Students from the Royal College of Art have made fabrics from plants grown in seawater, providing a potential solution for the currently freshwater-intensive fashion and textile industries. More
Scottish startup Kenoteq has launched the K-Briq – a more sustainable building brick that is unfired and made of 90 per cent construction waste. More
Stockholm-based designer Julia Olanders has used construction materials that are usually hidden in buildings to create a series of decorative vases for her Betweenness project. More
Architecture studio Generate and developer Placetailor have unveiled plans to build a carbon-neutral apartment block in Boston using a cross-laminated timber "kit of parts". More
Ceramicist Gregg Moore has created crockery for the Blue Hill at Stone Barns restaurant outside New York, that is made from the bones of the very cows whose dairy and meat is served. More
MIT engineers have found a new way to create aerospace-grade carbon-fibre composites using only one per cent of the energy of current methods, and none of the ovens and autoclaves. More
US clothing brand Pangaia has released a puffer coat, whose filling is made with flowers in a bid to offer a cruelty-free alternative to duck or goose down. More
IBM has developed a new type of battery that's free of cobalt, nickel and other heavy metals, avoiding the environmental and humanitarian issues related to lithium-ion technology. More
From lab-grown spider silk to cellulose, design and technology reporter Natashah Hitti continues our review of the year with 10 of the most interesting materials developed or used throughout 2019, with a particular focus on reuse. More
American company Heliogen has managed to concentrate solar energy to temperatures of more than 1000 degrees Celsius – hot enough to provide a fossil-fuel-free way to make concrete. More
A German construction project has saved an estimated 136 tonnes of carbon dioxide from entering the atmosphere by incorporating air pockets made of recycled plastic within its concrete slabs. More
Kazakhstani designer Enis Akiev has developed a method for turning single-use plastic packaging into tiles, by emulating the organic process of rock formation. More
An easily biodegradable material that could be "part of a global answer" to single-use plastic pollution has won its inventor, British designer Lucy Hughes, the international James Dyson Award. More
Canadian camouflage company Hyperstealth Biotechnology has patented the technology behind a material that bends light to make people and objects near invisible to the naked eye. More
New York designer Charlotte McCurdy has fashioned a water-resistant jacket from a plastic made of algae, which captures existing CO2 from the atmosphere. More
Rain would repair rather than damage roads if they were made of the tyre-based pavement invented by Israel Antonio Briseño Carmona, a Mexican student and winner of the nation's James Dyson Award. More
Swedish company Re:newcell is aiming to disrupt the fashion industry and save natural resources by creating garments from Circulose – a new material made from recycled cotton clothes. More
Montreal-based fashion designer Ying Gao has created a pair of robotic dresses that respond to their environment by rippling, expanding and contracting as if they are alive. More
Canadian brand Native Shoes has developed a sneaker that is entirely made from one continuous piece of algae-enriched EVA in a bid to clean up the footwear industry. More
The Netherlands could build a million new homes from sustainably harvested local wood and save 100 megatons of carbon in the process, according to architect Marco Vermeulen. More
