Search Results for: Environmental Health⊂mit=Search

BY KEITH NUTHALL
THE EUROPEAN Commission has made good on its plans to table formal legislation forcing polluters to pay for the cleansing of the European Union’s land, seas, rivers and atmosphere from the toxins that they have released.

Ministers will now be asked to approve a directive on environmental liability, allowing public authorities to hold companies legally responsible, not only for repairing ecological damage, but also for taking precautions to prevent such problems.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
TECHNOLOGICAL advancement seems to go hand in hand with miniaturisation; witness the development of the mobile phone from its 1980’s high-tech brick to today’s tiny handset; smaller than the devices used by Captain Kirk in the early Star Trek episodes that peered centuries into the future.…

BY RICHARD HURST
SOUTH African National Ports Authority chief executive Siyabonga Gama has announced that the re-release of tenders for the building of a ship repair facility at the Richard’s Bay port, in Kwazulu-Natal, would be issued early in March.

Its construction is expected to cost between Rand 2 billion, (Pounds 122 million), and 5 billion, (307 million), directly creating 400 new jobs with an estimated 1,200 indirect jobs being generated in varied fields such as steel, electrical engineering and shop fitting.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
WITH the rulebook of the Kyoto Protocol all but written, the European Commission has been considering innovative ways in which it can help reduce the EU’s production of greenhouse gases that contribute to global warming.

Much emphasis has been made in the past on reducing industrial pollution or emissions from cars and lorries, but Brussels has now turned its attention to a source of the gases that is very much under the control of local authorities: waste disposal.…

BY KATE REW
OPPONENTS of America’s largest cat litter mining project in northern Nevada have persuaded the local planning commission to refuse the production company Oil-Dri a ‘special use permit,’ which gives it the right to process the mineral at the mine site.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
AN ITALIAN state aid scheme designed to help the European Union achieve one of its key post-Erika disaster objectives – the phasing out of old single hull oil tankers – could be blocked by the European Commission, on the grounds that it is too generous.…

KEITH NUTHALL
SOPHISTICATED controls on the access of the European road haulage industry to ecologically sensitive areas such as the Alps should be introduced, not simple traffic bans, a new European Environment Agency report has claimed.

‘Road Freight Transport and the Environment in Mountainous Areas’ points out that the inevitable concentration of road traffic through mountain barriers, such as the Alps or the Pyrenees, will have “a large impact on human health and the ecosystem, especially in Austria, France, Italy and Switzerland.”…

KEITH NUTHALL
EURELECTRIC, the EU power industry federation, has embarked on a sophisticated political manoeuvre to save public procurement reforms to the EU’s utilities directive from being rejected at the hands of conservative and Christian Democrat MEP’s.

Oddly, the opposition of the parliament’s European Peoples Party bloc to the changes is based on an objection that Eurelectric shares; to amendments from the parliament’s internal market committee that would force power corporations to take account of social and environmental concerns when issuing a tender.…

BY ALAN OSBORN
THE NEW European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) has now virtually completed its legislative journey through the EU institutions and is set to begin operations in the first half of next year though we’re still not sure where. Helsinki was the favourite for the seat until the Italian prime minister signor Berlusconi rudely pushed the claims of Parma, dismissing the Finns as “people who don’t know what prosciutto is.”…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
INCREASING political pressure is being applied on eastern European governments to undertake root-and-branch reforms to promote energy effieciency and environmental performance within their utilities and industries, including the raising of gas and oil prices.

The United Nations Economic Commission for Europe recently addressed the issue, with its Committee on Sustainable Energy and the Committee on Environmental Policy agreeing to produce guidelines on price reforms for the region.…