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  • Low cost e-waste recycling in China releasing catalogue of pollutants

    Low-cost e-waste recycling in China releasing catalogue of pollutants

    Ecologist

    3rd September, 2010

    The world’s growing waste mountain of mobile phones, computers and other electronic goods is being illegally recycled in unregulated and primitive conditions in China and causing significant toxic pollution

     

    China’s family-run cottage industry for recycling e-waste is releasing dangerous amounts of toxic pollutants and posing a threat to local health, according to a team of scientists from the US and China.

    Sales of consumer electronics, particularly mobile phones and computers, have soared in the past two decades – with one billion of the former sold in 2007.

    Although Europe and the US have set up e-waste recycling systems much of the e-waste ends up being illegally exported to less industrialised countries where the laws to protect workers and the environment are inadaquate or not enforced.

    China in particular is expected to see seven-fold increase in mobile phone waste and four-fold increase in old computer waste by 2020.

    Researchers from the US and China studied the e-waste cottage industry that has sprung up in Shantou City, a town of 150,000 people in China’s Guangdong Province – the main destination for electronic waste.

    Previous studies have focused on toxic metals being released, however this study highlights the air pollutants being emitted into the surrounding air. It says the family-run workshops have no capability to control or reduce pollutant emissions.

    The majority of the electronic components are removed by heating the boards over a grill on a strove burner, a process known as ‘roasting’, before removing the reusable parts. This heating process releases numerous chemicals, heavy metals and other pollutants into the air.

    Study co-author Bernd Simoneit from Oregon State university said the pollutants were damaging not only to the environment but also the health of workers and people living in the area.

    ‘Some of these chemical compounds may be carcinogens; others may be just as harmful because they can act as “environmental disruptors” and may affect body processes from reproduction to endocrine function,’ he said.

    Greenpeace say the groundwater around the nearby town of Guyiu, in the same province as the study town, is undrinkable because of toxic e-waste being dumped in streams and fields.

    Useful links
    Study: Heavy Metals Concentrations of Surface Dust from e-Waste Recycling and Its Human Health Implications in Southeast China

  • Labor ahead in strategic power game

     

    Whether the rural independents back the Labor Party, as the tea leaves and the betting agencies suggest they may, or whether Bob Katter, Tony Windsor and Rob Oakeshott ultimately decide to throw their support behind a conservative government, Labor has played the more strategic game in lobbying for their support. Leaving personal dignity at the door, Gillard has done everything that she can to negotiate a deal. If she wins that won’t matter; if she loses it will be the final embarrassment in a short prime ministership.

    Related Coverage

    The independents highlight stability and longevity of government as two key ingredients to securing their support.

    Labor was clearer from the outset than the Coalition was about its preparedness to run full term if it formed minority government. That ticks the longevity box. In fact Gillard was even willing, quite carelessly in my view, to rule out the prospect of a double-dissolution election if the independents backed her in.

    In other words, 100 years of convention, that a federal government needs to have a trigger to go to the polls if its legislative agenda is stymied, is less important to Labor than Gillard saving face.

    This week she denied that how history might view her had played any role whatsoever in her attempts to form government. If you believe that you will believe emissions can be curbed without putting a price on carbon.

    In contrast, while the Coalition is assuring all and sundry that it plans to run full term if it is supported into government, early on senior Coalition sources were telling journalists that a return to the polls was the best option, that when the Greens gained the Senate balance of power in July next year it would provide the perfect trigger for an early election, and that because defeat would lead to internal blood-letting for Labor it wouldn’t be long before the polls made an early election too tempting to avoid for the Coalition — so that it could win a mandate in its own right.

    The Coalition also has tried to suggest a Labor government won’t be stable because of the recriminations likely after the poor election result, even if it does win. But that ignores what we all know, which is that as a tribal party that imposes strict discipline on its parliamentary team, Labor is better placed than the Coalition to hold together in minority government.

    That is especially the case considering the Coalition partners are already attacking each another over the money spent fighting one another in safe conservative electorates: coin that could have made the difference in tight marginal contests across the country.

    And while at first glance the idea of a Labor-Greens alliance may appear unstable to conservative rural independents worried about radicalism, the electoral reality is that without the backing of at least two of the three rural independents a left-wing agenda can’t pass through the House of Representatives to even be debated in the Senate.

    The rural independents will decide what passes into law and the circumstances when it does.

    (That said, watch this space if Labor does form a minority government and a carbon tax gets put on the agenda. It is hardly radical left wingism, but the Greens would support it in the Senate, and even if only Oakeshott out of the three rural independents backed it in the House of Representatives, what would Malcolm Turnbull do? He has crossed the floor before over an emissions trading system and may do so again given his commitment to the need to put a price on carbon. It is the one policy area that may frighten Windsor and Katter, in particular, from backing Labor.)

