The Design Museum has announced a major new exhibition about waste and design’s role in both creating and reducing it. Waste Age will open in October 2021. “We live in the age of waste. Design helped create the problem, but could it be crucial in solving it?” The museum asks. The exhibition will help visitors to “Discover how the production of waste has escalated since the mid-twentieth century and face the epic scale of this man-made crisis through immersive installations.” It will also “explore imaginative new approaches and ingenious new materials that will help shape a cleaner future and discover how you can play your part in ending the waste age.” More here

The FT reports on “gadgets that give back”. The story looks at various efforts to both reuse old tech and to harness the power of existing appliances in the home, such as The Eos Bioreactor which uses algae to capture and contain excess CO2. Among the schemes mentioned is The Turing Trust, set up by Alan Turing’s great-nephew James to reuse computers to teach IT skills in Africa. Story here

Concerned about greenwashing? Sophie Marjanac of ClientEarth, which brought a complaint against BP for its ‘Possibilities Everywhere: Keep Advancing’ advertising campaign last year, explains why greenwashing is so prevalent, how to spot it and why its calling for health-warning style messages on fossil fuel company advertising in this interview

After 70 years, IKEA has announced that it will no longer be printing its catalogue, citing its customers switch to online platforms for viewing products. The first catalogue came out in 1951 and had a print run of 285,000 copies. It reached its peak in 2016 when 200 million copies were printed in 69 different versions and 32 languages. Full details here

The UK has opened its first all-electric car charging forecourt. The installation, at Braintree in Essex, is operated by Gridserve which aims to have 100 such sites up and running within the next five years. Story here

Coca-Cola, Pepsi and Nestlé have  been named as the world’s top plastic polluters for the third year in a row. Break Free From Plastic’s annual audit found that Coke’s bottles were the most frequently found discarded on beaches, rivers, parks and other litter sites in 51 of 55 nations surveyed. Single-use sachets were the most commonly found type of item, followed by cigarette butts, then plastic bottles. Story here

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