• PHILIPPINES
  President Arroyo Protects Ancient Forests, Rare Eagle

• GERMANY
  First German Nuclear Power Plant Taken Off the Grid

• RUSSIA
  Activists Make Nuclear Waste a Russian Election Issue

• EUROPE
  Europe to Wrap Food in Active and Intelligent Packaging

• CANADA
  Mountains of Electronic Waste Pile Up

• INDIA
  Students Document Ganges River Pollution

President Arroyo Protects Ancient Forests, Rare Eagle

The decree expands the Peñablanca Protected Landscape and Seascape to more than 25 times its former size and connects the expanded area to the Northern Sierra Madre National Park. It protects the rare and endangered Philippine eagle and some of the country's last old growth forests.

The combined reserves are inhabited by 28 threatened vertebrate species including three considered critically endangered by the IUCN-World Conservation Union - the Philippine eagle, Pithecophaga jefferyi, the Philippine crocodile, Crocodylus mindorensis, and the Northern Luzon shrew rat, Crunomys fallax.

"The Peñablanca expansion is a huge conservation achievement for this nation," said Department of Environment and Natural Resources Secretary Elisea Gozun. "But when one takes into account that this new area is in the heart of the Sierra Madre Biodiversity Corridor - one of the richest regions in the world - this expansion really has global repercussions."

"The Philippines is one of the highest priority megadiversity countries and is considered by many to be the hottest of the biodiversity hotspots," said Russell Mittermeier, president of Conservation International (CI) which worked with Philippine government agencies and local conservationists to secure the expansion.

"For years, researchers have said that the Philippines could be the site of the world's next wave of extinctions," Mittermeier said. "Today's announcement, however, gives us reason for hope and we applaud the government for taking this bold measure."

The newly protected area encompasses the Callao Cave complex, a popular destination for national tourists, and stretches east, to cover both flanks of the Sierra Madre Mountain Range. It covers unique coastal and marine ecosystems, rich in endangered species such as whale sharks, giant clams and marine turtles.

CI-Philippines Director Romeo Trono said, "Peñablanca is an area that has been under pressure by illegal logging and wildlife hunting for years, but now we have the legal framework and landscape connectivity required to more effectively protect this region."

The Sierra Madre Biodiversity Corridor is a patchwork of protected areas strung along the 1.7 million hectare mountain range. Some 45 percent of all the country's plant species and more than half of its threatened animal species are found in th Sierra Madre forests. CI works with the World Wildlife Fund and other organizations to safeguard the corridor.

Director of the Protected Areas and Wildlife Bureau Wilfrido Pollisco and the Critical Ecosystem Partnership Fund (CEPF) also played major roles in making the Peñablanca expansion a reality. The CEPF is a joint initiative of Conservation International, the Global Environment Facility, the government of Japan, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation and the World Bank.

First German Nuclear Power Plant Taken Off the Grid

Environment Minister Juergen Trittin of the Green Party welcomed the closure of the 31 year old Stade station as proof that nuclear power has no future in Germany.

Power plant operator E.ON said the Stade plant - the second oldest in Germany - would have closed anyway on economic grounds. The firm has transferred an unused quota of one year's electricity production under the phaseout deal to newer plants.

In the USA, Trittin said, nuclear power plants are licensed to run 60 years, but Germany has halved this running time for a "safe" future energy structure. The Greens made nuclear phaseout a condition for forming the so-called Red/Green coalition with Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder's Social Democrats in 1998.

Before 2020, Germany must replace well over 40,000 megawatts of nuclear power generating capacity, Trittin said. In the European Union today the majority of the countries, such as Denmark, Austria and Italy, are atomic energy free. Others are moving away from nuclear power, either explicitly like Belgium, Sweden and Germany - or implicitly like the Netherlands or the United Kingdom, Trittin said.

While Stade never saw the large, the militant anti-nuclear demonstrations as other German power plants did, Trittin said the anti-nuclear power plant movement has had great success.

It stopped construction of the breeder reactor in Kalkar, and today a recreational park stands on that site, he said. "The building of the reprocessing plant in Wackersdorf was prevented against the embittered resistance of a Franz Josef bunch," Trittin said, and even in Bavaria all new nuclear power plants have been removed from the planning process.

