Pesticide manufacturers and the Federal Government have reached an agreement to phase out diazion, one of the most widely used pesticides in the US for indoor applications in Mar 2001 and for all lawn, garden and turf applications in Dec 2003.

The USEPA is phasing out the use of the pesticide under the Food Quality Protection Act as a measure to eliminate the use of organophosphate pesticides that are considered to pose the greatest potential risk to children.

The USEPA announced that it is maintaining the current standard, introduced in 1977, for radio nuclides in drinking water and has added a new standard for uranium.

The final standards are as follows:

• combined radium 226/228 of 5 picocuries per litre (pCi/L)
• gross alpha standard for alpha emitters of 15 pCi/L, not including radon and uranium
• combined standard of 4 milligrams per year for beta emitters
• 30 microgram per litre for uranium.

Environmental Polymers Group (EPG) have invented a plastic material, which can self-destruct. The company has beaten some of the big plastic manufacturers such as Du Pont and invented a material that is as revolutionary as it is green.

The secret is to make a plastic that is biodegradable and soluble in water under the right conditions and to make such a plastic available to industry. A material known as polyvinyl alcohol (PVOH) already exists and is used as a sizing agent and a coating for drug capsules. However, it cannot be made into pellets, the medium through which more than 60 per cent of the world's plastic is processed, without being spoilt.

Over the next three years, the British government will more than double its annual expenditure on projects to encourage the use and development of green vehicles. The additional expenditure for 2001-2004 are:

• £30mil for the on-going Powershift programme to promote cleaner fuel vehicles - this will support the purchase of 35,000 vehicles including gas and electric vehicles
• £30mil to expand the Cleaner Vehicle Programme (CVP) which was set up earlier this year to tackle pollution from vehicles such as buses and taxis
• £9mil to support the introduction of technologies such as fuel cell and hybrid vehicles

The Japanese government will allow prefecture governments to slash by up to 50% taxes on motor vehicles equipped with devices capable of cutting harmful pollutants in exhaust gases.

Three brackets of tax cuts - from 13% to 50 % - will apply to vehicles that beat current regulations by a wide margin. In addition, 10% more in taxes will be imposed on diesel vehicles more than 11 years old. Prefecture governments will be allowed to levy 10% more taxes on gasoline-powered vehicles over 13 years old.

Renewable energy certificates will start trading within Europe on 1 Jan 2001, when a test phase involving six countries will begin. The six countries are Denmark, Netherlands, Sweden, Norway, Greece and Italy. France and Belgium has also expressed interest and will likely join at a later stage of the testing.

Certificates can be bought or sold separately from the electricity produced by renewable plants, to give value to the environmental benefits of such plants. The organization aims to reach a traded volume of 100 gigawatt hours by the end of the testing period, which will last 18 months, with a third of it traded internationally. One certificate will be issued for each 1,000 kilowatt hour or 1 megawatt hour produced by renewable plant.

Scientists at NASA and the Scripps Institution of Oceanography reported that airborne black soot has the capacity to raise regional temperatures far more than carbon dioxide, a major greenhouse gas that also results from combustion.

According to the research team, the intense sunlight of the tropics heats the soot present in polluted air. This heating burns off the flat tops of shallow cumulus clouds for hundreds of miles downwind of pollution sources. With less cloud cover reflecting sunlight back to space, there is increased solar energy that reaches the Earth's surface and the lower atmosphere. This can significantly heat the atmosphere and oceans, according to the new findings.