Today we will look at those far-right wing global banking NGOs pretending to be 'left' social benefit' when they are simply HIDING AND LYING about how ENVIRONMENTALLY DEVASTATING the expansion of FOREIGN ECONOMIC ZONES to a nation will become. No matter how much FRIENDS OF THE EARTH---SIERRA CLUB-----LEAGUE OF CONSERVATION VOTERS sell the idea that GLOBAL GREEN CORPORATIONS are mitigating the effects of GLOBAL FACTORIES inside FOREIGN ECONOMIC ZONES----they are not. These far-right wing FAKE environmental NGOs support Clinton/Obama neo-liberals every election as 'LEFT DEMOCRATS'.
As overseas third world nations expand Foreign Economic Zones inside their nations often because GLOBAL FACTORIES have created such toxic environments people cannot live in them-----so too are those FOREIGN ECONOMIC ZONES expanding into AFRICA and NORTH AMERICA already doing the same. This HYPER-EXPANSION of GLOBAL FACTORIES will deplete all natural resources inside that colonized nation. None of this is necessary------stopping this expansion will allow 99% of sovereign citizens to conserve resources for a thousand and more years----we would not have LEVEL 5 DEGREE CLIMATE CHANGE without all this expansion of GLOBAL FACTORIES and FOREIGN ECONOMIC ZONES.
It is the job of FAKE ENVIRONMENTAL NGOS like FRIENDS OF THE EARTH----SIERRA CLUB------LEAGUE OF CONSERVATION VOTERS----along with far-right wing global banking 1% GLOBAL GREEN CORPORATION PARTY to pretend these next generation GLOBAL FACTORIES will not devastate the environment----especially in North America. What are we seeing in North America MOVING FORWARD? Strip mining of every mineral in all our US NATIONAL PARKS.
Remember, our REAL left environmental organizations like all other 'left' NGOs have these few decades national and global leaders tied to far-right wing global banking 1%-----killing REAL LEFT ENVIRONMENTALISM.
How developing countries are paying a high price for the global mineral boom
John Vidal, graphic by Pete Guest
Sat 15 Aug 2015 06.44 EDT
Soaring worldwide demand for the minerals used in electronic devices such as smartphones and laptops has left a legacy of social conflict and human rights violations across Asia, Latin America and Africa
John Vidal, graphic by Pete Guest
Sat 15 Aug 2015 06.44 EDT Last modified on Sat 2 Dec 2017 00.25 EST
Mining conflicts around the world.
Click to expand or download here. Source: EJATLAS.ORG Illustration: Pete Guest for the Observer
A 200ft deep pit gapes where three years ago stood a mountain. Fields where small farmers planted rice and grew fruit are now an industrial site, and wooden houses in the old village of Didipio have been abandoned – the community moved to make way for a large-scale gold mine owned by a New Zealand company.
The Filipino mine, guarded by high fences and bitterly contested by the indigenous Bugkalot people who fear pollution, spills and ill-health, is just one of scores of major new gold and copper mines opened in the last few years to meet soaring world demand for minerals used in electronic devices such as smartphones and laptops.
While the spot price of gold and other minerals has recently seen its greatest annual decline in more than 30 years, the legacy of the global mineral boom is social conflict, human rights violations and environmental devastation across Asia, Latin America and Africa, says a global investigation into hundreds of the world’s mineral mines.
As angry communities in Colorado last week counted the cost of a toxic spill from an old gold mine, a new atlas of 600 international mining and oil companies has identified more than 1,500 ongoing conflicts raging over water, land, spills, pollution, ill-health, relocations, waste, land grabs, floods and falling water levels.
The EU-funded report by academics at 23 universities and environmental justice groups in Africa, India and Latin America has identified 142 disputes involving gold mines, 130 at coal mines, 96 at copper mines and 73 at silver mines, with India, Colombia, Nigeria, Brazil, Ecuador, Peru and the Philippines having the most. They ranged from longstanding legal disputes to armed conflicts.
The companies whose mines have attracted the most accusations of human rights abuses and environmental conflict are some of the largest in the world, mostly listed on the London stock exchange. They include AngloGold Ashanti, Rio Tinto, Barrick Gold, BHP Billiton, Glencore Xstrata and Newmont Mining. Between them they are involved in 75 conflicts in countries ranging from Colombia, Burma and the Democratic Republic of the Congo to the US, Zambia and the Philippines, says the database.
“Across Latin America, Asia and Africa, more and more community lands, rivers and ecosystems are being despoiled and devoured by mining activities,” says Philippe Sibaud, author of two reports on the extractive industries for the Gaia Foundation. “The rights of farming and indigenous communities are increasingly ignored in the race to grab land and water. The hunger for these materials is a growing threat to the necessities for life.”
Heavy metals discolor the water north of Durango, Colorado, following the Gold King Mine spill. An estimated one million gallons of toxic wastewater was released into the Animas River. Photograph: Jeremy Wade Shockley for the GuardianIn many cases, governments have had to call on the army to defend the mining companies against aggrieved local communities who have taken up arms.
“Much of the Philippines has now been militarised to defend the companies,”, says Benedictine nun Sister Stella Matutina, a community worker in Mindanao province who has been targeted by the government for opposing mining companies. In the last year she has been charged with kidnapping, human trafficking and illegal detention for opposing Canadian, Australian and British mining companies and for looking after tribal people displaced by mining.
Mining in the Philippines has exploded from only 17 operations in 1997 to nearly 50 mega-mines today. “We have found that mining divides our people, it kills them, it does not help us. It destroys our values. Mining and militarisation are twins. Where there is big mining there is always militarisation, because the government has to ensure that foreigners can invest in our country. People are resisting, are taking up arms against the entry of these mining companies. We are killing each other over mining,” she said.
Following his outspoken encyclical on climate change and human ecology in June, Pope Francis has also stepped into the mining debate, calling for radical change by the industry.
In a message sent last month to leaders of communities affected by mining in Latin America, India, Africa and Asia, he spoke of “the cry for justice … for their lost lands, the violence, threats, corruption, the trampled human rights, the dire working conditions, and sometimes the slavery and human trafficking as well as the pollution of water, air and soil”.
The groups, meeting at the Vatican, said that mining companies “regularly invaded and denuded the traditional lands of indigenous peoples and poor farmers, expropriate water used for irrigation and drinking and leave polluted land and water behind.
WE ARE NOT SURE WHY GROUPS FIGHTING GLOBAL BANKING 1% OLD WORLD KINGS AND QUEENS MINING CORPORATIONS WOULD GO TO VATICAN---HOME OF OLD WORLD KINGS AND QUEENS.
“There have been grave human rights violations experienced: environmental destruction and contamination, health impacts, community divisions, uprooting from territories, sicknesses, loss of culture, prostitution, alcoholism and drug addiction, loss of their own economy, and the ties to organised crime that are generated by the mining industry.”
In his encyclical, the pontiff said: “It is morally unacceptable, politically dangerous, environmentally unsustainable and economically unjustifiable for developing countries to continue to fuel the development of richer countries at the cost of their own present and future.”
Conflicts have flared in Latin America, where many countries have opened up new regions to mining. Guatemala has awarded more than 350 new licences since 2007, mostly to Canadian companies. A further 600 are under consideration by the ministry of energy and mines.
