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After frying frites, bitterballen, churros or arancini, many people don’t think twice about disposing of used cooking oil. Yet one litre of waste oil can contaminate one million litres of water, according to the European Commission. At Cargill’s facility in the port of Ghent, Belgium, used cooking oil and other residual oils and fats are treated as raw materials, cleaned and converted into biodiesel for trucks and ships. This puts circularity into practice on an industrial scale at one of Europe’s largest facilities of its kind. Since production began, Ghent’s biodiesel is estimated to have reduced greenhouse gas emissions by 1,188,000 tonnes compared with fossil diesel, equivalent to taking about 550,000 cars off the road for a year. Read the full story on Invested in Europe.

Meta’s open-source Canopy Height Maps helped the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre improve its 2020 Global Forest Cover map, demonstrating how artificial intelligence can strengthen Europe’s ability to monitor forests and advance climate and biodiversity goals. Developed with the World Resources Institute, the maps use Meta’s DINO self-supervised computer vision model to estimate tree height from satellite imagery. This helped researchers apply the five-metre threshold used in many international forest definitions and better distinguish forests from other tree-covered land, including agricultural tree crops. The resulting product, available through the EU Forest Observatory, provides one of the most comprehensive open views of global forest cover. Read more on Invested in Europe.

Together with nine other associations, AmCham EU has signed a joint statement on the evaluation of the Single-Use Plastic Directive (SUPD), calling on EU institutions to avoid reopening the Directive. A revision at this stage would create uncertainty for operators and could also increase costs and deepen fragmentation across the Single Market. Several SUPD provisions are not yet in place. Data on implementation remain limited, making it too early to assess whether the Directive is meeting its objectives. The statement also underlines the need to address gaps in transposition and enforcement. It warns against overlaps with EU legislation such as the Ecodesign Regulation, the Packaging and Packaging Waste Regulation and the Circular Economy Act. Learn how the EU can support certainty and the Single Market in the joint statement.