The first conference Sensor-Based Sorting & Control took place in 2004. Since then it was organized every two years and stands out because of its internationality. In 2018, 150 people from 24 different countries participated. The ninth expert conference Sensor-Based Sorting & Control takes place from April 13 to 14, 2022 in Aachen.

State of Vanuatu, a small archipelago in the Pacific Ocean, with a population of 300,000 spread across 65 islands, is one of the first in the world to put into effect the single-use plastic ban since January 2018. This includes non-biodegradable plastic such as bags and polystyrene containers. Furthermore, they also proposed a ban on disposable nappies. In 2019, the state of Vanuatu went further with banning other single-use plastic items such as plates, cups, stirrers, food containers and egg cartons.

As of January 01, 2021, stricter regulations apply to plastic waste exports from the EU. Unsorted or contaminated plastic mixtures may no longer be traded inter-nationally. The reason for this is that this waste is difficult to recycle and thus often ends up illegally in the environment. Therefore, only clean and well-sorted plastic waste may be traded.

On 18 March, a meeting of the EU environment ministers took place. Among other things, the EU Battery Regulation was discussed. Accordingly, the new EU Battery Regulation - as part of the European Green Deal - is supposed to include the environmental and social impacts of batteries throughout the entire product life cycle.

In the course of implementing the circular economy package of the European Union, the Waste Framework Directive was amended recently. Textiles are no longer the poor relation of waste management but have come to the fore.

Hungarian municipal solid wastes (MSW) management has developed tremendously over the past 15 years. More than 3,000 landfills and dumps had been closed, just to mention one improvement. However, still, lots of work is necessary to accomplish the EU’s ambitious aim of decreasing landfilling and increasing recycling and composting.

Today, the blending of materials within textiles is an asset in the design of protective clothing and various technical applications, but material mixes and blends also found their way into retail trade. The rise in end-of-life items is thus putting pressure on waste management to develop suitable recycling processes. Still, in the textile sector, waste prevention claimed by policy seems to be a pious wish.

The reliable estimates are essential to developing measures to reduce plastic pollution and to make successes measurable and visible. For this reason, the cross-border project "PlasticFreeDanube" (PFD), which is co-financed by the European Regional Development Fund within the framework of Interreg Slovakia-Austria, aims to gain new knowledge on this topic for the Danube.

The EU has established concrete recycling targets for packaging waste for 2025 and 2030. Furthermore, the methodology for calculating the corresponding recycling rates has been amended. The new and stricter calculation methodology will potentially lead to decreases of the current rates. This will be particularly the case for plastic packaging, where denkstatt calculated a gap far above 10 % compared to smaller decreases (> 2 %) to be expected for glass or steel packaging.

Based on a longitudinal case study (the UniNEtZ project in Austria), which includes a multi-stakeholder involvement, we investigate the process of developing CE policies for the Austrian Federal Government from an SDG perspective. Within this context, the main research question is how multi-stakeholder processes can enable the development of CE policy options. The study thus contributes to providing a structured approach of how different stake-holders from academia, industry, research funding agencies and government collaborate, how knowledge is created and transferred within this multi-stakeholder process, and what outputs, outcomes and impacts can be realized at the national level in the context of developing CE policies using an SDG framework.

The FH Campus Wien Circular Packaging Design Guideline provide recommendations for circular design for the whole supply chain. Circular design is a necessary prerequisite to achieve the goals of the European Circular Economy Package which requires full recyclability of packaging by 2030. Circular packaging should re-duce resource consumption and environmental impacts of packaging. The assessment of packaging sustainability requires the calculation of direct and indirect environmental impacts and circularity at the same time. A method for holistic sustainability assessment of packaging has been proposed by FH Campus Wien and developed in an ECR-working group (Efficient Consumer Response) with the participation of a number of companies along the whole supply chain (brand owners, retailers, packaging manufacturers and packaging systems).

We are pleased to announce the signing of a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) between the Global WtERT Council (GWC), and the Research Institute for Solar Energy and new Energies (IRESEN), Morocco’s national Institute for Solar Energy and Renewable Energy. www.iresen.org

San Francisco plans to become zero waste city by 2020, which is a pretty ambitious but awesome goal.

A simple experiment has been developed to demonstrate the global warming potential of carbon dioxide (CO2) gas in the Earth's atmosphere. A miniature electric resistance heating element was placed inside an inflatable balloon. The balloon was filled with either air or CO2. Whereas the CO2 partial pressure on the earth's atmosphere is approximately 4 × 10−4 atm, in this experiment, a high partial pressure of CO2 (1 atm) was used to compensate for the short radiation absorption path in the balloon. The element was heated to approximately 50°C, the power was then switched off and the element's cooling trends in air and in CO2 were monitored. It took a longer time to cool the heating element back to ambient temperature in CO2 than in air. It also took longer times to cool the element in larger size balloons and in pressurized balloons when they were filled with CO2. To the contrary, the balloon size or pressure made no difference when the balloons were filled with air. A simple mathematical model was developed, and it confirmed that the radiative heat loss from the element decreased significantly in CO2. This investigation showed that the cooling rate of an object, with surface temperature akin to temperatures found on Earth, is reduced in a CO2-rich atmosphere because of the concomitant lower heat loss to its environment.