December, 2015:
EU Circular Economy Package Arrives
http://waste-management-world.com/a/eu-circular-economy-package-arrives
After months of deliberation following the axing of the previously agreed Circular Economy Package, the European Commission adopted a new package that will set a common EU target for recycling 65% of municipal waste by 2030.
In addition, the package see a common EU target of 75% for recycling packaging waste by 2030 and a binding target to reduce landfill to maximum of 10% of all waste by 2030.
According to the Commission the package will stimulate Europe’s transition towards a circular economy which will boost global competitiveness, foster sustainable economic growth and generate new jobs. To help facilitate this transition the Commission accompanied the CE Package with its Action Plan on the Circular Economy which sets out measures to “close the loop” and tackle all phases in the lifecycle of a product, from manufacture to disposal.
The plan also includes a number of actions that the Commission said will target market barriers in specific sectors or material streams, such as plastics, food waste, critical raw materials, construction and demolition, biomass and bio-based products, as well as horizontal measures in areas such as innovation and investment.
The Commission added that the aim of the plan is to focus on issues where EU level action brings real added value and is capable of making a difference on the ground.
Unsurprisingly for such a highly anticipated announcement, many in the industry were voice their opinion on the package, which was broadly welcomed with some reservations.
“I welcome the new proposed Directive on waste from the Commission,” ISWA president, David Newman, told WMW.
“I am very glad they have taken into account many of the comments made by ISWA in our meetings with them. In particular the need for harmonised data and reporting comes out clearly. The move towards restricting landfilling of biowaste is very important as is the overall 10% landfill target for 2030. Derogations for some member countries are common sense,” he said.
However, Newman also cautioned that the the package needed to be firmer on the collection of biowaste.
“The wording needs strengthening to ensure compliance, because ‘should’ and ‘shall’ are different concepts. It is a severe weakness of the proposal that such collection is conditioned by feasability questions as revised article 22 indicates.”
That was a view echoed by the Resource Association’s Ray Georgeson.
“Proposals on food waste and separate collection appear to be weaker than many of us had hoped for, and the introduction of TEEF as a successor (for biowaste) to TEEP may not prove to be the Commission’s finest moment,” he said.
Beijing’s pollution saviour: Mother Nature
Construction cranes are shrouded in smog in Beijing. Photo: Bloomberg
Residents say officials now rely on weather to control capital’s dire smog
What a difference a day makes. The arrival of strong winds overnight on Tuesday blew away much of the heavy smog that had choked Beijing for days, allowing the capital’s air quality to return to a healthy level within hours.
A cold front from the north reached the capital at about 11pm on Tuesday, and by midnight the concentration of PM2.5 particles, considered most dangerous to human health, had dropped to 22 – considered a healthy level – in the suburbs and 88 in the city. Residents woke up to a clear blue sky with cold, fresh air as the concentration of the fine particulates dropped to below 10 from more than 500 on Tuesday.
Internet users were quick to share pictures of the city’s clear skyline on social media while at the same time expressing in frustration that the capital was relying entirely on weather changes to fight the smog.
Officials, when questioned why the highest-level red pollution warning alert was not issued as the pollution index reached a hazardous level over the previous five days, explained that this was due to technological limitations.
Peng Yingdeng, a researcher at the National Engineering Research Centre for Urban Pollution Control, said air pollution had been dropping for three years, yet the weather – especially this year’s severe El Nino conditions – made the air quality worse. Beijing is prone to spells of low pressure that trap air pollutants closer to the ground.
Some questioned why a red alert, the highest level in a four-tier system, was not issued to help residents cope better. A red alert would force schools to shut down, cars to stay off the road on alternate days and construction projects halted.
The city’s Environmental Protection Administration has been under fire for issuing and maintaining only the orange alert even though air quality was so bad that readings were off the charts.
Unfavourable weather, together with coal-burning in Beijing’s suburban area and vehicle exhaust emissions, were to blame for the heavy smog, authorities said. (CTA: note that goods vehicles can only enter Beijing and other big Mainland cities after midnight)
According to Beijing Severe Air Pollution Contingency Plan, a red alert can only be issued by the Beijing Emergency Management Office after being approved by the city mayor. It should be issued 24 hours in advance if air quality is forecast to be severe, with the air quality index over 300, for 72 hours.
But Peng said it was not possible to forecast air pollution precisely for a period longer than three days, and the Beijing environmental watchdog was upgrading its air quality projection system at a cost of 30 million yuan to extend forecasts to five days.
When air quality plummeted last Friday, the Beijing Municipal Environmental Monitoring Centre forecast it to improve on Saturday. But the AQI nosedived on Sunday and continued to drop on Monday and Tuesday, an environmental protection Administration official told The Beijing News.
