In the past year, for example, Dr Seddon and Tom Welton, a chemist at Imperial College London, have shown that one of the most important and difficult processes in industrial organic chemistry, the Diels-Alder reaction (which links carbon atoms together and thus allows big molecules to be assembled) can work better in ionic than in conventional solvents.

ECONOMIST: Ionic solvent

Purists worry that the organic movement's original ideals have been forgotten as large companies that produce and sell organic food on an industrial scale have muscled in.

ECONOMIST: Food politics

Organic revenue growth in the industrial unit is still expected to come in around 10% for the year.

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Local food need not be organic, but buying direct from small farmers short-circuits industrial production and distribution systems in the same way that buying organic used to.

ECONOMIST: Food politics

It is pointless to buy myself some organic eggs with one hand and help sell industrial eggs with the other.

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The final step was to separate organic solids from the wastewater and combine them with wood chips to generate industrial compost.

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