Search Results for: Environmental health

BY KEITH NUTHALL
THE EUROPEAN Environment Agency has claimed that energy use is still rising in the European Union, mainly because of increasing transport consumption and has alleged that the EU’s greenhouse gas emissions could return to their 1990 levels by the year 2010 unless Brussels and Member States take firm action; this would include promoting renewable energy, said the EEA.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
THE EUROPEAN Space Agency is to use its satellites to check the implementation of environmental treaties, monitoring forest growth under Kyoto, their shrinkage under the Convention to Combat Desertification and the survival of wetlands under the Ramsar Convention.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
THE EUROPEAN Agency for Safety and Health at Work has called for project proposals tapping a Euro 4 million funding scheme to encourage higher safety and health standards in small and medium-sized businesses. The agency will provide co-financing grants of between Euro 25,000 and Euro 200,000, especially for training, providing information and spreading good practice.*Details:…

BY PHILIP FINE

THE USA’S Environmental Protection Agency is promoting the production of chemical gases from waste materials by reclassifying these currently "hazardous" toxins and allowing them to be used in gasification programmes, a process that puts materials under high temperatures to convert them into a so-called syngas.…

KEITH NUTHALL
THE EUROPEAN Commission is piling political pressure onto industries, especially fossil fuel electricity generators, which pour greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, to force them to clean up their processes, adding costs to their bottom line.

In a move that will only serve to make CHP and renewable plants more competitive by comparison, the Commission is preparing a raft of legal cases against eight European Union Member States, to force them to monitor and restrict their production of key greenhouse pollutants.…

BY PHILIP FINE

AN ENVIRONMENTAL group is taking the world’s largest poultry company to court for allegedly failing to take care of noxious releases on one of their contracted farms. The Sierra Club alleges that the US’s Kentucky-based Tyson Foods failed to report releases of ammonia on four large ‘chicken houses.’…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
Delegates to the annual meeting of the Institution for Occupational Safety and Health in Manchester this week were told of “serious setbacks” in the struggle to make Britain’s workplaces less dangerous. “Not only has a plateau effect in national accident trends been noticed but in some sectors things have actually worsened,” said Mr David Eves, who was deputy director of the Health and Safety Executive between 1989 and 2002 and is now IOSH Hon vice president.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
A TASK force of world food standards body Codex Alimentarius has agreed detailed draft guidelines on how to assess the safety of genetically modified foodstuffs and on how to trace and remove from sale any product that is subsequently shown to pose a hazard to human health.…

BY ALAN OSBORN
INTERNATIONAL moves to remove the maximum permitted dose of irradiation for food could lead to a major world trade dispute, which could undermine European Union regulations, says the London-based Food Irradiation Campaign, (FIC).

A joint study by the Food and Agricultural Organisation, the International Atomic Energy Agency and the World Health Organisation has concluded that “no upper dose limit need be imposed” as irradiated foods are deemed “wholesome throughout the technologically useful dose range.”…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
THE EU’S Standing Committee on the Food Chain and Animal Health has approved a European Commission plan to ban the export of all live pigs and porcine semen, ova and embryos from the Rhineland-Palatinate region of Germany, except districts east of the Rhine.…