While shopping at my local grocery store this week, I was confronted by a member of TESCO’s staff who would not accept naked fruit. Everything had to be bagged to be weighed. When I mentioned the fact that he wasn’t thinking about the environment, he said “only foreigners care about the environment”. It was a [...]

When working with my students on the issues of sustainability, one of the fundamental facts that I am trying to impress upon them is that ultimately there is no “away”. That ultimately, the wastes that we are creating through the economic models we have developed will at some point grow so large that they cannot [...]

A new shade of green is gradually sweeping across China’s export manufacturing industry, one that took a while to take root. Companies are riding the environment-friendly wave. Pressure from the national government and tightening regulations in overseas markets are compelling a growing number of suppliers to modify their business strategies and incorporate ecologically safe processes. [...]

Fresh off several conferences and meetings where discussions centered around smart grid, wind power, and other renewable energies, yesterdays tour of the Shanghai Municipal Waste Facility proved to be a very interesting site visit.  Operational for 3 years now, this facility (one of two facilities in Shanghai) incinerates about 1500 tons of trash a day [...]

Another fine example of how some choose to treat the city as their trash can.

Using some very interesting caricatures, Greenpeace has put together a top 10 list of ways Chinese firms often hide their pollution.  Some of these are old hand, but a couple (including consolidating of waste streams) were new to me. Many companies – domestic and international alike – simply break them because it’s cheaper to do [...]

If you cannot view the above, please click here During a conversation last week between myself and the strategic director of a global eNGO, the topic of industrial based programs came up. It was a conversation that she and I had had in the past as part of a project to help them target 4 [...]

Learning that China’s landfills are an environmentally mixed bag should come as no surprise to anyone, a story that Eastday’s article Landfill sites fail green screenfocuses on, but more alarmingly, though this article the size of the problem becomes apparent: China generated more than 150 million tons of household trash last year, as well as [...]

For the last few months, I have been toying with the idea that I needed to make a concerted effort to capture moments where I see residents (foreign and local) treating the streets as if they are their personal waste cans. Until a couple days ago, it remained a joke among myself a few friends, [...]

While enjoying my latte yesterday at my local Costa Coffee, my teeth began chattering. It wasn’t the first time, and I thought that as it was 37 degree outside, perhaps my body was just getting a bit over air conditioned. It wasn’t until I got up and looked at the thermostat (see above), that I [...]