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The 52:52:52 project, launching both on this site and on social media in early 2024 will help you address 52 issues with 52 responses over 52 weeks.

A Mundane Comedy is Dominic Kelleher's new book, which will be published in mid 2024. The introduction is available here and further extracts will appear on this site and on social media in the coming months.

This site addresses what's changing, in our own lives, in our organisations, and in wider society. You'll learn about key changes across more than 150 areas, ranging from ageing and time, through nature and animals, to kindness and love...and very much else inbetween.

Halcyon's aim is to help you reflect on how you can better deal with related change in your own life.

What's Changing? - Regeneration

Regeneration

 

Please see below recent regeneration-related change.

 

See also:

 

January 2024

  • Over the past 30 years, the oldest and thickest parts of Arctic ice have shrunk by 95%. Ramifications are widespread: ice is crucial for reflecting heat back into the atmosphere, so if it melts, temperatures rise. Melting ice also contributes to rising sea levels. The ice is critical not just for its impact on climate change, but also for communities in the region. Roughly four million people live in the Arctic and rely on it for fishing, hunting and transportation. Preventing emissions from entering the atmosphere helps slow melting, but some companies are taking a more direct approach. Start-up Real Ice, which took part in a UN “for Tomorrow” accelerator, is working on technology that it says could refreeze parts of the Arctic ice and boost its thickness.
  • The leaders of regenerative companies are rethinking business from the ground up, challenging the notion of profit-making as the corporation’s primary purpose. Regenerative entrepreneurs are tackling global problems such as soil quality, healthcare access and renewable energy.

 

December 2023

 

July 2023

 

May 2023

 

February 2023

  • Roughly 1.3 billion tons of the world's food is lost or discarded each year, but a startup wants to make use of the scraps, The Verge reported. Mill Industries aims to keep food out of landfills through a membership service involving a high-tech trash bin that turns waste into reusable grounds.

 

December 2022

 

November 2022

  • Driven by customers, activist investors, governments, and their own values, companies are increasingly looking to make a more positive impact on the environment by adopting a sustainability focus, including focusing on the emerging bio-economy, which focuses on using biological (non-fossil) resources, waste streams, and manufacturing by-products, often combined with a circular, whole-life-cycle product perspective. This movement is enabled by new materials technologies and processes that replace fossil-based ingredients with bio-based alternatives from the agriculture, forestry, and marine industries.
  • Supermarkets usually have bread left over at the end of the day. In Belgium, organic retailer Bio-Planet is helping save those loaves from waste streams by rerouting them to a local mushroom farmerECLO picks up bread from Bio-Planet stores and mixes it with sawdust to create a growing medium. That substrate is packed into bags and pasteurised, after which mycelium is added and mushrooms start growing. After four to twelve weeks, ECLO harvests organic eryngii and nameko mushrooms, which are then sold at all of Bio-Planet's stores. The process also uses brewing remnants from two breweries in Brussels. In 2021, 61% of the grower's mushroom substrates included 'waste' material.
  • Researchers discovered that mycelium skins could replace the hard-to-recycle plastic substrate materials found in computer chips, potentially reducing the huge volume of e-waste.

 

October 2022

 

September 2022

 

August 2022

  • The founder of an investment ban said that claims to sustainability already put companies behind the curve. To “sustain” suggests we benchmark where we are and keep things at that level, but solving the planet’s real and pressing issues won’t be achieved by sustaining anything. Rather, it requires a whole new approach, driven by investment into “regenerative,” rather than sustainable, businesses, such as in the agriculture industry.

