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Mars has supported recommendations that suggest people should limit the consumption of added sugars to no more than 10% of their daily caloric intake. The company also voiced support of a government proposal to include an added sugars declaration in the Nutritional Facts on all applicable food packaging.

Could the health and environmental benefits of taxes on sugary drinks and carbon-intensive foods outweigh the out-of-pocket costs? New research from Oxford University and the University of Reading suggests that is indeed the case. A study found that a combination of a sugar tax on soft drinks and a food-based carbon tax in the United Kingdom could raise £3.6 billion in revenue, reduce carbon emissions by 19 million tonnes, and increase life expectancy.

The team, at the Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia (IIT) in Genoa, is using coffee grounds to clean water, turning the grounds into a foam that can remove heavy metals like mercury. "We actually take a waste and give it a second life," says materials scientist Despina Fragouli. Her team took spent coffee grounds from IIT's cafeteria, dried and ground them to make the particles smaller. They then mixed the grounds with some silicon and sugar. Once hardened, they dipped it in water to melt away the sugar, which leaves behind a foam-like material.

General Mills now sources 69% of its top ten priority ingredients from sustainable sources, the company announced this week. The most significant process has been made toward palm oil (100%), fiber packaging (99%) and sugar beets, sugar cane and oats (50% or more). General Mills says it has taken several concrete … Read more »

The world's third largest ice cream manufacturer R&R Ice Cream collaborated with Iona Capital and Veolia to convert inedible ice cream waste - the sugar, fat, and protein left behind after cleaning - into biogas that generates power for the UK National Grid. The company uses an anaerobic digestion facility to convert the ice cream waste into biogas.

Renewable diesel fuel blend made from sugar did not impact ship engine performance or operation, according to a study by the Maritime Administration.

From tomatoes and paper pulp to lignin and sugar beets, it seems like researchers played with just about every fauna they could find in the search for the next great bioplastic feedstock this year.

Research published in the American Journal of Primatology earlier this month finds that the overall Western Chimpanzee population declined by six percent annually between 1990 and 2014, a total decline of 80.2 percent. The main threats to the Western Chimpanzee are almost all man-made. Habitat loss and fragmentation driven by slash-and-burn agriculture, industrial agriculture (including deforestation for oil palm plantations as well as eucalyptus, rubber, and sugar cane developments), and extractive industries like logging, mining, and oil top the list. In response to the finding that the Western Chimpanzee population has dropped so precipitously in less than three decades, the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) elevated the subspecies' status to Critically Endangered on its Red List of Threatened Species.

Bacardi is planning to source 40% of the sugarcane it uses to brew its rum from sustainable sources by 2017, and 100% by 2022. The company also announced plans to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions and the use of packaging and water