New mines in Honduras, Peru and Chile have all provoked opposition. Thousands of troops had to be deployed and anti-mining activists were shot as anger flared around the Canadian-owned Escobal silver mine in Guatemala last year.
Canadian mining companies have some of the worst records for human rights violations, according to a report submitted to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights in 2013. It found Canadian companies were involved in more than 100 human rights and environmental disputes in Latin America.
Pierre Gratton, director of the Mining Association of Canada, said: “We don’t deny that there is conflict everywhere but feel we are leaders in setting standards and are doing a better job than anyone else. There’s a much higher level of awareness and sensitivity now, and an ability to raise issues which in the past might have been overlooked. The industry is more active [than it used to be] in Asia, Africa and the Americas and is working in countries with weak governance. These [mines] are multibillion-dollar investments. The money flows to the capitals, and [impacted] communities say ‘what about us?’”
In the Colombian Amazon, the floodgates have opened for mining concessions, with licences being given on around 20 million hectares of land, much of it pristine rainforest , says former Colombian environment minister Martin von Hildebrand, who has been working with groups living along the lower Apaporis river.
“Yaigojé Apaporis became Colombia’s 55th, and third largest, national protected area in October 2009. And yet, just two days after the official announcement, a company was granted a mining title and began attempting to revoke the ‘protected area’ status. The same mining company is believed to be linked to a further 20 applications for mining exploration around Yaigojé Apaporis,” said Hildebrand.
The high price of gold in recent years has also attracted thousands of small-scale miners into fragile ecosystems. Yanomami Indians in northern Brazil and Venezuela whose populations were devastated in the 1980s by illegal goldmining face new invasions of gold miners, says tribal leader Davi Yanomami. “History is repeating itself,” he said on a visit to London last year. “Twenty years ago many thousands of gold miners flooded into Yanomami land and one in five of us died from the diseases and violence they brought. We were in danger of being exterminated then, but people in Europe persuaded the Brazilian government to act and they were removed.
“But now 3,000 more miners and ranchers have come back. More are coming. They are bringing in guns, rafts, machines, and destroying and polluting rivers. People are being killed. They are opening up and expanding old airstrips. They are flooding into Yanomami land.” More than 100,000 small-scale gold miners using rudimentary methods to extract gold from hillsides and rivers are thought to be active in Peru. In many cases they are competing with mega-mines which employ far fewer people.
According to PwC, one of the world’s top four industry auditors, government intervention and conflicts have mushroomed as commodity prices slump. “The gloves are off for the industry with widespread government intervention, internal industry conflicts and rising shareholder activism,” it said in its annual report.
Earlier this month anti-mining activists from 28 countries announced they would work together to seek a binding UN treaty and international tribunal to address the destructive impact of international mining. “It will give rights to people to sue mining corporations and hold them accountable for violations and crimes,” said Clemente Bautista of the Kalikasan People’s Network for the Environment.
“With an international mechanism we can join forces and file cases in an international tribunal,” said Selcuk Kozagacli, chairman of the Progressive Lawyers Association in Turkey. “Now more than ever do we need a united struggle worldwide to defend people.”
• This article was amended on 26 August 2015 to make clear in the graphic that disputes at the Chirana mine in Ghana pre-date its acquisition by Kinross.
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Our US national media are selling the idea that China is closing GLOBAL FACTORIES in older FOREIGN ECONOMIC ZONES to 'crack-down' on factory pollution when in fact these GLOBAL FACTORY CITIES have become TOO TOXIC in which to live. China as all global banking 1% ONE WORLD ONE GOVERNANCE MOVING FORWARD SMART CITIES-----is actually tripling the amount of environmental devastation because of huge mineral and water resources needed for SMART CITIES technology. So, China is closing toxic GLOBAL FACTORY CITIES, building NEW global factory cities and Foreign Economic Zones------all of which is ENVIRONMENTALLY DEVASTATING.
What is true of China is this-----it is exporting lots of the nastiest manufacturing to AFRICA and NORTH AMERICA. That is what we shared yesterday -----the kind of manufacturing making Chinese GLOBAL FACTORIES into toxic wastelands-----is what global banking 1% CLINTON/BUSH/OBAMA ----now TRUMP are building in US FOREIGN ECONOMIC ZONES----AFRICAN FOREIGN ECONOMIC ZONES.
THESE FAKE GREEN ENVIRONMENTAL NGOS-----KNOW THIS.
As does FAR-RIGHT WING GLOBAL BANKING 1% NATIONAL PUBLIC RADIO.......these few decades of FAKE NEWS.
Asia
China Shuts Down Tens Of Thousands Of Factories In Unprecedented Pollution Crackdown
October 23, 20174:52 AM ET
Heard on Morning Edition Rob Schmitz
In the gritty industrial town of Yiwu, workers prepare jeans to be dyed in a vivid range of colors.
Two months ago, this factory — and this entire city, located in China's eastern province of Zhejiang — was a much quieter place. Inspection crews from the environmental bureau had shut businesses down, cutting electricity and gas so that they could determine who was following China's environmental laws and who wasn't.
The boss of this factory, who asked that his name not be used for fear of punishment by local officials, says he's never seen anything like it.
"It had a big impact on our business," he says. "We couldn't make the delivery date since we [were] shut down. It's not just our factory. All the factories out here had this issue."
This is happening across the country: Entire industrial regions of China are being temporarily shut down, and the unusual sight of blue skies is reappearing as environmental inspectors go about their work. After decades of doing little about the pollution that has plagued much of the country, China's government may be finally getting serious about enforcing its environmental laws.
OH, REALLY????? WHILE US GLOBAL BANKING 1% ARE WORKING TO DISMANTLE ALL OUR ENVIRONMENTAL PROTECTIONS?
"So, basically, you're seeing these inspectors go into factories for surprise inspections," says Gary Huang, founder of 80/20 Sourcing, which connects foreign clients with China's supply chain. "They're instituting daily fines, and sometimes — in the real severe cases — criminal enforcement. People are getting put in jail."
In the past year, China's Ministry of Environment has sent inspectors to 30 provinces, where they've reprimanded, fined, or charged officials in more than 80,000 factories with criminal offenses. Entire swaths of Eastern China have halted production, prompting some companies to move entire supply chains to countries like India and Bangladesh to meet their orders.
"It's a huge event. It's a serious event. I think many of us here believe it will become the new normal," says Michael Crotty, president of MKT & Associates, a company that exports textiles from China. Crotty says in his nearly two decades in China, he's never seen a crackdown of this magnitude. "The consumers of China don't want red and blue rivers. They don't want to see gray skies every day."
China's crackdown reminds Crotty of 1970s America after the Clean Water Act was passed.
"At that time, we in the textile business saw many dyeing and printing houses shut down because they couldn't comply with the regulations. We're seeing a similar process taking place here in China, and it's much, much bigger. The disruption is larger," he says.
Crotty's colleague Archie Liu, general manager of MKT & Associates, estimates that 40 percent of China's factories have been at least temporarily shut down in the latest spate of inspections. He says that's a good thing.
