The European Parliament has tabled a bill that will require EU states to recycle 65% of their packaging waste by weight, against a current minimum of 55%. The bill also seeks to amend a 1994 European Commission law on recycling and broaden the definition of packaging material. New items like CD cases, tea bags, ink cartridges, and even flower pots, are likely to comply with waste recycling rules.

The new bill proposes different recycling rates for glass, metal, paper and plastic. It would also offer incentives to promote goods derived from recycled packaging waste.

The bill will require the EU states to ensure that by Jan 2006, new packaging are allowed into the market only if producers have done everything to minimise its damage to the environment.

KleanAire Technology has developed a new technology known as "Continuous Dry Flue Gas Scrubbing" that could cut emissions from thermal power facilities by as much as 19 percent, and reduce consumption of chemicals used in the emissions scrubbing process by almost 40 percent - allowing coal burning power facilities to operate cleaner and more efficiently than power plants using natural gas.

The technology is an advancement upon the widely used dry flue gas scrubbing process that is utilised because of its high efficiency at removing toxic particles resulting from coal combustion. However, until now, the dry flue gas scrubbing was incapable of operating at high efficiencies continuously. The new breakthrough provides an efficient method of ensuring that contaminated waste material does not escape from the scrubbing system and into the ambient air prior to being cleaned.

A group of US researchers from the Clark Atlantic University, DOE National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) and Scientific Carbons Inc. (SCI) have successfully developed a fertilizer while producing hydrogen from peanut shells and a sequestered carbon. This is one of the largest biomass to hydrogen projects in the US.

In the US, just six of the crops developed through biotechnology - soybeans, corn, cotton, papaya, and virus resistant squash and canola - can help improve farm income by US $1.5 million per year and reduce pesticide volume by 46 million pounds.

Research carried out at the National Center for Food and Agriculture Policy (NCFAP) to cover 40 case studies of 27 crops found that the other 21 crops when eventually planted, would improve farm income by another US$1 billion, and reduce pesticide volume by 117 million pounds.

Program director of NCFAP said that biotechnology offers the only practical way to control diseases that reduce yields and threaten entire crops. In nearly every case that was evaluated, biotechnology provides equal or better control of harmful pests at reduced cost.

In 2001, the aluminum recycling rate in the US dropped to 49.2%, the lowest level in 15 years. This figure translates to about 50 billion cans thrown away in landfills, incinerated, or littered last year.

According to Container Recycling Institute (CRI), this can wasting represents a tremendous lost opportunity to save energy and resources. The energy required to replace the 50 billion cans trashed last year was equivalent to 16 million barrels of crude oil - enough to meet the electricity needs of all the homes in Chicago, Dallas, Detroit, Seattle, and San Francisco.

New York Utilities serving half a million electricity consumers, announced a cooperative effort to promote the use of electric vehicles (EVs) in New York State.

The municipal electric systems and rural electric cooperatives of New York State are served by hydroelectricity from the New York Power Authority (NYPA). By using that clean, renewable power to fuel emission-free EVs, New York's public power communities will showcase their commitment to environmental quality.

The power systems hope to demonstrate the practical day to day use of EVs, and make EVs available to schools for educational purposes and to community groups to raise public awareness of the benefits of EVs.

Findings by the researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology revealed that nitrates could change the behaviour of arsenic and other toxic metals in some lakes.

Nitrate pollution, which arises from sources such as automobile exhaust, wastewater disposal and fertilizers, and associated with noxious impacts such as excessive algal growth, plays an important part in lake dynamics than previously thought. It is found to react with naturally occurring iron to form iron oxides that absorb arsenic, thus helping to reduce arsenic pollution in lakes.

The work aids scientists' understanding of how arsenic moves through polluted, stratified lakes, and has implications for other pollutants such as phosphate, lead, cadmium and zinc. These contaminants are also absorbed by iron oxides, and so are expected to have similar behaviours in lakes.

After more than a decade of scientific review, the US EPA finally released its health assessment for diesel exhaust. The pollutant is classified as a likely human carcinogen at environmental levels of exposure, a likely cause for lung cancer, asthma and other respiratory effects. Part of the ambient levels of particulate matter and diesel soot can exacerbate cardiovascular and respiratory conditions and lead to premature death.

Matsushita Electric Industrial Co. Ltd (MEI), known for National-brand refrigerators, announced that it plans to make all models of over 300 litres capacity home-use refrigerators CFC-free, which will minimise effect on global warming, by the end of 2003.

In order to prevent global warming, MEI has taken several initiatives over the years:

1. switched from CFCs to alternate CFCs used in its refrigerators in 1993;
2. switched from CFCs to cyclopentane as the foaming agent used for the insulation in 1994;
3. released a "CFC-free refrigerator" that uses isobutane instead of alternate CFCs in Feb 2002.

Trading environmental credits is an emerging market designed to allow firms that fail to meet emissions standards to buy credits from other firms that undercut their targets.

Billed as the first of its kind in the Asia-Pacific region and soon to be followed by other similar private investment vehicles, Rothschild Australia and Australia-based environmental group E3 International seeks to raise a $2 million fund to allow highly polluting companies to offset their emissions by buying carbon credits from cleaner firms.

The Carbon Ring Consortium will be open for investments under end October this year, and wrapped up in Jun 2003, when the carbon credits purchased will be distributed to investors pro rata.

According to a government report, South Korea's industrial emission of carbon dioxide is on par with developed countries and pressure for its early participation in the global greenhouse gas reduction programme under the Kyoto Protocol is likely to grow.

Carbon dioxide emissions from all sources in South Korea are estimated to have doubled to 494 million metric tons in 2000 from 249 million metric tons in 1990, making the country the 10^th heaviest producer of carbon dioxide emission.

A study by National Institute of Environment Research showed that the utilities and manufacturing account for 66.9 percent and 32.5 percent of industrial carbon dioxide emissions, respectively.

Australia's Third National Communication on Climate Change shows that its greenhouse gas emissions in 2008 - 2012 are expected to be 111 percent of 1990 levels - just 3 percent above the target it accepted during Kyoto Protocol negotiations.

This newly announced figures showed that the government's A$1 billion investment in greenhouse programmes is having a major impact on emissions, saving 60 million tonnes of greenhouse gases annually.

Despite the likelihood of Australia's being able to meet the target given the relatively small gap, the communication states that the Australian Government will not ratify the protocol, "unless and until it is demonstrated that it is in the national interest to do so."