If a place is environmentally fit, do you want to live there? Not necessarily –
forests, glaciers! We try to find a balance between what is liveable and what is
green = will take you to “paradise”
Data to find greenest & liveable places – 141 nations – taken into consideration
social factors (Y & edu) & environmental measures
Overall Ranks
Top 5
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
India & it’s Asian neighbours
Finland
Iceland
Norway
Sweden
Austria
Bottom 5
137. Chad
138. Burkina Faso
139. Sierra Leone
140. Niger
141. Ethiopia
66. Sri Lanka
84. China
104. India
108. Nepal
111. Bangladesh
115. Pakistan
Finland :
+ve: Great for air & water quality, low incidence of infant disease & how well it
protects its citizens from water pollution & natural disasters
-ve: produces an above average amount greenhouse gases, has large ecological
footprint ( the mass of land & water needed to sustain the national level of
consumption) and contributes significantly to regional environmental woes.
Cause: It has the highest industrial- energy consumption rate of all 5 Nordic
countries,, due largely to its reliance on the fuel intensive forestry & quarry
industries. Has colder winters and lower rainfall. Is affected in the last few years
and that forces cuts in production of hydroelectricity & has boosted (15% since
2005) use of fossil fuels, resulting in increased greenhouse gases.
For improvement: Must capitalise on national strengths. It is the world’s largest
exporter of wind-power technology but produces less than 1% of its own
electricity via wind power, despite average costal wind speed of 24 kmph.
Air Quality
Water Quality
1. Moldova
2. Finalnd
63. United States
126. Ethiopia
138. India
1. Norway
2. Finland
22. United States
127. Ethiopia
137. India
The Greenest & Livable countries
Analyzed 72 major international cities – sources included The
millennium Cities Database for Sustainable Transport - 2001, local
environmental laws, garbage production & disposal etc.
5 Best
Stockholm
Oslo
Munich
Paris
Frankfurt
5 Worst
68.
69.
70.
71.
72.
Bangkok
Guangzhou
Mumbai
Shanghai
Beijing
Other Asian cities
18. Hongkong
20. Tokyo
52. Seoul
67. Taipei
June 22, 1966: Cuyahoga river in Ohio state, USA: caught fire due to sparks from
a train - cause: oil slick.
No human life loss but property of $ 50,000 damaged
Effect: 3 years later Clean Water Act
Today: People fish & canoe on big stretches of the Cuyahoga
US: Carbon dioxide emissions grew by 22% during 1990 to 2005
Policy: boosted average fuel efficiency standard for passenger cars from 7.65
kms per litre to 11.69 kms per litre during1978 to 1985. Pollution hasn’t risen
since then.
All countries must offer greater incentives to use alternative fuel vehicles. Delhi –
CNG. Cars on batteries- Reva, Solar cars by students.
Should we go back to bullock-carts or to moving strips? Cartoons of future world!!
China: Sheer pressures of explosive population are putting pressure on
environment; e. g. in Beijing today the level of one type of particularly harmful air
pollution is more than four times the level in New York city.
This year’s Summer Olympics could be a major turning point for China. Following
the lead of South Korea which made a major effort to clean up Seoul before 1988
Summer Games. China has announced a number of ambitious green goals,
including cutting the use of coal in half, eliminating 200 manufacturing palnts in
the Beijing suburbs and lowering sulphur levels in petrol. The challenge is hitting
those targets.
A global co-operation is required for global environmental management. In fact
the whole world is ‘one’ and no country can be separated from the remaining
world (no quarantining is possible), no one can claim that it is not being affected.
All will have to work with same goal and zeal towards green world.
Environmental health – rates of
childhood mortality, disease, deaths from
intestinal infections
1. Austria
8. Finland
16. US
77. India
125. Ethiopia
Source: UN 2006 Human Development Index & 2005 Environmental
Sustainability Index and researchers at Columbia University. For more
information go to www.rd.com/greencountries
An out of control garbage crisis threatens the physical and economic health of
much of Asia
Reader’s Digest, Nov 2007: “It’s time to clean up” – William Ecenbarger, page
118 - 129
As Asians are getting wealthier & are consuming more, they are creating
unprecedented quantities of rubbish. ADB ( Asian Development Bank) estimates
that the regions largest cities produce on average 760,000 tonnes of solid waste
per day. It will be 2 fold -1.8 million tones - by 2025.
It’s too much to handle!!
‘The growing volume and of waste is threatening our cities,’ Micheal Lindfield,
principal urban development specialist in ADB in Manila.
It is beyond financial resources, to recover, treat or dispose the garbage, of many
municipal and national governments. The WB says that some are spending as
much of their 50% of their budgets to deal with garbage and still half of the
garbage goes uncollected.
Centre for environmental Studies of the Energy and Resources (TERI), New
Delhi reports that garbage collection efficiency in Indian cities ranges from 90 to
25%. The collection efficiency in developed Asian cities such as Tokyo, Hong
Kong, Singapore and Taipei varies between 90 to 100%.
Part of the uncollected waste normally find its way into sewers or gets eaten by
cattle; the rest is left to decay or is burned in open dumps.
