Monthly Archives: July 2011

Dirty Laundry

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Greenpeace Investigation

Unravelling the corporate connections to toxic water pollution in China

A new investigative report from Greenpeace, ‘Dirty Laundry’, profiles the problem of toxic water pollution resulting from the release of hazardous chemicals by the textile industry in China. The investigations focuses on two facilities that were found to be discharging a range of hazardous and persistent chemicals with hormone-disrupting properties. These results are indicative of a much wider problem that is posing serious and immediate threats to both our precious ecosystems and to human health. Urgent and transparent action is needed in order to eliminate the use and release of these hazardous chemicals.

As part of the investigations, Greenpeace also uncovered links between these polluting facilities and a number of major clothing, fashion and sportswear brands. Notably, the international brands Abercrombie & Fitch, Adidas, Bauer Hockey, Calvin Klein, Converse, Cortefiel, H&M, Lacoste, Nike, Phillips-Van Heusen Corporation (PVH Corp) and Puma, and the Chinese brands Li Ning, Meters/bonwe and Youngor, have all had products manufactured at one or the other of the facilities.

When confirming their commercial relationship with the Youngor Group, Bauer Hockey, Converse, Cortefiel, H&M, Nike and Puma informed Greenpeace that they make no use of the wet processes of the Youngor Group for the production of their garments. However, regardless of what they use these facilities for, none of the brands found to have commercial links with these two facilities have in place comprehensive chemicals management policies that would allow them to have a complete overview of the hazardous chemicals used and released across their entire supply chain, and to act on this information.

As brand owners, they are in the best position to influence the environmental impacts of production and to work together with their suppliers to eliminate the releases of all hazardous chemicals from the production process and their products.

Greenpeace is calling on the brands and suppliers identified in this investigation to become champions for a toxic-free future – by eliminating all releases of hazardous chemicals from their supply chains and their products.

Governments also have a crucial role to play. To this end, Greenpeace is calling on governments to work towards the elimination of all releases of hazardous chemicals by adopting a political commitment to ‘zero discharge’ of all hazardous chemicals within one generation, based on the precautionary principle and a preventative approach to chemicals management.

Worth the jump to the Greenpeace site for pdfs and images

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Analysis: China’s push for more hydropower tests limits

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By David Stanway for Reuters in Beijing

Plans to use massive new hydropower development to boost China’s power capacity by nearly half by 2015 will not dent coal demand enough to cut greenhouse gas emissions and could further damage the country’s strained river system.

China wants to raise installed power capacity by 490 gigawatts (GW) to 1,440 GW by 2015. At least 140 gigawatts of the new capacity will be from hydro power — equivalent to more than seven Three Gorges hydropower projects and enough to run the whole of France. The new hydro, along with other sources, is expected to cut coal-fired power from 73 percent of China’s generating capacity to 67 percent and slow the growth of CO2 emissions, which reached 7.5 billion tons in 2009 and are forecast to rise to as high as 12 billion tons by 2030.

But even a stringent pollution-reduction regime would still see China pump out about 9.7 billion tons of CO2 emissions by 2030 as new coal and other fossil plants also come online. [ID:nL3E7IA025] “You’re just playing with the edges,” Hayden Bairstow, an analyst with CLSA in Sydney said, adding that any move away from coal would also be paired with efforts to shut down smaller miners producing lower quality coal, and was likely to lead to more imports.

Government calculations suggest, however, that new hydro could cut coal use by more than 165 million tons, equivalent to China’s 2010 imports but a fraction of total output of more than 3 billion tons last year. But coal-powered plants will account for 77 percent of the remaining 350 GW of the planned new capacity, and maybe more if, as expected, the country runs into technical, financial and social hurdles in building new massive hydro projects.

BIGGER PICTURE

China is mulling a coal production cap of 3.8 billion tons by 2015, and is committed to increasing the share of non-fossil fuel energy to 15 percent of total consumption by 2020.

But few analysts believe it is possible to scale up hydro, nuclear, solar and wind power at such a massive rate.

“We think there is still a lot of skepticism but the commitment to decarbonize the economy may have shifted the balance of power between the different factions of the government on this,” said Peter Bosshard of the International Rivers NGO, which opposes hydropower development. The financial, social and political costs of further dams planned on the Yangtze river in addition to the massive 18 GW Three Gorges and new projects in the largely untouched Tibetan plateau feed into widespread distrust at home and in the downstream countries of southeast Asia.

New projects have been thin on the ground since the controversial Three Gorges dam was completed, with Premier Wen Jiabao skeptical about the virtues of big hydro.

Still, the country said last month that it has committed 400 billion yuan ($62 billion) to build four hydropower stations that would contribute 43 GW by 2015, to be built by China Three Gorges Corp. China says it has exploited just a third of its total hydropower reserves, compared to more than 80 percent in the United States and Japan.

