Search Results for: Environmental Health⊂mit=Search

BY BILL CORCORAN

INTERNATIONAL petroleum group Shell says it remains committed to continuing seeking permission for shale gas mining in South Africa’s Karoo desert, despite the government placing a moratorium on all fracking applications in the area. The country’s minerals minister Susan Shabangu revealed late April her department had halted both existing and new fracking bids until the technique, used to extract gas from deep underground, had been studied.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL

A CANADIAN environmental group claims to have discovered heavy metal toxins in 10 cosmetics products commonly used in Canada. Environmental Defence sent powders, blushes, foundations, concealers, bronzers, mascaras, eyeliners, eyeshadows, lipsticks and lipglosses to an accredited laboratory. It claimed nickel was found in all products, lead in 96%, beryllium 90%, thallium 61%, cadmium 51%, arsenic 20% and selenium 14%.…

BY MARK GODFREY

WITH some researchers (most recently Credit Suisse’s China analysts) predicting Chinese e-commerce revenues will grow 100%-a-year to 2015 it’s not surprising international brands are scrambling to understand and tap the dynamics of the country’s web portals. Top of the local business-to-consumer pile Taobao has evolved from an eBay knock off to a massively popular resource for wholesalers and B2C operators.…

BY RAGHAVENDRA VERMA

ENVIRONMENTAL concerns and the health hazards faced by the workers engaged in the ship and tanker breaking industry of Bangladesh have forced its government to reform controls of this most dangerous service. Dhaka has made administrative changes and proposed a new law that could force the international oil companies to share the costs of cleaning up the chemical and other waste left by this beach-based industry.…

BY MARK ROWE

WITH awareness growing in regards to their impact on the environment, the chemical make-up of fire retardants is becoming increasingly targeted by legislation around the world, and the Asia-Pacific region is no exception.

According to global paints and coatings company AkzoNobel (SPELLING CHECKED) – which recently opened a EUR7 million fire protection laboratory in the UK to serve as its global headquarters for fire retardant research – increasingly stringent worldwide regulations mean that the demand for more environmentally-conscious fire retardants will double by 2018.…

BY MARK ROWE and KEITH NUTHALL

CENTRAL Asia is often in the news regarding political instability, and the complexity of the region’s borders and ethnicities make for an opacity that can encourage the growth of organised crime. Also, being far from the centres of anti-money laundering activities and standard setting – in Europe, north America and east Asia, the region’s often authoritarian governments have a poor reputation regarding the enforcement of law and judicial probity.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL

THE EUROPEAN Union (EU) pharmaceutical sector will benefit from two new networks of research teams that will, (with a third environmental study group), benefit from Euro 700 million of European Commission funding. The first will be established by Britain and focus on systems biology and the second by France and Germany, focusing on human infections and related issues.…

BY LEE ADENDOORF and ALAN OSBORN

THE HIGH profile arrest in 2009 of a Sicilian businessman involved in the renewable energy sector and the subsequent seizure of his assets worth over Euro EUR1.5 billion in 2010, threw the international spotlight onto a problem Italian authorities have been grappling with for some time: the use of ‘clean energy’ industries such as wind and solar farms to launder mafia funds.…

BY MARK GODFREY

THE ENDLESS undulating hills of southwestern China’s Yunnan province may represent the future of biofuels in the country. These sparsely populated, red-soiled hills of pine and scrub are being touted as the place to grow feedstocks such as jatropha to make up for a clamp-down in using edible alternatives such as corn, rice and wheat.…

BY ALAN OSBORN

THE BIGGEST change in liquid cargo shipping practices in recent years has been the growth in the use of flexitanks where commodities are carried in plastic sacks inserted into standard 20ft International Organization for Standardization (ISO) metal containers.…