"After all, factories will be better, more sustainable, and more socially responsible after being inspected," he says. "It's better for our supply chain. Then we can tell Walmart, Costco, and other retailers of ours that we're qualified and that everything we make for Americans are environmentally friendly."
After a quarter century of living in China, Shanghai environmental lawyer Peter Corne is gleefully celebrating the new environmental crackdown.
"This is better than a 100-percent pay raise for me," says Corne, managing partner at Dorsey & Whitney's Shanghai office. "I was just dreaming about it. I never thought it would come true."
Corne says what's most promising about this new enforcement are the new fees that are being imposed when factories, whose emissions are now monitored in real time, discharge more than the law allows.
"The implementation will be totally different," Corne says. "It won't be the environmental bureau that's implementing anymore. They'll just be monitoring. It will be the tax bureau that's implementing it."
This is crucial, says Corne, because China's tax bureaus are powerful entities backed up by rigorous laws that, when violated, are typically met with aggressive local enforcement. Corne's confident the economic hit will be temporary as companies that specialize in clean tech get a boost from so many factories now being forced to comply with much stricter laws.
But in the short term, that's little consolation for businessmen like Michael Crotty.
"So, short-term, the disruptions are pretty significant, and the timing, quite frankly, is difficult," Crotty says.
Difficult, because these shutdowns have impacted supply chains producing goods for the upcoming Christmas season in the U.S. Crotty thinks Americans will see an increase in prices on the shelves this holiday season due to the breadth of China's factory shutdowns.
But, he says, it's a small price to pay for a cleaner China.
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Indeed. Africa is MOVING FORWARD to environmental devastation because as usual global banking 1% make a few people extremely rich and they DON'T CARE what happens to the other 99% of sovereign citizens. Africa has been MOVING FORWARD to FOREIGN ECONOMIC ZONE environmental devastation these few decades of CLINTON/BUSH/OBAMA. Today African natural resources are stretched but not dire. If REAL left social progressive leadership in Africa were installed TODAY Africa would CONSERVE those resources it has by STOPPING MOVING FORWARD AFRICAN FOREIGN ECONOMIC ZONES with GLOBAL FACTORIES.
The FENCING-OFF of African real estate setting aside massive amounts of land preparing for these FOREIGN ECONOMIC ZONES have already led to a march towards extinction of most of African animals-----it has mineral mining by foreign global banking 1% global corporations soaring----and it is attaching to what remains of African regions with FORESTS. If these FOREIGN ECONOMIC ZONES and GLOBAL FACTORY construction continue Africa will be depleted of all natural resources ----from minerals to fresh water in less than several decades. Does Africa have to partner with global banking 1% to build GLOBAL FACTORIES and FOREIGN ECONOMIC ZONES to develop local, domestic small business manufacturing and plenty of jobs for 99% of African citizens? ABSOLUTELY NOT. Global banking 1% have attached themselves to all this African development and will fleece any global banking 2% player selling out the 99% of African citizens.
A few African leaders made billionaires saying WE DON'T CARE-----killing the future of 99% of African citizens. Global banking 1% are merely building infrastructure to get to those natural resources folks---they are not DEVELOPING AFRICA for African citizens.
."It's merely about getting access to raw materials and products," says Robert Kappel from Hamburg's GIGA Institute of African Affairs'.
Global Ideas
Africa's road to environmental destruction
Africa's raw materials are attracting investors and African states are hoping to capitalize by building roads connecting the continent. But activists warn developments could come at the expense of people and nature.
When ecologist Jeff Sayer started his career as a field researcher in Zambia in 1969, rhinos dotted the country's plateaus and he regularly witnessed herds of elephants trundling across the Luangwa Valley. Today, just a handful of elephants straggle around near the tourist lodges. Rhinos have disappeared completely.
"I never dreamed of how much would be lost in such a short time," says Sayer, blaming environmental mismanagement and political chaos for the destruction.
Now the ecologist sees a new unpredictable threat on the horizon for the continent. That's because - in spite of the recent commodities slump - Africa still has a lot to offer. Around 30 percent of global mineral deposits remain in the continent's ground, say Sayer and his colleagues at the Centre for Tropical Environment and Sustainability Science at Australia's James Cook University.
That wealth of resources remains largely untapped. Australian, Canadian, US and particularly Chinese firms are all vying for a piece of this promising market, wanting to invest in diamond, gold or manganese mining, say the researchers. Between 2000 and 2009, investment by Chinese firms alone quadrupled to more than $100 billion (90 billion euros).
For businesses, the financial returns are potentially huge, particularly as hunger for consumer products like mobile phones, tablets and jewellery grows. But so too is the threat to the environment.
Arteries for Africa's economy
Rhinos and elephants are disappearing in Zambia
The program that aims to push Africa toward prosperity is #link:http://pages.au.int/infosoc/pages/program-infrastructure-development-africa-pida:called PIDA# (Program Infrastructure Development for Africa) and was adopted in January 2012 in the Ethiopian capital, Addis Ababa. According to program participants, which include the African Development Bank, the African Union, the United Nations and various countries, pipelines and streets will make it easier for people, water and energy to get around, making the continent more attractive and competitive. To this end, around 30 million square kilometers of land have been surveyed and plans for the #link:http://www.au-pida.org/:entire continent drawn up#.
And the plans are ambitious. They foresee the expansion of a road network known as the Trans-African Highway. Running to an overall length of 56,683 kilometers - and stretching from Cape Town in the south to Cairo in the north, Dakar in the west to Djibouti in the east - it will serve as an artery for the economy. Times are changing.
"The new oil and gas discoveries across Africa have added further impetus for the need to modernize Africa’s infrastructure," says Shem Simuyemba, Chief Infrastructure Economist with the African Development Bank.
As such, new roads connecting African states and arming the continent for competition with the rest of the world aren't the only things on the agenda. Ports in Benin, Lagos, Ghana and the Ivory Coast are planned, as well as river dredging, new cables for telecommunications and energy, and hydroelectric dams.
Firms from around the world but particularly from China are racing to get a piece of the African market
It's a costly undertaking. The projects planned as far as 2040 come with a price tag of $400 billion (350 billion euros). The African Development Bank is looking to private investors at home and abroad to raise the cash, including through the China-backed multilateral Africa Growing Together Fund (AGTF) and the #link:http://www.afdb.org/en/topics-and-sectors/initiatives-partnerships/africa50-infrastructure-fund/background/:infrastructure fund Africa50#, says Simuyemba. Development banks can't carry these sums alone - a "new global partnership" is necessary to find financing quickly.
PIDA's modernisation drive harbors other costs too, say Sayer and his colleagues. Diggers don't stop at world heritage sites or nature reserves. Recently, UNESCO agreed to redraw the borders of the Virunga National Park in the Democratic Republic of Congo so firms could #link:http://alert-conservation.org/s/op_CA-apr-18-topLE.pdf:search for oil and gas reserves#. The park is home to the rare mountain gorilla, and if but if the ecosystem collapses it will also be catastropic for the tens of thousands of people who live there, Sayer continues. Others say the plan for infrastructural development will mainly benefit the firms.
"It's merely about getting access to raw materials and products," says Robert Kappel from Hamburg's GIGA Institute of African Affairs.
ABSOLUTELY!!!