    If stability is important to the independents, Labor has used momentum this week to give such an appearance. First it locked in the Greens MP-elect Adam Bandt. Then it struck a deal with Tasmanian independent Andrew Wilkie. Neither move was unexpected, but it gave Gillard a winning appearance this week.

    Combined with the costings problems on the Coalition’s side and the revelation that Abbott offered Wilkie a profligate $1 billion for his local hospital to try to win him over, Labor is meeting the rural independents’ two-pronged demands more obviously than the Coalition.

    While Abbott has been clever to keep referring to Gillard as the acting Prime Minister — as a reminder that she doesn’t have the legitimacy of incumbency any more — the rest of his team has been positively ill-disciplined.

    Bill Heffernan, Alby Schultz and Barnaby Joyce haven’t managed to hide their frustrations about the rural independents taking their time to come to a decision, and they aren’t alone.

    If Abbott can’t control his troops during a delicate time such as the present, what chance does he have down the track?

    The question is, does any of this really matter? Are the independents wooed by the momentum and the offerings Labor is putting on the table or are they giving out signals that they may be leaning Labor’s way only so they can claim they treated the process evenly and with considered thought before siding with the Coalition?

    That is what happened to West Australian premier Alan Carpenter in 2008 when neither main party won an outright majority at the state election. It was left to the unaligned Nationals and independents to determined which side formed government.

    Nationals leader Brendon Grylls gave the impression that he was more attracted to the Labor offerings but ultimately sided with his former Coalition partner, the Liberals. Although there was no love lost between the Nationals and the Liberals in WA leading up to polling day, they did have a history of working together in the parliament.

    What worries Coalition strategists federally is that the history between the rural independents and the Liberals and Nationals is bitter and dominated by mutual loathing. The concern is that such animosities may prevent a deal being done, especially on the back of a poor post-election campaign to win them over.

    If anyone doubts just how high the stakes are as to which side forms government, again Western Australia provides some insights.

    The Barnett government, despite predictions that it would be marred by instability and chaos because of its minority status, is popular and politically dominant. The opposition has descended into a rabble and its leader is under siege.

    Let’s not forget, being opposition leader is regarded as the hardest job going around.

    Watch Peter van Onselen and his panel of senior News Limited journalists interview Communications Minister Stephen Conroy on Australian Agenda on Sky News on Sunday morning live at 8.30am, replayed at 12.30pm and 8.30pm

  • Thirsty foreigners soak up scarce water rights

     

    More than $2 billion of that trade took place in NSW, making this state’s water market equal to the entire value of the country’s wool exports.

    The federal Labor government helped inflate the price by buying more than $1 billion worth of water as drought bit last year, accelerating its $3.1 billion buyback of water in the Murray-Darling Basin.

    After good rains and a change to the government’s tender system, prices have dropped by as much as 40 per cent this year, hurting irrigators who need to sell their water rights, but making buying into the market more attractive to investors.

    ”We know that water is a scarce resource in a resource-starved world,” said Guy Kingwill, the chief executive of the agricultural company Tandou, which has substantial US and British investors.

    ”We are long-term investors in secure water entitlements and Australia is one of the few countries in the world where you can own those,” he said.

    Yet there is virtually no oversight from the Foreign Investment Review Board.

    The federal Treasury says it never looks specifically at foreign acquisition of water licences, and takes an interest only if a foreign player is buying an agribusiness worth more than $231 million.

    Mr Lourey rejects fears about ”water barons”, claiming his investment fund will allow ”water to be used in the most productive way possible. We would argue that’s in Australia’s strategic best interests”.

    But farmers’ groups are worried that big players could corner areas of the market by buying up permanent rights in whole valleys, or being able to dictate what food is grown where by controlling water.

    ”We don’t have a problem with investment, or indeed, speculation in the water market,” said Mr Gregson of the Irrigators Council. ”We are concerned about market dominance. It’s a recently developed, relatively fragile market.”

    FOREIGN OWNERSHIP

    ONLY a tiny handful of water bureaucrats in each state has full knowledge of who owns the country’s permanent water rights, as water registries cannot be openly searched. Some foreign acquisitions of water that have emerged include:

    Summit Global Management, founded by John Dickerson, of San Diego, owns $20 million worth of water through its Australian subsidiary Summit Water Holdings. The company wants to buy more.

    The Singapore company Olam International acquired nearly 90,000 megalitres of permanent water along the Murray when it picked up the almond operations of the failed managed investment scheme Timbercorp last year. The land and water were valued at $288 million.

    The British investment fund Ecofin owns 20 per cent of Eastern Australia Irrigation, a company with extensive land and water holdings in south-eastern Queensland.

