’s about people’s personal experience and there are tensions between the perspectives of businesses, residents and visitors. There are lots of peoplefrom the development sector working in this field, and that is no coincidence. They have learned how to deal with conflicting stakeholder interests.’

‘Find your place’

In 2012, Inge too felt ready for a major change of focus. She shifted her attention to water safety and became the head of the water policy programming department at the ministry of Infrastructure and Water Management, as VROM is called nowadays. ‘From a globe-trotting job to “Find your place” in the Netherlands.’ I get to go to the funniest places sometimes, for occasions like the official handover of a reinforced dyke,’ says Inge. ‘This is a much more technical world. But thanks to Wageningen, I have a broad field of vision. I can easily switch focus and I can make connections between different worlds.’

The interests of the community

The interests of the community are the common thread running through both women’s choices in their studies and their careers. ‘We both want to contribute to society. I am a tree-hugger in disguise, an idealist,’ explains Andrea. The youngest of her three children has decided to study Soil, Water and Atmosphere in Wageningen.

‘Keeping this line of work going,’ she says with satisfaction. Inge thinks she might want to work overseas again. ‘My children are 16 and 18 now. I don’t rule out the option of working abroad again for a few years at an embassy. In São Paolo, perhaps, where it all started with our internship. I think that would be fantastic. My husband is now professor of Climate Change in Nijmegen, and the idea appeals to him too.’

Background image: Marcel van den Bergh

This Master’s programme, launched in 2017, focuses on urban issues including the climate change-related problem of flooding. In another 30 years’ time, about 70 percent of the world’s population will be urban: a shift that brings logistical and environmental challenges in its wake. How can we ensure, for example, that city dwellers have a pleasant, safe habitat, a secure food supply and a good waste disposal system?

Like the Highline in New York

In Australia, the students were put up on the campus of the University of Technology in Sydney (UTS), where they brainstormed about water management and mobility in the city. Raaijmakers: ‘We worked in small groups, each group looking at a different suburb and pondering what it should look like in three months, in three years and in 30 years. A suburb is part of a larger whole, of course, so we had to coordinate our ideas with the other groups.’

‘In our suburb, for example, there are lots of high-rise apartment blocks. We thought about how you can make sure the area is accessible to residents. We think more tram and metro networks are needed to achieve that. We also had the idea of turning the raised highway that crosses Sydney into a kind of park for cyclists and walkers, like the Highline in New York.’

The Master’s programme is run jointly by Wageningen University & Research, Delft University of Technology and the Amsterdam Institute for Advanced Metropolitan Solutions. The first cohort of 18 students is a mixed group with backgrounds ranging from engineering to nutrition and health. According to programme director Erik Heijmans, this is the strength of the Master’s. ‘Students work together and pool the knowledge they bring in from their own fields of expertise. We’re not interested in theory alone but above all in how you put that theoretical knowledge into practice.’

City as living lab

Most of the projects MADE students work on are located a bit closer to home, in Amsterdam. ‘That is a well-organized city that is still growing. That poses new challenges too,’ says Heijmans. ‘The city is a living lab in which students can test their ideas in practice straightaway.’

‘I find it interesting to figure out how to build on a circular-economy principle, using “urban mining”, for example,’ says student Toni Kuhlmann. ‘In this approach you reuse as much material as possible from buildings under demolition.’ An environmentally friendly neighbourhood is going up, for instance, at the location of the former Bijlmer jail, giving materials from the demolished jail a second life. ‘If you take the windows out carefully, you can use the glass again,’ explains Kuhlmann. And copper from old gas and water pipes can be reused in electronics.

Kuhlmann first did a Bachelor’s in Future Planet Studies at the University of Amsterdam. ‘I am interested in sustainability in cities.’ Raaijmakers started on the Master’s after her Bachelor’s in Landscape Architecture at Wageningen. ‘I didn’t want to work exclusively on design, but much more on practical applications.’

‘There are 18 students in our year, so we soon formed a close-knit group. It is nice that everyone has a different background because you learn new ways of looking at things. As a landscape architect I look mainly at the connections between a system and the landscape. When it rains, I want to know where the water goes and how it is drained away. An industrial designer, on the other hand, is far more interested in knowing all about the functionality of the materials that drainage system is made of.’

www.wur.eu/made

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‘Most of the plantation workers are illegal Haitian immigrants who can be deported at any time. Thanks to fair trade, they earn just that little bit more on the plantations than they can in, say, construction work.’ More than three quarters of the bananas exported by the Dominican Republic are certified as organic or fair trade, and most of these are shipped to Europe.

The basis for suitable measures

The trade benefits for export to the EU that the Dominican Republic now enjoys will end in 2020. ‘To estimate the impact of that and to forestall a collapse of sustainable banana cultivation, the EU asked for a country analysis. I expect our report will provide the basis for putting the right measures in place. One thing is certain: as long as retailers impose such low prices, the sector will never become truly sustainable.’

info: fedes.vanrijn@wur.nl

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