But its hydropower capacity at the end of last year stood at 213.4 gigawatts, the highest in the world. Longer-term plans call for China to reach 450 GW of hydropower capacity by 2030, more than double current levels.

But large-scale projects require the relocation of millions of people and cause deep changes to river flows and hurt farmers and shipping, causing tensions within the country.

Furthermore, dwindling water flows along the Mekong in Southeast Asia as well as on the Brahmaputra in eastern India and Bangladesh could produce a sharp international backlash.

China’s own limited water supplies could also be affected by the construction plans, said Ma Jun, director of the Institute of Public and Environmental Affairs, an NGO that monitors China’s rivers.

“(It) means that in many of our rivers there won’t be running water,” he said.

GLOBAL WARMING HELPS

China however says that its Copenhagen pledge to cut 2005 levels of carbon intensity by 40 to 45 percent before the end of this decade makes hydropower the best option. “Hydropower has got to be our number one priority,” said Pan Li, vice-head of the environmental department of the China Electricity Council, a government-backed industry association. China is also facing its worst power shortages in years and Beijing is keen to scale up its “west-east power transmission” project aimed at criss-crossing the country with long-distance power lines that will allow new hydropower plants in the southwest to deliver cheap and clean electricity directly to the east coast. “The government wasn’t giving much support to hydropower — leaders were influenced by the propaganda issued by environmental groups — but after the Copenhagen meeting there have been changes,” said Zhang Boting, the vice-secretary general of the China Society for Hydroelectric Engineering. “They now feel the pressure of emissions and the only way to solve the problem is by nuclear or hydropower, but the volumes from hydro are much bigger than nuclear and nuclear has its own problems.”

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An Assault on Clean Water and Democracy

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Robert F. Kennedy Jr-President, Waterkeeper Alliance.

Like the 104th Congress when Republicans controlled the House of Representatives, the House today is swinging a sledgehammer at a cornerstone of contemporary American democracy and undermining the most extraordinary body of environmental law in the world.

Chief among the attacks is HR 2018, known as the “Clean Water Cooperative Federalism Act of 2011.” The bill, currently working its way through the House, hogties the federal government’s role in administering the federal Clean Water Act and gives states a veto power over a host of critical water quality decisions that the Clean Water Act currently authorizes the Environmental Protection Agency to make. This approach will foster a 1950s-style race to bottom as shortsighted and self-interested state politicians dismantle their clean water laws in order to recruit filthy polluters.

Corporate polluters — through massive campaign donations and relentless fear-mongering — can easily dominate the state political landscapes. Their indentured servants in Congress — many flying the Tea Party banner — are working to disrupt the existing balance between state control and federal oversight in our environmental laws by returning us to the days of limited federal supervision — a time when local government was on the side of polluters in a partnership that was stealing people’s livelihoods, their recreation, their health, safety, property values and their childhoods.

The original drafters of the Clean Water Act were keenly aware of the problems inherent in leaving all responsibility to the states. Prior to 1972, that scheme had ignited rivers and firestorms and left Lake Erie declared dead. We saw the results first hand here on the Hudson River in the 1960s — where hundreds of fishermen lost their jobs because their beloved waterways had become too polluted to allow anyone to safely eat the fish. The Clean Water Act, enacted shortly thereafter, created a beautifully simple yet powerfully effective tool to help address these problems: a federal safety net for water quality that guarantees a minimum level of protection to all Americans, no matter where you live. And for nearly 40 years this approach has been working.

Indeed, the Clean Water Act is one of our most important environmental laws, and it is a model — both in the U.S. and abroad — for achieving a sensible balance between state officials’ familiarity with local conditions and the important role the federal government plays in protecting all citizens from a race-to-the-bottom by polluters and politicians intent on short term gain at the expense of local communities and long-term prosperity.

Having this shared authority is essential because state agencies face intense pressure to ignore the Clean Water Act in favor of the most powerful corporate interests. It is no coincidence that many of the bill’s sponsors are from states where EPA has used its authority under the Act in recent years to make sure minimum levels of protection are achieved, such as West Virginia and Florida.

Unfortunately, HR 2018 rewards states for their past failures and rolls back the clock nationally by promoting an agenda that benefits only those who seek to pollute our waterways — not the communities that depend on them.

Representative Tim Bishop of New York, to his credit, offered an amendment in committee that would have protected water bodies that serve as drinking water supplies, flooding buffers, recreation destinations and habitat for fish and game prized by anglers and hunters from these sweeping rollbacks. But sponsors of the bill would have none of it — further revealing their disinterest in the protection of the American public from the threats of water pollution.

Poll after poll shows the public’s support for clean water. The American people didn’t stand for these congressional attacks to our environmental laws in the mid-1990′s. And we must not stand for them today.

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