    Tandou Limited owns Tandou Farm, near Menindee Lakes, in far western NSW. A fierce takeover battle this year has left the company dominated by the New Zealand corporate raider Sir Ron Brierley’s Guinness Peat Group (28 per cent), battling it out with Ecofin (19.9 per cent) and the US company Water Asset Management ( 13 per cent). Tandou’s most valuable asset is $30 million worth of water rights.

    A Japanese consortium led by Mitsubishi Corporation acquired the Australian water businesses of the British company United Utilities in May.

    Causeway Asset Management, of Melbourne, wants to attract $100 million from foreign investors to a ”diversified portfolio of permanent water entitlements” in Australia.

  • German Military Report: Peak Oil Could Lead to Collapse of Democracy

     

    That collapse could, in turn, cause many countries to abandon free markets principles, the report states. Deals would be struck between oil-exporting and oil-importing countries that would fix prices and remove large amounts of oil from the global market place.

    “The proportion of oil traded on the global, freely accessible oil market will diminish as more oil is traded through bi-national contracts,” the report states.

    That would prompt some governments to abandon free market economics altogether, the report suggests. With peak oil causing “partial or complete failure of markets … [a] conceivable alternative would be government rationing and the allocation of important goods or the setting of production schedules and other short-term coercive measures to replace market-based mechanisms in times of crisis.”

    But the report also warns that the economic crisis caused by shrinking oil supplies and skyrocketing prices could be seen by the general public as a failure of market economics as a whole — and with it, the political institutions that created those economic systems.

    Public anger at the existing system would create “room for ideological and extremist alternatives to existing forms of government.” Populations would fragment along political lines and “in extreme cases” this could “lead to open conflict.”

    Peak oil — which refers to the moment when the world’s production of oil begins to shrink — is a controversial concept, but few doubt the basic logic underlying it: That eventually the world’s finite supply of oil will run out, and nations will have to turn to other sources of energy, or face economic disaster.

    With the report, Germany joins the growing ranks of Western governments apparently alarmed by the prospect of peak oil.

    Last Sunday, the UK Observer reported that Britain’s Department of Energy and Climate Change is refusing to release documents related to peak oil, even though, as the Observer noted, previously released documents argue the veil of secrecy around the issue is probably “not good.”

    The UK government is reportedly canvassing leading scientists and industrialists for their advice on how to build a contingency plan for peak oil.

    And earlier this year, a report from the US Joint Forces Command stated that “by 2012, surplus oil production capacity could entirely disappear, and as early as 2015, the shortfall in output could reach nearly 10 million barrels per day.”

    The report continued, “While it is difficult to predict precisely what economic, political, and strategic effects such a shortfall might produce, it surely would reduce the prospects for growth in both the developing and developed worlds. Such an economic slowdown would exacerbate other unresolved tensions, push fragile and failing states further down the path toward collapse, and perhaps have serious economic impact on both China and India.”

    Not everyone agrees that peak oil is a reality — at least not yet. Detractors point out that predictions of peak oil have been made since the 1950s, and the date for it was originally pegged at around 1995. But the discovery of new oil fields and the development of new technologies for oil extraction mean that oil production has continued unabated in new oil fields even as traditional oil supplies run dry.

    Peak oil skeptics argue that rising oil prices are responsible for the continuing supply of oil — as oil gets more expensive, extracting it from difficult places becomes more profitable. Some argue this process could continue for decades.

    But environmentalists point out that these new alternative methods of extracting oil are more environmentally harmful than traditional methods. Producers in the Alberta oil sands, for example, use large amounts of water to push oil out of sand, and the thick oil produced by this process is significantly higher in carbon content than the light, sweet crude imported from the Middle East.

    © 2010 Raw Story

  • Disappointment over approval for massive plant

    Disappointment over approval for massive plant

    ABC September 3, 2010, 3:32 pm

     

    A South West environment group says it is disappointed the Federal Government’s has given environmental approval for a urea plant to be based in Collie.

    Perdaman Chemicals and Fertilisers’ $3.5 billion plant will process up to four million tonnes of coal a year, turning it into fertiliser to be exported to India and other parts of Asia.

    If it goes ahead, it will be the world’s biggest coal gasification and storage facility.

    The project is expected to create 1,500 hundred jobs during construction with 200 permanent workers.

    It is expected to generate in excess of $800 million dollars in export earnings.

    The company says the Federal environmental approval is an important step forward for the project.

    But, the Preston Environment Group’s Peter Murphy says it will contribute to an already deteriorating environment.

    “All up, all the industries in the area will emit up to 12 million tonnes of carbon into the atmosphere every year including what Perdaman is contributing,” he said.

    “Really, when we’re talking about the total emission it’s unacceptable.”