Environmental concerns
New roads aren't the only projects in the pipelines, there are plans to expand ports too, like this one in Lagos, Nigeria
To assuage environmental concerns, the African Development Bank has promised that all planned projects will be assessed for their impact on nature according to international standards, and to grant local communities their say.
"As far as possible, such projects avoid protected conservation areas," says economist Simuyemba. Where this is not the case, "measures are built within the project to mitigate any adverse effects which may arise." He adds that African countries are now focusing more on development and cooperation, with conflicts becoming a thing of the past.
But Sayer believes thorough oversight is only possible in relatively stable countries such as Ghana. Environmental protection in less stable regions requires the help of the international community, which transform particularly biodiverse areas into untouchable nature reserves.
"If you could imagine Africa getting more prosperous," says Sayer, "you could imagine conditions where you expect to move to cities, to expect agriculture to be more modern, and be concentrated in a few years." It's a scenario he says could save a lot of forests across the continent.
Politics is the problem, says the ecologist. Many of the infrastructure projects will be built in places with broken political structures and no place for environmental protection.
So far, little of the mammoth project has been implemented. There are a few roads, but many are still without asphalt, and what has been completed is partly neglected because no money is available for maintenance. If and when more road-building begins in earnest, people should be the top priority, says Africa analyst Kappel. Roads should connect people in remote villages to marketplaces or bridge economic centers.
But, he concludes, "exactly this kind of road-building has been neglected for decades."
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As we shared yesterday global banking 1% are trying hard to REHABILITATE what have been vilified global corporations tied to environmental devastation---tied to sacking sovereign nation's free-market economy while installing GLOBAL FACTORIES as is now MOVING FORWARD in US FOREIGN ECONOMIC ZONES. The massive MARKETING AND PUBLIC RELATIONS blitz here in US national media is tied to the intent to bring NIKE GLOBAL FACTORIES to US FOREIGN ECONOMIC ZONES. It has nothing to do with REAL intentions of protecting NORTH AMERICAN ENVIRONMENT.
We read about a rising new GREEN NIKE describing the environmental devastation in terms of polluted waterways in China for example. The devastation of any global garment industry----shoes fall under garment is far-reaching. Why is NIKE and other shoe manufacturers like UNDERARMOUR changing from rubber soles to other materials being called GREEN?
NO------GLOBAL BANKING 1% ARE SIMPLY CREATING ECONOMIC CONDITIONS TO LOWER THE PRICE OF RUBBER AS RUBBER USES IN PRODUCTS SOAR.
Global banking 1% building GLOBAL FACTORIES and creating FOREIGN ECONOMIC ZONES in third world nations once having a sovereign economy around RUBBER PLANTATIONS.
'Home
Urbanisation and industrialisation hits rubber industry
‘Boosting production and quality through new technology, the way forward’
22 July, 2018
Rubber, a lucrative industry in the country at one time, is today in a precarious state due to rubber land being acquired for industrial and commercial activities across the country, the Colombo Rubber Traders’ Association (CRTA) warned last week'.
Addressing the 99th Annual General Meeting of the CRTA at the Ceylon Chamber of Commerce auditorium last week, out-gong Chairman of the Association Sunil Poholiyadde said over 4,000 acres of rubber land across the country has already been acquired for industrial and commercial activities.
“Land in the rubber growing areas is fast diminishing and this is a major obstacle to boost production and develop the crop. We had many pow wows with the authorities to stop the acquisition of rubber land which if not curtailed, would pose a major threat to the plantation,” Poholiyadde said.
KILLING RUBBER PLANTATIONS TO BUILD GLOBAL FACTORY FOREIGN ECONOMIC ZONES----WHICH IS WORSE ENVIRONMENTALLY?
Rubber grown in the traditional areas is no longer conducive due to rapid urbanization and industrialisation, the CRTA noted.
According to CRTA, the land acquired from rubber plantations have not been used for any purpose.
“Most of this land has been abandoned and it is of no use to anyone,” Poholiyadde said. Besides the rapid dwindling of land left for cultivation, the sharp decline in global rubber prices which has slumped by almost 50 percent has come has a double whammy to the industry.
Rubber prices dropped from around Rs. 600 per kilogram to Rs. 200 per kg in 2016. However, the price per kg increased marginally this year and currently stands at Rs. 350.
Smallholders account for nearly 70 percent of natural rubber production while the rest is held by corporates.
“Smallholders bank on prices and when prices drop they move into other occupations. Most of the plantation areas are home to various industries which offer employment to rubber farmers,” Poholiyadde said. The decline in prices, the acute shortage of workers especially affecting companies and the reduction in cultivable land have boiled down to low production which plunged from around 150 million kgs to 60 million kgs about two years ago.
“Production volumes have now increased to around 85 million kgs, which is a marginal increase. We cannot depend on smallholders alone to improve production. The Plantation Ministry must initiate measures to boost production and quality through new technology that will fetch a better price for rubber in the global market,” Poholiyadde said.
Incumbent Chairman Amanda Weerasinghe said since the first rubber seeds were planted in 1876, the rubber tree has not been fully made use of with the advancement of science.
“We should look at rubber not only as a commodity but also as a crop that has many benefits to be reaped.”
“The 10-year Master Plan for the rubber industry should be implemented by focusing on value addition. It would be a disaster if we continue to import raw material for exports,” Weerasinghe said.
The Ministry of Plantation Industries launched the plan for 2017-2026 with a target to record an export turnover of US$4,000 million by 2025. The rubber industry aims at being a US$ 3 billion industry by 2020.
However, rubber production which had an annual output of over 155,000 MT in the mid 1970s and Sri Lanka being the fourth largest rubber producer in the world, still hovered around 158,000 mt by 2011 while many countries increased their production volumes during the same period. Sri Lanka which had been a leading rubber producer has slipped to the sixth position among natural rubber producers in the world. The crop grown in around 200,00 hectares mainly in the wet zone has been extended to the dry zone as well.
Sri Lanka manufactures a wide range of value added products which comprise surgical, household and industrial gloves, hoses, tyres, tubes, auto parts , aviation tyres , rubber flooring, floor mats, carpets and footwear.
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NIKE as UNDERARMOUR and other GLOBAL GARMENT FACTORIES are MOVING FORWARD as fast as they can to robotic assembly of in this case SHOES. There will be fewer people in these GLOBAL FACTORY assembly lines but plenty of workers tied to factories manufacturing the PARTS of these shoes.
Below we see a newly PATENTED MACHINE by NIKE -----we see NOTHING ENVIRONMENTAL happening with this machine. It INCREASES the use of energy just to market a GIMMICK. The poly materials used are same old PLASTIC blend and soles still rubber.
What we see being marketed as GREEN tied to NIKE is something called TRASH SHOE. Recycling plastics as we discuss over and over breaking down recycled plastics into these kinds of MICROPLASTIC uses ----is the OPPOSITE of REAL LEFT ENVIRONMENTALISM because is increases the ability of plastics to leach into our ground water and soils.
These DESIGNER styles bring costs of sports shoes to record levels. HOW is this environmental? How is installing SMART TECHNOLOGY into garments-----ENVIRONMENTAL?
