More sustainable vegetable oil: Balancing productivity with carbon storage opportunities

Emerging bio-capture strategies for greenhouse gas reduction: Navigating challenges towards carbon neutrality

Greenhouse gas emissions are significantly contributing to climate change, posing one of the serious threats to our planet. Addressing these emissions urgently is imperative to prevent irreversible planetary changes. One effective long-term mitigation strategy is achieving carbon neutrality. Although numerous countries aim for carbon neutrality by 2050, only a few are on track to realize this ambition. Existing technological solutions, including chemical absorption, cryogenic separation, and membrane separation, are available but tend to be costly and time intensive. Bio-capture methods present a promising opportunity in greenhouse gas mitigation research. Recent developments in biotechnology for capturing greenhouse gases have demonstrated both effectiveness and long-term benefits. This review emphasizes the recent advancements in bio-capture techniques, showcasing them as dependable and economical solutions for carbon neutrality. The article briefly outlines various bio-capture methods and underscores their potential for industrial application. Moreover, it investigates into the challenges faced when integrating bio-capture with carbon capture and storage technology. The study concludes by exploring the recent trends and prospective enhancements in ecosystem revitalization and industrial decarbonization through green conversion techniques, reinforcing the path towards carbon neutrality.

Eco-Friendly and High-Performance Bio-Polyurethane Adhesives from Vegetable Oils: A Review

Current petrochemical-based adhesives adversely affect the environment through substantial volatile organic compound (VOC) emissions during production, contributing to air pollution and climate change. In contrast, vegetable oils extracted from bio-resources provide a compelling alternative owing to their renewability, abundance, and compatibility with adhesive formulation chemistry. This review aimed to critically examine and synthesize the existing scholarly literature on environmentally friendly, sustainable, and high-performance polyurethane adhesives (PUAs) developed from vegetable oils. The use of PUAs derived from vegetable oils promises to provide a long-term replacement while simultaneously maintaining or improving adhesive properties. This quality renders these adhesives appropriate for widespread use in various sectors, including construction, automotive manufacturing, packaging, textile, and footwear industries. This review intended to perform a comprehensive assessment and integration of the existing research, thereby identifying the raw materials, strengths, weaknesses, and gaps in knowledge concerning vegetable oil-based PUAs. In doing so, it responded to these gaps and proposes potential avenues for future research. Therefore, this review accomplishes more than merely evaluating the existing research; it fosters the advancement of greener PUA technologies by identifying areas for improvement and innovation towards more sustainable industrial practices by showcasing vegetable oil-based PUAs as viable, high-performance alternatives to their petroleum-based counterparts.

CARM30: China annual rapeseed maps at 30 m spatial resolution from 2000 to 2022 using multi-source data

Rapeseed is a critical cash crop globally, and understanding its distribution can assist in refined agricultural management, ensuring a sustainable vegetable oil supply, and informing government decisions. China is the leading consumer and third-largest producer of rapeseed. However, there is a lack of widely available, long-term, and large-scale remotely sensed maps on rapeseed cultivation in China. Here this study utilizes multi-source data such as satellite images, GLDAS environmental variables, land cover maps, and terrain data to create the China annual rapeseed maps at 30 m spatial resolution from 2000 to 2022 (CARM30). Our product was validated using independent samples and showed average F1 scores of 0.869 and 0.971 for winter and spring rapeseed. The CARM30 has high spatial consistency with existing 10 m and 20 m rapeseed maps. Additionally, the CARM30-derived rapeseed planted area was significantly correlated with agricultural statistics (R2 = 0.65-0.86; p < 0.001). The obtained rapeseed distribution information can serve as a reference for stakeholders such as farmers, scientific communities, and decision-makers.

Deforestation and greenhouse gas emissions could arise when replacing palm oil with other vegetable oils

Oil crops are among the main drivers of global land use changes. Palm oil is possibly the most criticized, as a driver of primary tropical forests loss. This has generated two different reactions in its use in various sectors (e.g., food, feed, biodiesel, surfactant applications, etc.): from one side there is a growing claim for deforestation-free palm oil, whereas on the other side the attention raised towards other vegetable oils as possible substitutes, such as soybean, rapeseed and sunflower oil. We assess potential land use changes and consequent greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions for switching from palm oil to other oils and compare this solution to deforestation-free palm oils. We consider three scenarios of 25 %, 50 % and 100 % palm oil replacement in the eight major oil crop producing countries. Total GHG emissions account for anthropogenic emissions generated along the life cycle of the field production process and potential forest carbon stock losses from land use change for oil crops expansion. Replacing palm oil with other oils would have a worthless effect in terms of global emissions reduction since GHG emissions remain approximatively stable across the three scenarios, whereas it would produce a deforestation increase of 28.2 to 51.9 Mha worldwide (or 7 to 21.5 Mha if excluding the unlikely deforestation in USA, Russia, Ukraine and the offset deforestation in China, India). Conversely, if the global palm oil production becomes deforestation-free, its GHG emissions would be reduced by 92 %, switching from the current 371 to 29 Mt CO2eq per year. Although highlighting the historical unsustainability of oil palm plantations, results show that replacing them with other oil crops almost never represents a more sustainable solution, thus potentially questioning sustainability claims of palm oil free products with respect to deforestation-free palm oil.