 

July 2022

  • Liam Heneghan, is professor of environmental science and studies at DePaul University in Chicago, has argued in favour of "restoration ecology": where ecosystems have been degraded because of human activity - including an overexploitation of useful species, invasion by exotic pests, erosion of soils, pollution from excessive nutrients, overgrazing by animals, and so on - restoration promises to reverse the damage and give these systems new life. Humans’ dubious achievement is to have greatly accelerated the wreckage of nature, thereby making what seemed so dependably durable tragically transient. Surely, believes Heneghan, we deserve a science and practice of nature conservation commensurate with the scale of the problem
  • Until now, most dead solar panels just got shredded or thrown into a landfill. The economics didn't come out in recycling’s favour. The value one could generate from a salvaged panel hadn’t been enough to make up for the cost of transporting and recycling it. However, that’s on track to change, according to analysis by research firm Rystad Energy, which forecast that expects the value of recyclable materials from solar panels to grow exponentially over the next several years, to $2.7 billion in 2030 from just $170 million this year..
  • Outdoor brand Patagonia has long offered repairs. Its repair centre in Nevada was the largest apparel-mending facility in the US, while a network of fixers in Europe extend the life of around 1,000 garments every month. In 2022 Patagonia also opened a mending location in Amsterdam: the United Repair Center. What was novel about this hub was the 'united' part - in addition to Patagonia, other brands were encouraged to join in, making it easier for them to offer repair services to their own customers. The centre also launched a course to train 300 students as certified textile repair technicians over the next few years, intending to grow its capacity to mend up to 300.000 garments annually.

 

June 2022

 

May 2022

 

April 2022

  • The RSA, which has been at the forefront of social impact for over 260 years, from championing early smokeless combustion technology to hosting the influential Food, Farming and Countryside Commission, argued that the future doesn’t just happen, it’s up to us to create it. As we face the challenges of climate change, inequality and environmental degradation, we know to simply sustain is not enough and we should aim for a world where people and communities harness their potential to be sources of health and regeneration for all life on earth
  • A wildflower that was thought to be extinct in Ecuador has been spotted for the first time in 40 years. The flower, Gasteranthus extincus, was believed to have been eradicated as a result of the government’s aggressive deforestation efforts, which partly aim to create more space for farming.
  • Austrian residents now only pay half of the costs for getting electronic devices repairedReparaturbonus is a scheme introduced by the Ministry of Climate Action and Energy. It subsidises repair costs for everything from tea kettles to washing machines and laptops to e-bikes - half of the total expenses, up to 200 € device. People can request a voucher online and redeem it with a participating repair service provider, who then claims 50% of the total costs directly from the government. To avoid stockpiling, vouchers are valid for three weeks after they're issued. As soon as someone redeems their first voucher, they can request another.
  • There is an abundance of alternative fabrics to be used in fashion, including algae, which could revolutionise how fabric is created. Algae-based fabric creators are also looking to use it as an air purifier. Meanwhile, Mylo and Adidas partnered in 2021 to make the first mushroom leather-based shoe. Lululemon also worked with Mylo to create the first mushroom leather-based yoga mat.
  • As we shift to a bio-based rather than fossil-fuel-based economy, seaweed could provide a lot of the compounds we need. Seaweed plantations are beginning to pop up all along Europe’s Atlantic and North Sea coasts. 
  • While a complete biological replacement tooth might be some ways off, we may in the shorter term see successes in regenerating dental pulp or dentine, as stem-cell driven regenerative dentistry evolves.  .

 

March 2022

  • Transitioning to regenerative agriculture is a massive undertaking that requires shifts in behaviour and investment from all actors connected to the agriculture system – from farming communities to retailers and brands. Harnessing early momentum around regenerative agriculture into meaningful impact requires rapid translation and learning across diverse environments and markets, between scales and regional contexts. While each regenerative farm has a unique soil, climate and culture, there are shared barriers to the transition, from perverse incentives to lack of pathways to market in countries like the US.

 

February 2022

 

January 2022

  • A Forbes article argued that, whereas a sustainable firm seeks merely to reduce its ecological footprint, a regenerative company seeks to increase its socio-ecological handprint—as Harvard professor Greg Norris puts it—by restoring the health of individuals, communities and the planet. In doing so, regenerative businesses can achieve greater financial performance and impact than their sustainability-focused peers. 
  • According to a study by ReGenFriends nearly 80% US consumers prefer “regenerative” brands to “sustainable” brands (they find the term “sustainable” too passive).
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