Nike is patenting a machine that will make its most popular shoe fit better
Leanna Garfield
Sep. 23, 2016, 9:32 AM
Nike's Flyknit sneakers are wildly popular worldwide — the franchise is expected to bring in $1 billion a year in revenue this year, according to Forbes.
Now, the company appears to be developing a machine that will make the shoes fit even better.
Called the "Portable Steaming System for Articles of Footwear," the device uses steam to customize how a pair of Flyknits fit an individual owner. As first reported by Investor's Business Daily, Nike filed a patent application for the machine with the US Patent and Trademark Office on September 22.
The patent's illustration basically looks like a steam monster engulfing a pair of sneakers:
An illustration of Nike's the "Portable Steaming System for Articles of Footwear."
US Patent and Trademark Office
Flyknits are unlike other Nike sneakers because the upper part (which wraps around the top and sides of the foot) is made of woven yarn and other fibers. The soft, stretchy material is designed to mimic the feel of a sock, offering a snug fit that can go nearly unnoticed by the wearer. The sneakers debuted in 2012 and now r etail for $130 to $270, depending on the model (Nike offers over 190 different pairs on its site).
According to Nike's patent application, the portable steaming system was invented by Bryan Farris, one of the company's Portland-based shoe developers. The customer puts on their Flyknits immediately after the hot steam has hit the yarn material, causing the fabric to shrink and offer a more snug fit. Each shoe can be customized to accommodate any differences between your right and left foot as well.
The machine resembles a device unveiled by Nike in 2013. A GIF from a video produced by The Next Web (below) shows a Nike worker placing the shoes in a black metal box, where they are steamed for about 30 seconds. The shoes' owner then puts them on so the shoes can mold to their feet.
The machine was available in Nike's London and New York City flagship stores for a limited time in 2013. When customers bought a pair of Flyknits, they could get them steamed for free.
Nike is also developing other sneaker innovations. At an event in March, the company introduced its "Back to the Future"-inspired HyperAdapt self-lacing shoe, which will become available at select US stores in late November (a year after protagonist Mart McFly wears them in the movie). This year, the company also unveiled its Vapormax sneakers, which feature a bubbly midsole that increases flexibility and bounce without compromising support.
These shoes, along with the new steaming machine, provide an intriguing glimpse into the future of sneaker technology.
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One of the biggest EXPENSES for corporations as GLOBAL FACTORIES consolidated local small business manufacturing into MONOPOLIES-----then GLOBAL MONOPOLIES-----was was to do with the consolidated WASTE produced at these huge factories. We watched as global corporations placed heaping loads of waste on a slow boat to third world using those regions as DUMPING GROUNDS because developed nations had ENVIRONMENTAL STANDARDS keeping their societies from being made TOXIC WASTE DUMPS.
Why are global corporations creating this FAKE GREEN policy of ZERO WASTE? To lower industrial production costs. By PRETENDING the processes inside GLOBAL FACTORIES are actually creating ZERO WASTE-----which none of these policies are ACTUALLY DOING-------they are keeping industrial waste in what were developed nations just as TOXIC as ever----using MARKETING TERMS to make that local toxic dumping OK------
WE ARE GREEN SAY MOVING FORWARD GLOBAL FACTORY---LOOK, WE HAVE DECLARED WE HAVE ZERO WASTE.
So, NIKE is super-sizing the industrial components of its manufacturing process all while global banking 1% media outlets and FAKE ENVIRONMENTAL NGOS pretend this is all REALLY ENVIRONMENTAL. FORBES says this is all environmental---so it must be.
'the company plans to send zero waste from contracted footwear manufacturing to landfills by fiscal year 2020'.
ZERO WASTE policy is simply global corporations refusing to pay to ship the toxic waste to third world nations. Don't think third world nations are getting a break---they are seeing GLOBAL FACTORIES and FOREIGN ECONOMIC ZONE building soaring.
May 18, 2016, 01:34pm
Here's How Nike Is Innovating To Scale Up Its Manufacturing
Trefis Team Contributor Great Speculations i
In addition to being one of the eight companies who are testing the world’s first 3D printer designed for large-scale manufacturing, Nike‘s patents have nearly doubled since 2009 and the company has the third largest U.S. portfolio of design patents. This clearly indicates Nike’s focus on product innovation and technology to create a manufacturing edge for itself. The acceleration of patent filins in the past few months reveals the company’s focus on new ways to manufacture products. Globally, Nike has 19,500 patents and patent applications, which is significantly high when compared to competitors. The comparative number for Adidas is around 2,400. As the company works towards meeting its revenue target of $50 billion by the end of 2020, investment in innovative products and manufacturing techniques will be key to achieve this target.
Sustainable Innovation As An Engine For Growth
While Nike has an ambitious revenue target for 2020, the company plans to achieve this as sustainably as possible. Recycled materials are being used in 71% of Nike’s footwear and apparel products and the company plans to send zero waste from contracted footwear manufacturing to landfills by fiscal year 2020. The company management stated that it is looking at sustainability as a way to unlock greater performance from its gear by thinking about manufacturing and design differently. An example of this innovation is Nike’s Flyknit which features a one-piece upper in the shoe and doesn’t require multiple cuts that are typically used to build a sports shoe. Since this innovation eliminates waste, the use of this technology has reduced Nike’s environmental footprint by 3.5 million pounds of waste.
Nike is looking at innovative manufacturing techniques to increase scale in a sustainable way. The company plans to work with “fewer, better contract factories’ in an effort to overhaul its manufacturing operations. Innovations such as 3D printing of its products will support these efforts. While Nike has been investing in 3D printing for a few years now, its participation in testing the new HP mass scale 3D printer indicates that the company plans to use this technology for mass scale production soon. Nike also plans to use the 3D printing technology for customized shoes which consumers can get made at its outlets.
3 D TECHNOLOGY IS PLASTICS------NOTHING GREEN GOING ON WITH MORE USES FOR PLASTICS
As per our estimates footwear is the most valuable segment for Nike accounting for nearly 50% of its valuation. We expect Nike’s global market share in the footwear market to increase steadily from 23% in 2016 and reach around 30% by the end of our forecast period.
In its latest quarterly results (Q3 2015) Nike registered an 11% increase in footwear revenues compared to the same period last year. The company also reported an EPS (earning per share) of $0.55 in this quarter, higher than the consensus analyst estimate of $0.48.
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Below we see CANADA selling this FAR-RIGHT WING global banking 1% policy of ZERO WASTE as really GREEN. Oh, look there is a HIERARCHY at a time when MOVING FORWARD ONE WORLD is dismantling every US agency tied to OVERSIGHT AND ACCOUNTABILITY for global corporations.
Zero Waste Hierarchy
Released: April 2014
This resource offers guiding principles and describes a progression of policies and strategies that support a zero waste system. The hierarchy is aspirational and promotes the highest and best use of materials as practical and possible.
What we are seeing MOVING FORWARD in US FOREIGN ECONOMIC ZONES is privatization of all US PUBLIC WATER AND WASTE to global corporations. Our 99% WE THE PEOPLE are being told these global corporations are going to require everyone to recycle and lower WASTE. What are GLOBAL FACTORIES in US FOREIGN ECONOMIC ZONES doing? They are SUPER-SIZING INDUSTRIAL WASTE.