For the next 10 years, the nuclear power plant at Stade will still stand, and the decommissioning process will provide much work until 2015, the environment minister said.

Germany still does not have a permanent nuclear waste repository, as location is a problem. "So far there is no suitable ultimate waste disposal location, Trittin said, promising to change the country's atomic energy law to make a "transparent selective procedure" obligatory.

Activists Make Nuclear Waste a Russian Election Issue

Two weeks ahead of the December 7 elections to the State Duma (Parliament), Russian environmental groups will organize protests and information pickets, actions and performances aimed at informing voters across country on the positions of candidates on nuclear waste issue.

Ecodefense, Russia's national anti-nuclear group since 1998, says actions will take place 20 large cities on November 25, conducted by some 50 environmental groups.

The campaign is aimed at building a strong civil society by forcing parliamentarians to be more responsible.

"The new elections are coming, and we have to remind voters which Duma members voted in favor of the import of nuclear waste," Ecodefense said. "Through effective public pressure we need to force the new parliament to disapprove the nuclear waste legislation as amoral and anti-democratic."

In 2001, the Duma approved legislation allowing the Ministry of Atomic Energy (MinAtom) and the nuclear industry to import high-level radioactive waste such as spent nuclear fuel.

At the same time, nearly 90 percent of citizens demonstrated their opposition to the new legislation, holding hundreds of actions all across the country. The parliament ignored mass public opinion.

The Russian nuclear industry has announced it will import over 20,000 metric tons of nuclear waste from across the world for long term storage. The industry expects to earn nearly $20 billion for new reactor construction and spent nuclear fuel reprocessing.

But Ecodefense says that for the past several years the nuclear industry has been under strong public pressure, and cannot find new customers for its spent fuel services.

At the same time, Russia is having problems dealing with its own spent nuclear fuel. In Murmansk today, Victor Akhunov, head of the Russian Ministry of Atomic Energy's Department of Ecology and Nuclear Installation Decommissioning, told a meeting of an International Atomic Energy Agency expert group that Russia has 200 metric tons of spent nuclear naval fuel that it has little chance of reprocessing. He called the backlog Minatom's "most difficult current challenge."

Europe to Wrap Food in Active and Intelligent Packaging

David Byrne, the EU Health and Consumer Protection Commissioner said Monday, “Active and intelligent packaging should be allowed in Europe, provided it complies with the principles of EU food safety law. This proposal also extends our "farm to fork” approach to safety so that any materials clearly intended to come into contact with food can be identified and traced.”

The new regulation was prepared following broad consultation with the EU member states as well as professional and consumer organisations.

The proposal sets up traceability requirements so that materials coming into contact with food are identified at all stages of production and distribution. This is seen by the commission and stakeholders as an important safeguard in the event of any possible contamination.

Food contact materials are all items intended to touch food. This includes packaging such as plastic wrapping, and glass bottles as well as objects like coffee machines and soup spoons. The revised regulation also covers adhesives and printing inks.

Active packaging interacts with food to reduce oxygen levels or add flavorings or preservatives. “Intelligent” packaging can monitor the food and transmit information on its quality.

Currently, this type of packaging cannot be introduced into the EU because existing legislation states that food contact materials should not trigger any chemical reactions which might change the food's taste, appearance, texture or smell or alter its chemical composition. This applies even if the changes are beneficial.

Fresh foods sometimes produce gas or moisture inside the packaging as they age naturally. This can encourage microorganisms to grow.

For example, oxygen can cause bread and pizza crusts to grow mold. It also causes vegetable oils to go rancid and makes other foods lose their flavor. Some types of active packaging contain oxygen scavengers which absorb the gas the food releases. It cuts down the risk of food poisoning and it also helps the food keep its flavor for longer.

The proposal will now be examined by the European Parliament and the Council under the co-decision procedure.

Mountains of Electronic Waste Pile Up Across Canada

Nationally, the Canadian Council of Ministers of the Environment, this year chaired by British Columbia, has made electronic waste a priority at its annual meeting in Victoria next week, says B.C. Minister of Water, Land and Air Protection Joyce Murray.

