Search Results for: Italy

BY KEITH NUTHALL
THE STORAGE of CO2 deep underground in uneconomic coal seams is one key option being considered by the (carbon) Sequestration Leadership Forum, which has just been joined by the European Commission. Other members are Australia, Brazil, Canada, Colombia, Italy, India, Japan, Mexico, Norway, China, Russia, Britain and the US.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
THE EUROPEAN Commission is taking Austria, Belgium, Greece and Italy to the European Court of Justice over their alleged failure to implement a 1999 directive on minimum welfare standards for laying hens.…

KEITH NUTHALL
INNOVATION from European Union-funded research has continued to offer improvements to the way that EU water utilities work. For instance, the European Commission-funded MicroChem initiative has developed miniaturised laboratory-on-a-chip systems suitable for rapid field testing of water streams. They examine water in tiny pictolitre quantities, flowing through microbore channels produced by photolithographic etching.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
EVERY year it seems, the international community has a pet topic in which it is fashionable to promote good behaviour, and this year the favoured cause seems to be water conservation. The World Bank, the UN Environment Programme and others have all produced weighty tomes on the need to conserve drinking water stocks.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
THE EUROPEAN Commission has signed an international charter on the capture and storage deep underground of carbon dioxide, also involving Australia, Brazil, Canada, Colombia, Italy, India, Japan, Mexico, Norway, China, Russia, Britain and the US. This Sequestration Leadership Forum is developing schemes to capturing CO2 at source and storing it for thousands of years deep underground, probably in depleted oil and gas wells, with the aim of reducing greenhouse gas emissions.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
THE EUROPEAN Commission is taking France, Luxembourg, Belgium, Netherlands, Germany, Italy, Ireland, Greece, Spain, Austria and Finland to the European Court of Justice for failing to adopt an older (and looser) directive on GM food. This includes rules on post-marketing monitoring, public information, plus labelling and traceability.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
THE EUROPEAN Investment Bank wants to lend up to Euro 95 million to state-owned Croatian gas utility Plinacro to modernise the country’s gas transmission system. The money would be spent on building a new 180 km trunk pipeline from Zagreb to Slavonski Brod, supplying eastern Croatia and a 192 km trunk pipeline from coastal Pula to Karlovac, near Zagreb, connecting networks to offshore Adriatic gas fields and Italy.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
ITALY and Spain are living outside their means when it comes to fresh water abstraction, according to a new water report from the European Environment Agency (EEA). It brands these large European Union countries as being “water stressed,” exploiting more than 20 per cent of their annual fresh water supplies.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
THE EUROPEAN Commission has offered to enshrine in international law, the right of non-European Union retailers to enjoy the same rights to set up supermarkets, hypermarkets and departments stores across Europe, as local retail companies.

Its offer comes in the World Trade Organisation’s Doha Development Round, where negotiations on services are the most advanced of all its talks on liberalising global commerce.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
SWEDEN has the highest European Union unit labour costs in the combined tobacco, food and drinks industries, according to a report from Eurostat, the EU’s statistical agency; its average for the latest available comparable figures (year 2000) was Euro 38,000.…