It is clear what that ZERO WASTE HIERARCHY will focus upon-----NOT those global corporate campuses--but our 99% of trash cans. THINK ZERO TOLERANCE by police these few decades was harsh----MOVING FORWARD far-right wing global corporate FASCISM will make us shiver if we produce waste.
So, what do GLOBAL FACTORIES declaring themselves ZERO WASTE-----do to PRETEND they are being GREEN?
What is Zero Waste?
Zero Waste is a philosophy and a goal. Only by “closing the loop” can we hope to develop a sustainable economy. The idea is to reduce consumption as much as possible by using design-for-environment in all products and their packaging, and to make all products and packaging recyclable. Achieving Zero Waste depends on designing products and industrial processes so that their components can be dismantled, repaired and/or recycled. Zero Waste means linking communities, businesses and industries so that one's waste becomes another’s feedstock. It means preventing pollution at its source. It means new local jobs in communities throughout British Columbia.
Zero Waste
Definition From the Zero Waste International Alliance:
"Zero Waste is a goal that is ethical, economical, efficient and visionary, to guide people in changing their lifestyles and practices to emulate sustainable natural cycles, where all discarded materials are designed to become resources for others to use.
Zero Waste means designing and managing products and processes to systematically avoid and eliminate the volume and toxicity of waste and materials, conserve and recover all resources, and not burn or bury them. Implementing Zero Waste will eliminate all discharges to land, water or air that are a threat to planetary, human, animal or plant health."
Zero Waste Initiatives in British Columbia
Zero Waste Resources
Zero Waste Hierarchy
Released: April 2014
This resource offers guiding principles and describes a progression of policies and strategies that support a zero waste system. The hierarchy is aspirational and promotes the highest and best use of materials as practical and possible.
On the Road to Zero Waste: Priorities for Local Governments
Released: June 2009
Summary:
This report provides guidance to municipal and regional governments across B.C. on the actions, tools and opportunities available to them to increase the 3Rs and move closer to achieving zero waste.
Zero Waste One Step at a Time - Benefits and Applications for Retail Businesses
Released: May 2002
This discussion paper introduces the concept of zero waste as a tool that will assist retail and other types of businesses to not only increase their economic efficiency but also move towards long term sustainability in our overall economy.
Zero Waste in the ICI and Retail Sectors: Mountain Equipment Co-op, a national retail chain, has committed to a Zero Waste goal. Through creative repurposing, targeted re-training, and implementation of composting programs, MEC achieved a 92% diversion rate in 2007. The company also developed an online gear swap, to help members trade their gently used items. This impressive reduction in waste resulted in $216,000 savings in disposal costs!
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This was the first attempt by global banking 1% to PRETEND they are working towards ZERO WASTE. Don't think this WASTE TO ENERGY INCINERATOR being pushed out was a loss to global banking corporations having PATENTED this process. Across the nation these FAKE GREEN PATENTED WASTE TO ENERGY products were bought by global banking 5% freemason/Greek local pols and players pretending our US cities were being GREEN. We are glad this community was successful in fighting this GREEN INCINERATOR----but the goals of GLOBAL FACTORIES and US FOREIGN ECONOMIC ZONES is to install these FAKE GREEN INCINERATORS all over global corporate campuses.
This is what we call a FALSE FLAG. It appears local citizens are winning in environmental justice when MOVING FORWARD intends on using these FAKE GREEN incinerators throughout GLOBAL FACTORY CITIES. So, indeed, GLOBAL FACTORIES will burn all that waste that used to be shipped on huge barges to third world nations----just as TOXIC while PRETENDING it is all GREEN. This is worse than the FAKE GREEN policy called GREEN COAL and FRACKING natural gas as GREEN ENERGY.
MEDICAL WASTE CURTIS BAY
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BALTIMORE (WJZ) — A dangerous chemical spills in Baltimore and created a toxic acid cloud over some neighborhoods, forcing some people to shelter inside their homes for two hours.
The cloud threatened neighborhoods near a chemical plant and caused everyone to shelter in place.
CURTIS BAY is our west Baltimore community in direct pathway of what will become GLOBAL FACTORIES the size of US cities. It is the destination of medical waste which will soar as Baltimore expands into a global health system and tourism-----it will soar as medical products tied to PATENTING PHARMA----BIOLOGIC AND BIOTECHNOLOGY PRODUCTS. So, there is not intent in BALTIMORE to be GREEN-----to provide oversight and accountability of global corporations as to ZERO TOLERANCE WASTE.
ZERO WASTE policy means all of what will be exploding numbers of chemical manufacturing factories will KEEP that waste local. This policy is setting the stage for US FOREIGN ECONOMIC ZONES to operate as they do overseas-----don't worry about getting rid of toxic waste.
WE KNOW this is FAKE GREEN policy and so do FRIEND OF THE EARTH----SIERRA CLUB------LEAGUE OF CONSERVATION VOTERS----which will PRETEND ZERO WASTE is really environmental.
Baltimore Scraps Its Waste-to-Energy Plan Mar 22, 2016
Plans for an incinerator in South Baltimore have been halted, and the community could be better off that way.
A years-long, youth-led campaign to prevent the construction of a waste incinerator in the south Baltimore neighborhood of Curtis Bay has inched closer to victory.
Last week, the Maryland Department of the Environment alerted the New York-based company Energy Answers International that its permit to build an incinerator that would convert trash into energy is no longer valid. The proposed plant would generate 160 megawatts of electricity by burning an estimated 4,000 tons of solid waste per day. The facility would spread over 90 acres, making it the largest incinerator in the U.S. if built, according to the Environmental Integrity Project.
The incinerator would also sit just a stone’s throw from a number of schools and parks, not to mention hundreds of homes that are already in close proximity to a cluster of pollution-producing facilities. This is why students from those schools and their families have been protesting the construction of the waste-to-energy plant since Energy Answers began building it in August 2013. The Curtis Bay neighborhood already suffers the worst levels of air pollution in the state.
The map and chart below, created using the EPA’s EJ SCREEN mapping application, shows that the area within a mile of the proposed incinerator site registers extremely high levels of ozone and particulate matter emissions. Both of these air pollutants are responsible for asthma and respiratory disease-related deaths, especially among children and people of color. It may even play a role in increasing urban violence.
The neighborhoods around the planned incinerator also are dense with old housing containing lead-saturated paint, which increases health risks tied to toxic lead exposure.The Flint water disaster has heightened the nation’s awareness about the dangers of lead contamination. Consider in that context that the incinerator was permitted by the state to release up to 1,000 pounds of lead into the air yearly, along with 240 pounds of mercury, as the Chesapeake Physicians for Social Responsibility’s Gwen Dubois wrote in a Baltimore Sun op-ed last November.
Dubois says that Curtis Bay and neighboring communities of Brooklyn and Hawkins Point have higher levels of heart disease, lung cancer, respiratory disease, and diabetes than the rest of the city.
“Is it related to the pollution? I believe it is,” Dubois tells CityLab. “Can I prove it? No. Do I think we ought to put more pollutants in the air that cause these things? No. Are our own citizens benefitting from it? No.”
