Amsterdam has set itself and halving its use of virgin materials by 2030. Behind those lofty aims is a host of projects accelerating the transition to a more environmentally sound city – something, perhaps, more places can learn from.

To fulfil its material wants and needs, humanity currently uses more than 100 billion tonnes of materials – metals, plastics, stone and more. Only about 30 per cent of that makes up anything of any permanence; the rest is burned or thrown away to rot in landfill. It’s an awful state of affairs, and many advocate switching as fast as we can to a circular economy, in which materials are reused in perpetuity.

The trouble is, this transition requires rethinking and rewiring the systems we use to make and maintain just about everything. Overwhelming? Just a bit. But the problem is increasingly being broken down into city-sized chunks. The world’s urban centres, after all, consume about 75 per cent of all materials and are responsible for around half of carbon emissions.

To find out more, Â鶹´«Ă˝ paid a visit to Amsterdam and, in partnership with researchers from the , explored the work going on there – and what it can teach us about circularity.

We have corrected this video to properly identify spokesperson Sacha Stolp, director of innovation for futureproof assets for the City of Amsterdam.

A waterproof, plant-based material that degrades quickly in the ocean could offer a sustainable alternative to single-use plastics in cups and straws.

Transparent paperboard is, like cellophane, made from cellulose, the molecule that makes up plant cell walls. Because of the coagulant chemicals used in cellophane’s production, it hadn’t been possible until now to make it stiff, limiting it to applications such as food packaging.

at the Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology in Yokosuka and his colleagues discovered that when cellulose is treated with a solution of lithium bromide, it doesn’t require a coagulant – it can simply be left to dry instead.

“We have now developed a regenerated cellulose material from this solvent system that is not only shapeable but also has the potential to serve as a sustainable alternative to conventional plastics,” says Isobe.

The researchers found that a cup made of transparent paperboard can hold just-boiled water with almost no leakage for well over 3 hours. When they added a coating made from a plant-derived fatty acid salt, the cup became completely waterproof.

The material can be made from both recycled and upcycled cellulose products such as recovered clothing. Isobe and his colleagues also tested how the material breaks down in the ocean and found that it completely degraded in 300 days in the deep sea and more quickly at shallower depths.

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Ěýat the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology in Australia says having a paper-based alternative to plastic is “not a bad thing”, but she has some reservations about this approach to tackling the waste issue.

“I would say that there should be an objection to using anything single-use unless it’s really required by people or groups that really need single-use disposable materials – for example, the medical industry,” she says.

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