According to experts, there are no landfill sites in India. Municipal solid waste is
simply dumped without any treatment into land or on outskirts of a city in an
unscientific manner with no compliance of regulations. The land required for
garbage disposal is increasing every year & the most of the existing ‘dump sites’
are filling faster. The cumulative land requirement for disposal during this period
– if at least 80% of this waste was collected – is about 75 sq. km. If this waste is
compacted & buried 2 meters deep in the ground, it would cover over 20,000
football fields.
Much of this added burden is packaging from consumer products and the
products themselves will take years or centuries to decompose. Four of every
five products bought by Asians are discarded after single use. This makes
handling of waste more complicated & expensive. For 2000-05, the government
required to maintain core municipal services in India were Rs. 532000 million.
Everybody suffers regardless of his/her status or age.
Contamination does not differentiate between rich and poor. – Dr Wahid Murad,
a solid waste management specialist at Malaysia’s Multimedia University.
Garbage crisis is more than an environmental issue. It is threatening the
competitiveness of economies, discourages tourism and hinders industrial
development.
A new dimension of garbage problem is computer waste. By 2005, 43536 tonnes
of computer waste was accumulated over 5 to 7 years in India. Mumbai tops the
list with 11017 tonnes. In a newly developed high-tech commercial area in
Mumbai –Mindspace – that was developed on untreated site of the largest
dumping ground in Mumbai, tenants complain about repeated computer failures
caused by gases rising up from decomposed garbage. Equipment worth millions
of rupees is lost every year.
In Bangkok there are masses of ugly smelly garbage (from which an odorous
yellow liquid oozes on the roads on a rainy day) on the roads that are not
collected daily. When it does big vans obstruct the traffic.
In many areas in India the drinking water is contaminated due to garbage and
disease bearing insects and rats are breeding & thriving on it. Nine in every ten
landfills are non – engineered facilities, in Asia.
ADB says the growing garbage crisis should be countered by “3 Rs” – reducing
the amount of waste, reusing items and recycling materials.
Taiwan and Singapore both have adopted the policies that have reduced the
volume of garbage dramatically, thanks to 3 Rs! Taiwan claims 32% reduction in
waste output since 2001 and Singapore claims drop of 8% since 2000.
Taiwan: Policy: ’Garbage shall not touch the ground’ – Households in Taiwan are
required to dispose the waste every night at pick-up points, at pre appointed
times. Then it is separated into kitchen garbage, trash and recyclable items.
There is a fee for the garbage & trash but recyclables are picked up without a
charge. So there is a financial incentive to recycle.
Singapore’s “Towards zero land-fill” programme focuses on 3 broad strategies:
waste minimization at source, recycling and incineration. Central to the
incineration (to burn to ashes) strategy is the carefully engineered Semakau
Landfill, which mainly serves as the final resting place for ashes from four wasteto-energy incinerators. Opened in 1999, it is the world’s first island made entirely
from waste landfill.
Singapore is working with the industries too to reduce consumer waste. The
country’s National Environment Agency has signed an agreement with five
industry associations representing about 500 companies to substantially reduce
packaging waste, which comprises of about one-third of all household trash. The
packaging is attractive to attract the buyers’ attention and affect their perception
of the product and sometimes the packaging is bigger in volume & weight than
the product itself.
South Korea, Japan and Singapore have comprehensive waste management
programmes and a few other countries have made modest gains in battling the
onslaught of garbage.
India’s Ministry of environment & forests issued its Municipal Solid Wastes Rules
in 2000. But only a few municipalities have complied. One that complied by 2003
is Suryapet, a town in Andhra Pradesh. Suryapet citizens started segregating
waste at the source. Solid debris is collected separately from the wet waste. The
wet waste is sent to a yard for vermi-composting & the resulting manure is sold to
the farmers. Dry waste goes to municipal depots for further segregation & is then
sold to recyclers. The town achieved “zero waste” within six months with no
external funding & without te help of NGOs. Proper segregation eliminated the
requirement of landfills.
There is an emerging group of environmental workers in Asian garbage crisis –
millions of scavengers who reuse and recycle material that they find in urban
dump sites. Cooperatives of garbage pickers in the Philippines, India and
Indonesia are using their collective muscle to bargain for better prices & working
conditions.
Manila’s Smokey Mountain was once a national embarrassment inhabited by
squatters working in filth and decay. High rates of infection and disease cut
decades from their lives. Today it is a hill composed of compressed garbage.
A community of 30,000 people who make their living recycling garbage has
sprung beside it. There are 21 apartment buildings and has schools, courts, daycare centers sport grounds etc.
Trash from businesses, offices & households is still brought to Smokey Mountain
but now workers separate everything out and sell it to middle-men. Trash is
transformed into primary materials that can fetch higher profits in international
markets like China. The scavengers are trained in improving their waste recycling
through better collection, sorting and exporting.
Moral of the story: With proper handling, unwanted waste can be transformed
into a valuable resource.
China: The Great Leap
China Daily: According to media reports, several air conditioner installers have
fallen to their deaths in Beijing. As the sweltering summer heat sweeps the
country, sales of air conditioning units are booming…. The spurt in installation
service demand has left many firms understaffed, so some are temporarily
recruiting untrained installers to cash in …… even refuse to provide safety belts
to save costs.
There are countless stories of nightmarish factory conditions, human rights
violation, local corruption and environment folly.
China toys
China price
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