The European Parliament has sent its member governments legislation recently to force industry and others who pollute the environment to pay for the mess they make. The polluter-pays bill, which has been in the works for the past 20 years, received fresh impetus from several oil spills in recent years causing huge damage to EU coastlines.

The legal norm across the EU now is that polluters are not liable for the full costs of repairing the damage they do to water, soil, and animal habitats. This would change under the new bill that would also make it mandatory for companies to obtain environmental liability insurance. That way, if polluters go bankrupt, taxpayers are not left holding the cleanup bill.

The polluter-pays bill would leave it to the EU governments to enforce the polluter-pays rule and to determine the size of any payments.

Staples Inc, a US leading company in mobile electronic devices, has announced a chainwide recycling programme that could provide its customers the resources to recycle used electronic devices and rechargeable batteries. The recycling programme would help reduce the amount of electronic wastes and their hazardous elements from going into landfills.

Under the programme, Staples customers could drop off their used cell phones, PDAs, pagers, chargers and rechargeable batteries in any of its stores. The used mobile electronic devices will then be refurbished by a mobile electronics recycling company for reuse, usually in the developing countries.

A US company, Farr Air Pollution Control has introduced a new portable dust collector, called "Zephyr® II" collector. The equipment is targeted at plants requiring periodic dust collection at various locations or during plant maintenance. It could be used to capture welding fumes, grinding dusts, dry dusts, soldering fumes and other airborne particles.

The dust collector comes as a self-contained unit and has an airflow capacity of 700 cfm at the capture hood: The user just needs only to plug in the power and compressed air supply line, and install the fume arm and hood with 360-degree positioning. Dust entering the collector is removed by three stages of filtration. The main filter, which uses a reverse pulse cleaning system to extend filter life, offers 99.99 percent efficiency for 0.5 micron and larger particles. The filter is also washable for virtually unlimited service life.

General Motors Corp (GM), the world's largest automaker, has announced that starting next year it would progressively make its new "displacement on demand" technology standard equipment on SUVs and pickups.

Displacement on demand, or DOD, technology applied on a V8 engine would automatically shuts off half of a V8's eight cylinders, temporarily turning it into a more efficient four-cylinder engine, when the vehicles are cruising at a constant speed or carrying a light load.

GM said that the DOD technology, which costs a nominal amount for the automaker to install, could help it to meet rising fuel economy standards for pickup trucks, SUVs and vans.

The U.N. Commission on Sustainable Development has set the schedule to address global environmental issues after a two-day meeting. The meeting built on last year's Earth Summit in Johannesburg, South Africa, which set a goal to halve by 2015 the proportion of people earning less than a dollar a day while preserving the planet's resources for future generations - known as sustainable development.

The initial two-year period, for 2004 and 2005, will focus on issues of water, sanitation, and human settlements. In 2006 and 2007, the focus will be on energy for sustainable development, industrial development, air pollution and atmosphere, and climate change. In 2008 and 2009, the issues will be agriculture, rural development, land, drought, desertification and Africa.

Topics for future years include transportation, chemicals, forests, biodiversity, mountains, oceans and seas and disaster management and vulnerability.

Under a complex weighting system, Russia's ratification to the Kyoto Protocol is crucial for the protocol to come into force after the withdrawal of the United States.

Environment Commissioner Margot Wallstrom said the Russia's decision lies in the hand of their President (Vladimir Putin) and Prime Minister (Mikhail Kasyanov). An important checkpoint to measure Russian action would be the EU-Russia Summit in St Petersburg in late May 2003.

Wallstrom said that Russia could not expect any more help from the EU to finance the treaty. On the other hand, United States, which opposes the treaty, was actively working to get Russia on its side.

The UN Framework Convention on Climate Change said that UK was well on course to meet its goals to cut greenhouse gas emissions under the Kyoto Protocol to curb global warming. UK has achieved 12.8 percent reduction in greenhouse gas emission between 1990 and 2000.

The UK has also set a domestic target to make a cut almost twice as big as its Kyoto goal by cutting greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide by 23 percent. It uses fiscal measures such as the renewables obligation and the climate change levy, a carbon tax on industry, to achieve the emissions reduction.

UK government has reported that the first year of the voluntary UK emissions trading scheme started in Apr 2002, saw around 900 companies exchange rights to emit over seven million tonnes worth of carbon dioxide. Emissions trading enables companies in UK that cut greenhouse gas emissions above government agreed targets to sell allowances to those, which are unable to meet the reductions.

The UK government said it had allocated around 31.5 million emissions allowances to companies, over 7.2 million of which had been exchanged in about 2,000 transfers in the scheme's first year. In overall, the national carbon dioxide emission has reduced by 13.5 million tonnes in 2002, which is more than three times its target of a 3.5 million tonnes cut.

The carbon dioxide trading scheme implemented by UK would help it to meet its commitments under the Kyoto Protocol on Climate Change, ahead of mandatory European trading from 2005.