Future Green 5 Must Reads

Hey there sustainable food advocates – a huge thank you to all the experts, our co-facilitator, and all the attendees at our showpiece event UnConference 3.0 – Our Food Our Future: Innovative Solutions in Action, last Friday, 21st March! Even if you couldn’t make it this time, the great news is that the insights shared, the connections made, and the things learned – on topics including AI’s power to advance sustainability in the food sector – will multiply across the community at large, until the next edition. By then, there’ll be a whole load of new advances to discuss!

Just before UnConference 3.0, I was thrilled to be recognised in the Harper’s Bazaar Visionary Women Awards! It was presented at the ‘BAZAAR at Work Summit 2025 – Connecting Visionary Women’, held at The Fullerton Ocean Park Hotel in Hong Kong on 19th March. This award isn’t just for me, it’s for the entire Future Green community, and all the change makers working towards a more sustainable future!

The sustainability challenge never stops rolling, and neither do we. So join us on 10th April for our breakfast-session Roundtable With Belu, to learn and share insights on best-in-class food-sector and workplace practices for one of the world’s key recyclable commodities: water!

​
🤖 80: the number of change makers working either in food and drink-related businesses, NGOs, or governmental bodies, that attended our UnConference 3.0, highlighting the role of AI in pushing food-system improvements.

💦 Water is the ultimate recycled product. The same can’t be said for its packaging. What happens to it before, and up to the time it gets to your colleagues’ or customers’ cups, can become sweet spots in your organisation’s sustainability effort.

🥤 Reusable cup schemes work if there’s a network of merchants to receive them. A U.S. study including major coffee and fast food chains, showed 79% of cups returned, were dropped off somewhere other than the place the drink was purchased.

🏷️ 50.6%: proportion of over 16s in the European Union that were overweight in 2022, according to its data. Is that a good context for ditching Nutri-Score labelling?

🌾 110 million tonnes. Estimated minimum crop losses annually, due to microplastics interfering with plant photosynthesis, according to some Chinese research.