This week, British Columbia is leading program staff from each province in the development of a common set of guiding principles for dealing with electronic waste. The principles are intended to provide some certainty and greater economies of scale to recyclers.

The province will include electronics in new Extended Producer Responsibility Regulation the government is developing, Murray said today. "We will work with electronics producers and retailers to set a date for implementing the program here in British Columbia – the sooner the better."

To prepare for their new responsibilities, electronics producers created the Electronics Product Stewardship (EPS) Canada last year. This not-for-profit organization is braced for an onslaught of provincial governments demanding recycling and take back programs.

EPS Canada President Dave Betts told the e-Scrap 2003 conference in Orlando, Florida in October that eight provinces representing over 95 percent of the Canadian population have passed stewardship program laws or are in the process of amending existing legislation.

The legislation typically does not mention electronics. Instead, the provincial environment minister is given the authority to request that industry develop and implement a program, explained Betts.

Ontario's Waste Diversion Act covering electronic waste was recently passed into law. So far Ontario’s Environment Minister Leona Dombrowsky has asked for programs covering consumer packaging, oil and tires, but not electronics.

"No province, including Ontario, has asked for a program for electronics hardware," Betts said, "but we know we are on everyone’s target list and we fully expect that within six months two or three provinces will request the development of a program."

The Federation of Canadian Municipalities (FCM), has been going through a consultation process to determine what role municipal governments should play in the management of electronic waste. The consultation gathered input from municipalities across Canada between January and March 2003 using three methods: an online survey to 1,000 municipal governments; regional consultations in Nova Scotia, Quebec, Alberta and British Columbia; and a national workshop.

The FCM is expected to produce its report shortly.

Murray says the sooner all parties coordinate to deal with electronic waste the better. After lead-acid batteries, electronic waste is the biggest source of heavy metals in landfills. Each monitor and television set contains one to five kilograms of lead, and mercury is used in plasma televisions and to backlight many stereos.

Christmas is coming, she warns, with its parade of electronic gifts moving into Canadian homes and its waste stream of obsolete electronics headed for Canadian landfills.

Students Document Ganges River Pollution

EcoFriends has trained hundreds of students from several Kanpur high schools and public schools as Ganga Ambassadors. They spent the week of November 7 through 14 monitoring the river for pollution. The reports will be shared with the media and sent to various levels of government authorities.

EcoFriends has documented the release of millions of liters of raw sewage and toxic tannery effluent through more than a dozen drains, though all the drains were tapped through interception and diversion works under Ganga Action Plan (GAP). The plan, created and run by the National River Conservation Authority is supposed to intercept, divert and treat 882 million liters per day in dozens of towns along the river.

But the ambitious plan has fallen short in practice. Kanpur's Ganga Ambassador students found that human and animal corpses are "consigned to the river unabashedly, despite the electric crematoria constructed under GAP being in perfect order," EcoFriends says. Open defecation, cattle wallowing, and washing of clothes in and along the river continue without restraint, despite several judicial pronouncements against such polluting activities.

Kanpur is downstream from distilleries, paper mills, sugar mills and chemical units in Meerut, Rampur, Gajraula Industrial Estate and other towns of Western Uttar Pradesh and Uttaranchal which discharge their contaminated, multi-colored waste into the Ram Ganga and Kali rivers, the tributaries of Ganga which meet it upstream of Kanpur. The industrial effluents generated by upstream towns aggravate Kanpur’s drinking water problem.

In Kanpur, some 350 leathermaking facilities add to the pollution of the holy river. Last year, Kanpur residents and businesses "went on the warpath" said EcoFriends, as the taps in many locations emitted black, brown, yellow stinking water.

As a result of EcoFriends' efforts to involve the people of Kanpur in maintaining a clean river, the GAP Project Planning and Coordination Unit is starting a monthly newsletter to enhance the public participation in the project.

The object of this campaign, the group says, is to mount pressure on the government agencies to ensure efficiency, transparency and honesty in GAP implementation. They also want to make polluting industries responsible for cleaning up their messes, and set a precedent for similar action in other towns.