Plastic Overshoot Day marks the point when the amount of plastic waste generated exceeds the world’s capacity to manage it, resulting in environmental pollution. In 2024, the global Plastic Overshoot Day is projected to occur on September 5th. Each country has its own Plastic Overshoot Day, which is determined by …
• Polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) are highly toxic chemicals whose production and use has been banned all over the world. • PCBs are heat resistant, but when they burn at high temperatures they produce one of the most lethal toxins. • PCBs degrade very slowly in the environment, polluting it for …
Mixtures of polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) were manufactured for commercial purposes from 1929 onwards. They were chiefly used as coolants and insulation fluids in transformers and capacitors, and as lubricants and fire retardants. Most PCBs do not easily react to other chemicals and are heat-resistant. There are some 180 commonly known …
PCBs have polluted rivers and the Great Lakes of the US mid-west. Studies conducted on the Mississippi, the Ohio rivers, and the Fox have found PCBs associated with the sediments and the organic content in the water. PCBs were most concentrated in fish in the Mississippi near Pepin (Wisconsin) and …
Manufacture, use and disposal of PCBs was restricted in many countries in the 1970s. Japan banned production in 1972, Canada in 1977. The Organisation of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) restricted their use in February 1973, and phased them out by end-1988. The OECD set the maximum permissible levels of …
europeans will continue to be exposed to significant levels of dioxin caused by the disposal of scrap cars, despite a proposed legislation agreed by the European Union ( eu ) Commission. The Commission has dropped plans to include in the legislation the provision for phasing out of polyvinylchloride, ( pvc) …
the Central Pollution Control Board (cpcb) has finished work on the first part of the zoning atlas that classifies areas according to their ability to house particular industries. The first effort of its kind in India, the atlas currently covers 17 districts spread across 12 states. The Zoning Atlas for …
Ecological devastation in China is rampant: acrid, blackened air in industrial cities; rain that turns inky and corrosive with acidity; noxious mounds of untreated garbage and hazardous sludge spewed out by millions of township enterprises; dead fish in the Huaihe river; carbon dioxide emissions that account for one-tenth of the …
a huge stockpile of lethal waste has been discovered next to the 2000 Olympics site in Sydney which is contaminated with poisonous dioxins. Greepeace, the international green group, has found shocking levels of dioxins, almost 60 times higher than the levels produced by the world's first major dioxin accident in …
ENVIRONMENTALISTS from Japan and other Countries are protesting against a government -funded dike, which has dried out the Isahaya wetlands in the Nagasaki Prefecture. The once-thriving wet-lands have turned into a muddy cesspool containing dead sea organisms. Government officials say that the dike is necessary to reclaim land, control view …
In answer to queries whether it was not too early for conceiving a project like the one in question, Anil Agarwal, the Centre for Science and Environment's director, had pointed out that it was, in fact, late. The Green Rating Project should have begun with liberalisation
in an unprecedented move , the Spanish court recently sent a factory owner to prison for causing damage to the environment. For the first time in Europe, such a sentence has been awarded on environmental grounds. The factory owner, Jose Puignero, who owns textile firms in northeastern Spain, was sentenced …
A cyanide spill in the Guijiang river near Wuzhou city in southwestern Guangxi province recently resulted in the death of a large number of fish in the river and suspension of water supply by some local water companies. The spill occurred when a truck carrying 10 tonnes of cyanide fell …
FREDERICK NORONHA PANAJI years of environmental campaigning in the country's smallest state seems to have made some dent: politicians here are willing to concede that the environment is a matter of concern. The Goan chief minister, Pratapsing Rane, while presenting the 1997 budget in the last week of March, repeatedly …
On the Comptroller and Auditor General's (cag) report tabled in the Karnataka Assembly in 1996, which identified 10,888 polluting industries in the state (till March 1995): In 1992, some of the industries were exempted (from seeking environmental clearance), under the exempted category of non-polluting industries, which meant that we could …
IT MAY have been slow in coming, but now a definite respect for green tax measures can be discerned in the developed world, especially in the US. A recent survey of state environmental tax provisions by the Centre for Global Change (CGC), US, has revealed that various states have enacted …
lightning could be primarily responsible for global warming, as it produces a quarter of the planet's concentration of nitrogen oxides (nox), according to a recent study conducted by Colin Price and his team at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, us (New Scientist, Vol 153, No 2066). The high …
The peppered moth has typically white-coloured wings, finely speckled with black. But in the first half of the 19th century, virtually all peppered moths had entirely black wings
The damage that textile production causes to the environment has been a bone of contention for environmentalists. Pollutants from textile production (zinc, sulphides or copper salts) are non bio-degradable. But now, a French fashion designer, Olivier Lapidus, is all set to launch a collection of clothes made from eco-friendly fibres …
on january 6, the Gujarat High Court (ghc) formulated a plan to set up an environment audit scheme to tackle the menace of pollution in the state. The proposed audits would be conducted by the Gujarat pollution control board (gpcb) and would primarily apply to two categories of effluent discharging …