The United Workers began working with a group of students in the neighborhood, banded under the name Free Your Voice. The kids learned from organizers about the potential dangers of the incinerator and helped the group rally against Energy Answers’ plans. The youth group held marches, went door to door gathering signatures for a petition, and flooded public meetings with artistic performances to express their opposition.
They scored a huge victory in February 2015 when the Baltimore Regional Cooperative Purchasing Committee pulled out of an agreement to buy energy from the future plant. The city of Baltimore then pulled its support a month later, leaving Energy Answers without two of its biggest customers for the $1 billion project. Still, the company refused to halt its plans.
The Free Your Voice group led a march to Maryland’s Department of the Environment offices last December to deliver a petition signed by thousands who opposed the waste-to-energy plant. A few people were arrested during that delivery, including Dubois, for refusing to leave the premises. In January, a United Nations working group toured the site as part of a U.S. visit, then criticized the state in its report back:
The highest polluting industrial facilities, across a range of sectors from farming, mining to manufacturing, are more likely to be situated in poor and minority neighbourhood, including those of people of African descent. For instance, we are concerned about the possible health risks to people of African descent on account of the incinerator project in Curtis Bay, Baltimore and the lead contaminated water in Flint, Michigan. African American communities are calling for environmental justice as they are concerned that they are disproportionately exposed to environmental hazards impacting their health and standard of living.
All of this played a role in the state’s decision to invalidate Energy Answers’ permit last week, but so did the actions of the company itself. As noted in the state’s letter explaining the permit revocation, Energy Answers failed to do any construction at the project’s site since October 31, 2013. Under the permit rules, a company can’t let construction stall for longer than 18 months. This March marks month 29 with no activity on the 90-acre lot, putting Energy Answers well over the time limit.
The environmental department’s suggestion to pull the permit now sits with the state’s public service commission, which will make the final decision. It hadn’t yet scheduled a public hearing on the matter as of March 21, but the commission’s communications director, Tori Leonard, says she expects them to take it up on March 30. Until then, the project is, as DuBois puts it, “on ICU until a doctor comes and declares it dead.”
If such a declaration is made, it will be the second waste-to-energy plant killed off in the Baltimore region within a month. An incinerator that’s been running in Harford County, just northeast of Baltimore County, closed on March 17 after operating for 30 years.
Now, is waste-to-energy technology bad in general, or just bad for Baltimore? If it involves combustion—burning solid wastes—then it is bad in general, says the Environmental Integrity Project attorney Leah Kelly, who studied the issue for a 2011 report. There are a number of waste-to-energy plants operating or in development in other states and countries, and using other energy-extracting processes like gasification. But when using combustion, Kelly says she’s “never heard of one that burns trash cleanly.”
The Free Your Voice kids of Curtis Bay, meanwhile, are hoping that the would-be incinerator site will instead be used by companies that can bring cleaner, greener jobs to the community.
“Community members have been working to bring truly green, community-driven, positive alternatives like solar, recycling, and composting that provides good jobs for residents and doesn't put our lives at risk,” says Destiny Watford, one of the teens leading the effort. “The incinerator was holding us back from that positive vision.”
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'But the measure did not advance to the floor of the House of Delegates in the session’s final days'.
After all that media press about a WIN AGAINST INCINERATORS at Curtis Bay pretending Maryland Assembly voted against these incinerators-----here we see this never actually happened. Not only did Maryland Assembly not vote to stop incinerators is left its GREEN SUBSIDY intact.
It does not matter which MARYLAND ASSEMBLY pol voted against this INCINERATOR----because MOVING FORWARD US FOREIGN ECONOMIC ZONES will ignore any local, state, or US law that harms CORPORATE PROFIT and having to haul away huge amounts of toxic waste is COSTLY. When we allow MOVING FORWARD GLOBAL FACTORIES IN US FOREIGN ECONOMIC ZONES---there will be complete and total environmental devastation.
General Assembly keeps green-energy subsidy for incinerator, kills other environmental bills
Scott Dance
Contact Reporter
The Baltimore SunApril 9, 2018
A challenging General Assembly session for environmental groups ended with the failure of two key proposals — one to measure the loss of Maryland forests and another to end green-energy subsidies for a Baltimore trash incinerator.
Neither bill came up for votes in the state Senate on Monday, the last day of the legislature’s 90-day lawmaking session.
The last-minute legislative defeats followed several other losses earlier in the year: the General Assembly shot down proposals to grow the state’s supply of renewable energy and to enact bans on polystyrene foam and a harmful pesticide known as chlorpyrifos.
Alison Prost, Maryland executive director of the Chesapeake Bay Foundation, said she expected state lawmakers to be more eager to act on environmental issues, given that many of them expressed concerns that President Donald Trump has weakened some federal clean air and water standards.
CHESAPEAKE BAY FOUNDATION LEADERS KNOW----JUST AS WE DO ----MOVING FORWARD GLOBAL FACTORIES IN US FOREIGN ECONOMIC ZONES --LIKE BALTIMORE WILL NOT ONLY KILL THE CHESAPEAKE BAY---BUT THE ENTIRE REGION.
“I am puzzled by the lack of priority given to the environment given that you can’t go far in Maryland without being near the water,” Prost said.
Lawmakers did not ignore the environment altogether. They passed proposals to protect the state from the possible harms of offshore oil and gas drilling and to preserve efforts to build wind farms off the state’s coast.
But environmentalists classified those measures as defensive moves to prevent further pollution, instead of efforts to more aggressively clean the Chesapeake Bay and slow global climate change.
“There were certainly some disappointments,” said Kristen Harbeson, political director for the Maryland League of Conservation Voters.
Environmental advocacy groups urged the General Assembly this year to close loopholes in state forest conservation laws that have allowed the clearing of some of Maryland’s largest and most dense forests — in some cases without requirements to replant any trees. Developers and county and municipal governments disagreed with elements of the proposal that would have made construction projects and tree planting efforts more expensive and logistically challenging.
And there was disagreement over whether forest loss is occurring.
Gov. Larry Hogan’s administration says the state’s tree canopy is growing, but environmental groups say that doesn’t take into account the higher ecological value of dense forests.
As a result, the bill was watered down to simply require the state to collect more data on forest losses. But that measure came one vote shy of final passage in the Senate on Monday.
“This was just trying to get us the data needed to answer the tough policy questions,” Prost said. “And the General Assembly couldn’t get it done.”
Days earlier, the Senate passed a bill that would have removed a “green energy” label from trash incinerators like a facility in Baltimore. Doing so would have stripped the incinerator of millions of dollars in subsidies paid through Marylanders’ electricity bills.
A recent Baltimore Sun investigation showed that a state renewable energy program sends millions of dollars to paper mills and trash incinerators that produce greenhouse gases and pollution.
But the measure did not advance to the floor of the House of Delegates in the session’s final days.
As overseas third world nations expand Foreign Economic Zones inside their nations often because GLOBAL FACTORIES have created such toxic environments people cannot live in them-----so too are those FOREIGN ECONOMIC ZONES expanding into AFRICA and NORTH AMERICA already doing the same. This HYPER-EXPANSION of GLOBAL FACTORIES will deplete all natural resources inside that colonized nation. None of this is necessary------stopping this expansion will allow 99% of sovereign citizens to conserve resources for a thousand and more years----we would not have LEVEL 5 DEGREE CLIMATE CHANGE without all this expansion of GLOBAL FACTORIES and FOREIGN ECONOMIC ZONES.
