Liu Xiao spends her weeks visiting sludge and organic waste treatment plants across China. The travel can be tiring but as a technical and policy adviser on waste management she must help implement President
A typical product on a supermarket shelf will have had about one hundred times its own volume of waste created before it reaches the consumer, according to Forum for the Future, an environmental charity. Meeting the demand for food, water, timber and fuel has caused a terrifying spike in the amount of waste produced around the world. The UK's Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs has estimated that over half of the country's household waste comes from retail and almost 30 per cent of landfill can be traced back to the five leading supermarket chains.
With carbon markets worth more than
Patrick Getreide is an entrepreneur with a big ambition: to build the world's greenest office block. Energy Plus, his projected 70,000 square metre Paris block, will be carbon neutral and generate more electricity than it uses, saving tenants
Although carbon-offsetting has gathered momentum as a way for companies to reduce their environmental impact, the best way to cut emissions is still to use less energy. And with oil trading at above $100 a barrel and energy bills continuing to rise, being more efficient makes financial as well as environmental sense. But many companies have yet to change fundamentally the way they operate in order to embrace energy efficiency.
The list of businesses going "green" lengthens by the day. Household names such as Wal-Mart, Coca-Cola, General Electric, Hewlett-Packard and L'Orealboast programmes to cut their greenhouse gas emissions, use natural resources more efficiently, recycle more and clear up pollution. These initiatives have gained approval from consumers and praise from environmental groups, but what will happen if the economy slows? Will companies continue to put efforts into improving their environmental credentials? Or will these green buds wither in the chill wind blowing through the markets?
World trade growth declined sharply in 2007 and is expected to slow further this year as financial turmoil and rising commodity prices further depress global economic activity, the World Trade Organisation said yesterday. Preliminary estimates suggest the volume of world trade rose 5.5 per cent in 2007, down from a robust 8.5 per cent in 2006. Based on the latest gloomy global output forecasts by the International Monetary Fund, the WTO says trade growth this year could slip to 4.5 per cent, the lowest since 2002.
Seen from the porthole of a Super Puma helicopter skimming over the Atlantic, the future of African oil exploration appears for a second like a giant, fire-breathing dragon. Towering 12 storeys above the waters off Nigeria, Royal Dutch Shell's mammoth Bonga facility puffs a constant plume of flame as it sucks oil from below the ocean floor. Shell sees Bonga's start-up in November 2005 as heralding a new era of deepwater operations in Nigeria, where a series of recent reports have revealed the depths of its difficulties onshore in the swamps of the Niger Delta.
Russia's Gazprom took further steps to strengthen its hold on natural gas supplies to Europe on Thursday, signing a joint venture with Libya and saying it was in preliminary talks on a multibillion dollar project to pipe Nigerian gas to Europe across the Sahara. News of the two projects came as Vladimir Putin, Russian president, became the first Russian leader since 1985 to visit Libya. According to the country's official news agency, Libyan leader Muammer Gaddafi said during talks with Mr Putin he supported the idea of forming an Opec-style group of gas-exporting countries.
Even as it has increased the state's role in the economy, Vladimir Putin's authoritarian administration has presided over one of the world's biggest liberalisations
The UK government has set a target for every new home to be "zero-carbon' by 2016. Given that it intends the industry to be building 240,000 new homes a year by that date, it is an ambitious target