    Perdaman’s Andreas Walewski says the company is committed to meeting the strict safety and environmental conditions that have been imposed on the project.

    “We’ve certainly worked with the Federal department and the State department trying to ensure that we adhere to strict guidelines,” he said.

    “We believe we have demonstrated this and obviously the approval confirms this.”

    Final approval for the project lies with the State Government.

     

  • Gillard faces Rudd-Made climate trap

     

    Related Coverage

    The Prime Minister’s plan to have a 150-member people’s assembly to create a consensus on climate change is already marked for the waste basket.

    The proposal for another talk-fest was always a dubious idea but it was a Labor climate change policy promised during the election campaign that the Greens have supplanted with a climate change committee that will include Labor and Greens MPs.

    Reaching a consensus at a people’s assembly is not going to mean much if the climate change committee takes a different stance and, after July 1 next year, a more radical climate change plan, acceptable to the Greens, is put to the Senate.

    In Rudd’s early days an emissions trading scheme, ill-defined, became part of a mantra for cutting carbon pollution and heading off catastrophic climate change and extreme weather, which included Australia’s prolonged drought and accompanying water shortages in southeastern Australia. The political issue that was to become a defining difference between the Howard government and the Rudd opposition was the ratification of the Kyoto Protocol on cutting greenhouse gas emissions. Ratifying Kyoto was a potent symbol because Howard would never agree to the ratification, although Australia was already a signatory to the Kyoto Protocol, which expires in 2012, because he believed to do so worked against Australia’s economic interests as one of the world’s biggest suppliers of coal.

    The refusal to ratify Kyoto played into the image of Liberal dinosaurs who were “climate-change deniers”, old-fashioned and backward-looking.

    Rudd campaigned on the issue, forced the Howard government to shift ground and put forward its own belated plans for an ETS; to put a price on carbon.

    Rudd convinced the public of the importance of action on climate change by political leaders in Australia.

    Addressing the “greatest moral and economic challenge of our time” to protect our children and grandchildren became Rudd’s political hallmark.

    There was overwhelming public support for action on climate change and Labor soared ahead of the Coalition on the question of who was better able to handle the issue.

    Rudd exploited the political potential, but during the 2007 election campaign was careful to leave his policy options within acceptable limits by quickly repudiating remarks by the then climate change spokesman, Peter Garrett. The new frontbencher suggested it wouldn’t be necessary for developing nations to face binding commitments at the same time as Australia and other developed nations. As Labor leader Rudd reacted quickly and killed off what could have been a disastrous blow to climate change politics.

    It was this point that led to the failure of the UN’s Copenhagen climate change conference last year.

    In the end Rudd’s framing of the climate change action argument contributed greatly to the vision of an old and tired Coalition government and contributed to Howard’s defeat.

    The irony is that the creation of public demand for action on climate change meant a political problem was created, and the problem was insoluble.

    Howard was only the first leadership victim of the inherent problem of reconciling genuine concern about climate change with practical, effective and cost-efficient action.

    His Liberal Party successor, Brendan Nelson, was dumped as opposition leader in 2008 because he got caught between a shadow ministry that felt compelled to take climate change action and a back bench baulking at an ETS because of popular opposition in their electorates.

    Malcolm Turnbull took the opposite position to Nelson – who had sought to delay action on an ETS until after Copenhagen – and decided to speed through an ETS with Coalition amendments.

    Last year Turnbull argued that it was better to appear as a co-sponsor of the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme with Coalition changes and then move on from climate change than continue to be painted as climate-change denying dinosaurs.

    But Turnbull’s position was opposed by his Coalition partners, the Nationals, and split the Liberal Party.

    In the end it was Tony Abbott’s opposition to an ETS that defeated Turnbull and made Abbott the fourth Liberal leader in just three years.

    Rudd’s demise followed his failure to pass legislation on an ETS, the despondent reaction to the Copenhagen fiasco and the final abandonment of the CPRS. Remember, it wasn’t just Coalition opposition that defeated Rudd’s CPRS but Greens opposition as well.

    Gillard has now agreed to meet Greens leader Bob Brown and new Greens MP Adam Bandt every parliamentary sitting week, “principally to discuss and negotiate any planned legislation”.

    According to the signed agreement: “When parliament is not in session, the Prime Minister, or her delegate, will meet with Senator Brown and Mr Bandt, or their delegate, at least once each fortnight, principally to discuss the upcoming legislative agenda.”

    Brown and Bandt have nominated gay marriage and a price on carbon as their top priorities.

    Having opposed gay marriage, not just on Labor policy but personal grounds, Gillard faces another difficult issue.

    It’s the return to finding a politically acceptable solution to Rudd’s insoluble problem.