“But technical limitation is no excuse,” Peng said. “The local environmental protection authority could have warned people of the severity of the smog.”
Source URL: http://www.scmp.com/news/china/policies-politics/article/1886320/beijings-pollution-saviour-mother-nature
People in Delhi are fashioning their own masks as hazardous smog chokes the Indian capital
The world’s most polluted major city has been blanketed in hazardous, choking smog as climate change talks started in Paris
There was a time when winter in the Indian capital was a glorious thing. Clear, sunny days and crisp cold nights.
No longer. Over the last decade air pollution has grown so rapidly that the cold weather turns the city into a grey, smog-filled health nightmare.
New Delhi has earned the dubious distinction of being the world’s most polluted major city, surpassing Beijing.
While the Chinese capital has made progress in spreading awareness about air pollution and is taking steps to address it, New Delhi has barely begun to acknowledge the problem.
But as hacking coughs linger for months and red, watery eyes itch, a slow awareness is developing.
Some people tie handkerchiefs around their mouths and noses and others wear surgical masks.
Sitesh Singh drives one of the city’s many auto rickshaws and suffers from asthma. He has started wearing a surgical mask through the winter and says it helps him breathe.
While surgical masks protect from larger pollution particles they do little to filter out smaller PM2.5, the most lethal particulate pollution that can become lodged deep inside the lungs.
While there is scant reliable data on respiratory illness in India, doctors say the number of cases is rising and the ones they see are more serious.
Over the last week PM2.5 levels have soared above 300 micrograms per cubic meter on some days, 12 times the standard set by the World Health Organisation.
When air quality hits hazardous levels in China schools may be closed, industries shut down and government vehicles taken off the roads.
India has no such emergency protocols. Anti-pollution laws remain widely ignored and unenforced.
Its fledgling air quality index covers only a few cities with a patchy network of monitors that often don’t work.
Globally, air pollution kills millions of people every year, including more than 627,000 in India, according to WHO.
India’s air pollution comes mostly from coal-fired power plants, crop burning, domestic cooking with firewood or cow dung, and vehicles burning diesel fuel.
Source URL: http://www.scmp.com/news/asia/south-asia/article/1886211/people-delhi-are-fashioning-their-own-masks-hazardous-smog
Bid to delay third runway voted down
http://thestandard.com.hk/news_detail.asp?we_cat=4&art_id=163806&sid=45678000&con_type=1&d_str=20151202&fc=4
A motion, urging the government to delay construction of the third runway, was defeated by 13 pro-establishment legislators.
Civic Party lawmaker Kwok Ka-ki moved the motion yesterday in the Three-Runway System Advisory Committee, citing as reasons labor shortages and insufficient raw materials.
But after a two-hour debate at the Legislative Council, only five pan- democrats, including Kwok, supported the motion.
He expressed fears about cost overruns, citing the funding woes of the Hong Kong-Shenzhen-Guangzhou Express Rail Link, while technical problems, such as a so-called “sky wall,” remain unresolved.
“We don’t have enough manpower and raw materials. We don’t have any agreement [with the mainland] to resolve the sky wall. This is why we are in a hurry to sign contracts. We all know that once the airport signs the contracts, there’s no way back,” Kwok said.
People Power’s Albert Chan Wai-yip urged the government to first submit all related reports because without them, lawmakers cannot make a well-informed decision.
The People’s Liberation Army Air Force requires aircraft leaving Hong Kong to reach an altitude of more than 15,700 feet before they enter mainland airspace. This altitude restriction is commonly known as the sky wall.
However, pro-Beijing lawmakers said the project should not be delayed any further.
Tourism legislator Yiu Si-wing and transport legislator Frankie Yick Chi- ming said the third runway will benefit the tourism, logistics and trading sectors.
Airport Authority chief executive officer Fred Lam Tin-fuk said sea sand will be bought from China and imported labor considered for the project, which has seen its budget increase to HK$141.5 billion from HK$84.5 billion.
Tipping points – no safe limit
http://www.airclim.org/acidnews/tipping-points-%E2%80%93-no-safe-limit
18 possible tipping points well before +2°C is reached
New research reported by Climate News Network has identified at least 37 “tipping points” that would serve as evidence that climate change has happened – and happened abruptly in one particular region.
Eighteen of them could happen even before the world warms by an average of 2°C, the proposed “safe limit” for global warming.
Researchers report in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that they “screened” the massive ensemble of climate models that inform the most recent reports from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and found evidence of abrupt regional changes in the oceans, sea ice, snow cover, permafrost and in the terrestrial biosphere that could happen as average global temperatures reached a certain level.
The models did not all simulate the same outcomes, but most of them did predict one or more abrupt regional shifts.
