Australia’s environment minister rocks
November 30, 2007
Posted in Green News
Peter Garrett, the two-metre tall, bald-headed former frontman of Australian rock group Midnight Oil, has been made the environment minister by the country’s newly elected Labor government.
[youtube:http://youtube.com/watch?v=10BbpGKLXqk]
His band, which was very popular in South Africa in the late-1980s, sang about environmental and social injustice. “Beds are Burning”, a song about Aboringinal land rights, was an international hit. In 1990, the band reportedly also staged an impromptu concert outside oil company Exxon’s headquarters in New York with a banner that read: “Midnight Oil Makes You Dance, Exxon Oil Makes Us Sick.” The group disbanded in 2002 and Garrett turned his attention to politics.
In what is widely reported as “punishment” for political gaffes he made on the campaign trail, Garrett did not get responsibility for climate change, this was given to another minister Penny Wong, 39, who is Malaysian-born and openly gay.The change in government is good news for the UN’s Kyoto agreement. Australia has been one of the major greenhouse gas emitters – the US is the other one – that has refused to ratify the protocol and agree to emissions reduction targets.Kevin Rudd, Australia’s new prime minister, has already decided to ratify the protocol and participate fully in the fight against climate change, the Guardian reports, leaving the US somewhat out in the cold. In fact, Rudd has said he will join Garret and Wong at the Bali meeting of environment ministers to discuss the future of the Kyoto agreement beyond 2012.
Trans-Sahara expedition powered by chocolate
November 29, 2007
Posted in Transport
A chocolate-powered truck left Britain on Friday and is making its way overland to Timbuktu in Mali in an attempt to complete the first carbon-neutral trip across the Sahara.
The entire 6,000km trip – which will take them through France, Spain, Morocco, Western Sahara and Mauritania on their way to Mali – will be powered by biodiesel made from waste chocolate.
The BioTruckers, Andy Pag and John Grimshaw, aim to show that biodiesel can be made in ways that are environmentally friendly. They say their truck’s fuel has been assessed by independent experts at CarbonAided and “its manufacture and use emit just a tenth of the carbon footprint of fossil dieselâ€.
The BioTruck is a “recycled†1989 Ford Iveco Cargo flatbed that was rescued from the scrap heap. It is carrying 1,500 litres of the choccy-diesel and two Landcruisers from the mid 80s that will be needed to complete the difficult last 200km stretch of the trip to Timbuktu.
The team is expected to arrive in Timbuktu on December 16.
For more on the BioTruck expedition click here
Pink alert for East African flamingos
November 27, 2007
Posted in Green News, Transport
Danger is looming over the horizon for the lesser flamingos of Lake Natron, one of Africa’s most spectacular birdy tourist attractions.
Plans to build a massive soda ash plant on the Rift Valley lake in northern Tanzania, where up to a million of the pink birds breed, have been temporarily halted while the developers, Lake Natron Resources, produce a “new and better environmental statement and consider other sites for soda ash extraction”, BirdLife International reports.
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Highveld declared air pollution hot spot
November 26, 2007
Posted in Green News
A 31,000 square kilometre area extending across eastern Gauteng and western Mpumalanga has been declared an air pollution hot spot by the minister of environmental affairs and tourism.
The “Highveld Priority Area” is home to 3.6-million people and includes Witbank, Middelburg, Secunda, Standerton, Edenvale, Boksburg, Benoni and Balfour.
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Top 40 companies join carbon disclosure project
November 26, 2007
Posted in Business
Seventy-four percent of the JSE’s Top 40 listed companies this year participated for the first time in the Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP), an initiative to collect information on how companies around the world are responding to climate change. The CDP annually collects climate change-related information on behalf of investment institutions that manage assets totalling $41-trillion.
However, only half of the JSE respondents disclosed information on their greenhouse gas emissions, according to the CDP’s South Africa Report 2007, released at the JSE on Thursday.
A few large players dominate South Africa’s carbon emissions, with three companies – Sasol, BHP Billiton and Anglo American – contributing 83 percent of the emissions disclosed to the CDP, the report said. Eskom, which is not a listed company, but which nevertheless chose voluntarily to participate in the project, “has emissions that are 2.8 times higher than the highest FTSE/JSE Top 40 emitter”.
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Saving the world one seed at a time
November 25, 2007
Posted in Green News
If you love baobabs, then Madagascar is the place to go. The island has six species of the “upside down tree”, South Africa has only one. It’s also the only place in the world you’ll find lemurs in the wild. In fact, about 70 percent of the plants and animals here are endemics (live nowhere else on Earth).
The island split from the African continent tens of millions of years ago, allowing its inhabitants to evolve in isolation, undisturbed by human beings until 2,000 years ago. But countless species in this biodiversity hotspot are gone and many others face extinction. Britain’s Kew Gardens is trying to do something about it.
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Finance ministers concerned about climate change
November 25, 2007
Posted in Business
South Africa’s finance minister, Trevor Manuel, told the media that the G20 was “deeply concerned” over the effect of climate change on global food prices this week, Sapa reports.
Manuel put most of the blame for the worldwide surge in grain prices on climate change. The rise in production of crops for biofuels was also causing the price of maize and wheat to rise, he reportedly said.
The finance ministers and central bank chiefs from 20 of the world’s largest economies met in Kleinmond, in the Western Cape, last week.
Ordinary South Africans don’t seem to share the finance minister’s concern about climate change. Research done by TNS Research Surveys earlier this year found that global warming ranked last on a list of concerns facing South Africans. The top five were crime, HIV/Aids, corruption, poverty and unemployment.
Recycling made easier in Joburg
November 25, 2007
Posted in Lifestyle
Seventy-seven percent of the South African city dwellers surveyed by a research company recently said they never recycled paper and packaging. I suppose it’s not surprising, but it is very concerning. Part of the problem, I suspect, is that that there is a lack of information about what can and cannot be recycled available to the public and recycling takes a huge amount of effort. I’m sure that if it were made easier to recycle, a lot more us would do it.
In my area Mondi’s Ronnie Recycling service is a straightforward and reliable way to recycle paper and cardboard. I have a compost heap in my garden that takes most of my organic waste, but what do people who don’t have gardens do? They need somewhere to store it until they can take it to the dump. The same applies for everything else – glass, cans, plastics and broken appliances – recycling requires so much storage space and effort that I often just throw everything in the bin and hope the guys with the trolleys that rummage through the rubbish on Pikitup’s collection day will do the necessary sorting and recycling for me. They do earn a bit of income at the buy-back depots, after all. But, it’s a bit hit and miss. I’d rather be certain that my plastic is being recycled in an environmentally friendly way and not ending up lacing the shores of the Braamfonten Spruit.
Enter Resolution Recycling. They have hit on a brilliant idea. For an annual fee of R360 (that works out to R30 a month), they give you a big, green dustbin into which you put your recyclables and then they come and fetch it from you every two weeks. How simple is that? They also provide you with a list of what they can recycle. Justin Needham, the owner, told me he ensures that all the material is dealt with in an environmentally friendly way and he has a reputation to maintain so he takes the green factor very seriously.
At the moment Resolution Recycling operates mainly in Joburg’s northern suburbs, but it is expanding all the time, so it’s worth getting in touch with them to see if they do your area. I was told that they are looking at including Pretoria some time next year.
For more information take a look at Resolution Recycling’s website
