Liu Xiao spends her weeks visiting sludge and organic waste treatment plants across China. The travel can be tiring but as a technical and policy adviser on waste management she must help implement President
Philippine fast-food chains are to begin offering half servings of rice in a move to help the government ease demand for the staple and avert a possible shortage with global rice inventories sitting at 25-year lows. Jollibee Foods, the country's biggest restaurant chain, with more than 600 stores, said its operations managers were planning how to implement the plan.Its Chinese fast-food unit, Chowking, is set to offer half portions of rice from April 1. McDonald's is also considering serving half portions in more than 250 stores.
Energy companies cannot be charged a fully commercial price for disposing of nuclear waste without "killing the prospect" of a new generation of reactors, a senior UK government adviser will warn today. The analysis will spur opposition to Britain's contentious drive to expand its nuclear capacity. Gordon Brown, the prime minister, will today underscore his determination to attract investors to build new reactors at his summit with Nicolas Sarkozy, the French president.
The new government of South Korea, among the world's largest emitters of greenhouse gases, plans to cap emissions at 2005 levels for the next five years in spite of Seoul's exemption from cuts under the Kyoto protocol. The environment ministry presented the proposal to freeze emissions until 2012 in a report to Lee Myung-bak, the president, in a bid to join international efforts to fight global warming.
Eon's shock offer yesterday to sell its prized electricity transmission grid could have a domino effect on the European Union's energy sector. The German company struck a deal with EU competition regulators to divest the asset to settle two antitrust cases against it, an important breakthrough in Brussels' efforts to prise open electricity and gas markets.
Laurie Hyman had a busy time at this month's New York Toy Show, the US industry's biggest annual event, with more than 1,200 exhibitors. Her start-up company, Green Toys, sells toy teacups, bowls and gardening tools that are made in California from recycled plastic milk containers, and sold in boxes made from recycled cardboard. "We're getting a lot of interest - from big retailers, from small retailers, from everyone," she says, showing off a jar holding the white shredded plastic used to make the toys.
Russia's environmental watchdog yesterday said it had filed a Rbs4.35bn ($180m) pollution suit against Norilsk Nickel, the Russian mining group, in its largest ever environmental complaint against a Russian company.
BP is looking for ways to realise the value of its alternative energy investments, which the oil and gas group believes are worth up to $7bn (
ExxonMobil yesterday tried to persuade the US Supreme Court it should not have to pay $2.5bn in punitive damages to victims of the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill, the largest such award in US history. The justices are being asked to bring closure to the lengthy legal dispute. The US business community is hoping that they will use the case, which involves a tanker crash that released 11m gallons of oil into Alaska's Prince William Sound, to discourage large punitive damage awards.
To its opponents, China's Three Gorges dam on the Yangtze River is all the more tragic because it has a historical precedent. Built in the 1950s, the huge Sanmenxia