But the future is not an exact science according to the researchers. “Our results show that the different state-of-the-art models agree that abrupt changes are likely, but that predicting when and where they will occur remains very difficult. Also, our results show that no safe limit exists and that many abrupt shifts already occur for global warming levels much lower than 2 °C.”
The researchers explore some of the telltale indicators of such abrupt change. One of these would be the wholesale collapse of the Arctic Ocean winter ice: the Arctic is expected to be largely ice-free most summers in the next few decades. Winter ice would then become increasingly thin. Once sufficiently thin, warming and wave power would do the rest, and tend to leave clear blue water even in the coldest seasons.
Another indicator would involve massive unexpected plankton blooms in the Indian Ocean as a consequence of an upwelling of nutrient-rich waters from the ocean bottom, in response to changes in the Asian monsoon regime.
A third would involve massive snow melt on the Tibetan plateau: in 20 years, the annual average snow cover could fall from 400 kilograms per square metre to a trifling 50 kg.
A fourth signal would be massive dieback in the Amazon rainforest over a few decades, mainly because of reduced rainfall.
Yet another telltale aspect of climate change would be the sudden, paradoxical dramatic drop in temperatures in the North Atlantic, as a response to global warming and a collapse of the ocean current that carries warm surface water north, while denser, colder and increasingly more saline water in the Arctic sinks to the bottom and flows back southward.
The researchers conclude: “An additional concern is that the present generation of climate models still does not account for several mechanisms that could potentially give rise to abrupt change. This includes ice sheet collapse, permafrost carbon decomposition, and methane hydrates release.”
Reinhold Pape
Source: Climate News Network
Air pollution takes 3.3 million lives per year
http://www.airclim.org/acidnews/air-pollution-takes-33-million-lives-year
Farming emissions of ammonia are a leading cause of air pollution health damage and premature deaths in Europe and eastern United States.
Every year 3.3 million people die prematurely from the effects of outdoor air pollution worldwide – a figure that could double by 2050 unless clean-up measures are taken. This is shown in a study carried out by a team of researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry in Mainz, Germany, recently published in the journal Nature.
The study focuses on the most critical outdoor air pollutants, namely fine particulate matter (PM2.5) and ozone. It is estimated that nearly three-quarters of the deaths are due to strokes and heart attacks, and one quarter to respiratory diseases and lung cancer.
This is the first study to single out different outdoor air pollution source-sectors and estimate the number of premature deaths they each cause, considering seven source categories: residential and commercial energy use; agriculture; power generation; land transport (i.e. excluding shipping and aviation); industry; biomass burning; and natural sources.
A surprising discovery, according to the authors, is that the two largest sources of health damage from air pollution are not industry and transport, but small domestic fires and agriculture.
Residential and commercial energy use is the largest source category worldwide, contributing nearly one-third of the premature deaths, and with particularly high shares in countries such as India and Indonesia. This category includes diesel generators, small stoves and smoky open wood fires, which many people in Asia use for heating and cooking. (Note that this study’s estimate of 1.0 million deaths per year from this sector is in addition to the 3.54 million deaths per year due to indoor air pollution from essentially the same source.)
By contrast, a leading cause of air pollution in Europe, Russia, Turkey, Japan and the eastern United States is agriculture. Ammonia is emitted into the atmosphere as a result of intensive livestock farming and use of fertilizers. It then reacts with other air pollutants, namely sulphur dioxide and nitrogen oxides, to form ammonium sulphate and ammonium nitrate, which are tiny airborne particles.
Globally, agriculture is the cause of one-fifth of all deaths due to air pollution. In many European countries, its contribution is 40 per cent or higher. Since the abundance of ammonia is often a limiting factor in PM2.5 formation, a reduction in its emissions can make an important contribution to air quality improvements.
The finding that agriculture is the second-largest contributor to global mortality from PM2.5 is highly valuable, said environmental health expert Professor Michael Jerrett, at the University of California, because agriculture has generally not been seen as a major source of air pollution or premature death, and because it suggests that much more attention needs to be paid to agricultural sources, by both scientists and policymakers.
Other major sources are coal-fired power plants, industry, biomass combustion and motor vehicles. Taken together, they account for another third of premature deaths. Just under a fifth of premature deaths are attributed to natural dust sources, particularly desert dust in North Africa and the Middle East.
The authors conclude that: “Our results suggest that if the projected increase in mortality attributable to air pollution is to be avoided, intensive air quality control measures will be needed, particularly in South and East Asia.”
Christer Ågren
Source: Max Planck Institute press release 16 September, 2015
The article: “The contribution of outdoor air pollution sources to premature mortality on a global scale.” By J. Lelieveld, J. S. Evans, D. Giannadaki, M. Fnais and A. Pozzer. Published in Nature, 17 September 2015; doi: 10.1038/nature15371