It is the job of FAKE ENVIRONMENTAL NGOS like FRIENDS OF THE EARTH----SIERRA CLUB------LEAGUE OF CONSERVATION VOTERS----along with far-right wing global banking 1% GLOBAL GREEN CORPORATION PARTY to pretend these next generation GLOBAL FACTORIES will not devastate the environment----especially in North America. What are we seeing in North America MOVING FORWARD? Strip mining of every mineral in all our US NATIONAL PARKS.
Remember, our REAL left environmental organizations like all other 'left' NGOs have these few decades national and global leaders tied to far-right wing global banking 1%-----killing REAL LEFT ENVIRONMENTALISM.
How developing countries are paying a high price for the global mineral boom
John Vidal, graphic by Pete Guest
Sat 15 Aug 2015 06.44 EDT
Soaring worldwide demand for the minerals used in electronic devices such as smartphones and laptops has left a legacy of social conflict and human rights violations across Asia, Latin America and Africa
John Vidal, graphic by Pete Guest
Sat 15 Aug 2015 06.44 EDT Last modified on Sat 2 Dec 2017 00.25 EST
Mining conflicts around the world.
Click to expand or download here. Source: EJATLAS.ORG Illustration: Pete Guest for the Observer
A 200ft deep pit gapes where three years ago stood a mountain. Fields where small farmers planted rice and grew fruit are now an industrial site, and wooden houses in the old village of Didipio have been abandoned – the community moved to make way for a large-scale gold mine owned by a New Zealand company.
The Filipino mine, guarded by high fences and bitterly contested by the indigenous Bugkalot people who fear pollution, spills and ill-health, is just one of scores of major new gold and copper mines opened in the last few years to meet soaring world demand for minerals used in electronic devices such as smartphones and laptops.
While the spot price of gold and other minerals has recently seen its greatest annual decline in more than 30 years, the legacy of the global mineral boom is social conflict, human rights violations and environmental devastation across Asia, Latin America and Africa, says a global investigation into hundreds of the world’s mineral mines.
As angry communities in Colorado last week counted the cost of a toxic spill from an old gold mine, a new atlas of 600 international mining and oil companies has identified more than 1,500 ongoing conflicts raging over water, land, spills, pollution, ill-health, relocations, waste, land grabs, floods and falling water levels.
The EU-funded report by academics at 23 universities and environmental justice groups in Africa, India and Latin America has identified 142 disputes involving gold mines, 130 at coal mines, 96 at copper mines and 73 at silver mines, with India, Colombia, Nigeria, Brazil, Ecuador, Peru and the Philippines having the most. They ranged from longstanding legal disputes to armed conflicts.
The companies whose mines have attracted the most accusations of human rights abuses and environmental conflict are some of the largest in the world, mostly listed on the London stock exchange. They include AngloGold Ashanti, Rio Tinto, Barrick Gold, BHP Billiton, Glencore Xstrata and Newmont Mining. Between them they are involved in 75 conflicts in countries ranging from Colombia, Burma and the Democratic Republic of the Congo to the US, Zambia and the Philippines, says the database.
“Across Latin America, Asia and Africa, more and more community lands, rivers and ecosystems are being despoiled and devoured by mining activities,” says Philippe Sibaud, author of two reports on the extractive industries for the Gaia Foundation. “The rights of farming and indigenous communities are increasingly ignored in the race to grab land and water. The hunger for these materials is a growing threat to the necessities for life.”
Heavy metals discolor the water north of Durango, Colorado, following the Gold King Mine spill. An estimated one million gallons of toxic wastewater was released into the Animas River. Photograph: Jeremy Wade Shockley for the GuardianIn many cases, governments have had to call on the army to defend the mining companies against aggrieved local communities who have taken up arms.
“Much of the Philippines has now been militarised to defend the companies,”, says Benedictine nun Sister Stella Matutina, a community worker in Mindanao province who has been targeted by the government for opposing mining companies. In the last year she has been charged with kidnapping, human trafficking and illegal detention for opposing Canadian, Australian and British mining companies and for looking after tribal people displaced by mining.
Mining in the Philippines has exploded from only 17 operations in 1997 to nearly 50 mega-mines today. “We have found that mining divides our people, it kills them, it does not help us. It destroys our values. Mining and militarisation are twins. Where there is big mining there is always militarisation, because the government has to ensure that foreigners can invest in our country. People are resisting, are taking up arms against the entry of these mining companies. We are killing each other over mining,” she said.
Following his outspoken encyclical on climate change and human ecology in June, Pope Francis has also stepped into the mining debate, calling for radical change by the industry.
In a message sent last month to leaders of communities affected by mining in Latin America, India, Africa and Asia, he spoke of “the cry for justice … for their lost lands, the violence, threats, corruption, the trampled human rights, the dire working conditions, and sometimes the slavery and human trafficking as well as the pollution of water, air and soil”.
The groups, meeting at the Vatican, said that mining companies “regularly invaded and denuded the traditional lands of indigenous peoples and poor farmers, expropriate water used for irrigation and drinking and leave polluted land and water behind.
WE ARE NOT SURE WHY GROUPS FIGHTING GLOBAL BANKING 1% OLD WORLD KINGS AND QUEENS MINING CORPORATIONS WOULD GO TO VATICAN---HOME OF OLD WORLD KINGS AND QUEENS.
“There have been grave human rights violations experienced: environmental destruction and contamination, health impacts, community divisions, uprooting from territories, sicknesses, loss of culture, prostitution, alcoholism and drug addiction, loss of their own economy, and the ties to organised crime that are generated by the mining industry.”
In his encyclical, the pontiff said: “It is morally unacceptable, politically dangerous, environmentally unsustainable and economically unjustifiable for developing countries to continue to fuel the development of richer countries at the cost of their own present and future.”
Conflicts have flared in Latin America, where many countries have opened up new regions to mining. Guatemala has awarded more than 350 new licences since 2007, mostly to Canadian companies. A further 600 are under consideration by the ministry of energy and mines.
New mines in Honduras, Peru and Chile have all provoked opposition. Thousands of troops had to be deployed and anti-mining activists were shot as anger flared around the Canadian-owned Escobal silver mine in Guatemala last year.
Canadian mining companies have some of the worst records for human rights violations, according to a report submitted to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights in 2013. It found Canadian companies were involved in more than 100 human rights and environmental disputes in Latin America.
Pierre Gratton, director of the Mining Association of Canada, said: “We don’t deny that there is conflict everywhere but feel we are leaders in setting standards and are doing a better job than anyone else. There’s a much higher level of awareness and sensitivity now, and an ability to raise issues which in the past might have been overlooked. The industry is more active [than it used to be] in Asia, Africa and the Americas and is working in countries with weak governance. These [mines] are multibillion-dollar investments. The money flows to the capitals, and [impacted] communities say ‘what about us?’”
In the Colombian Amazon, the floodgates have opened for mining concessions, with licences being given on around 20 million hectares of land, much of it pristine rainforest , says former Colombian environment minister Martin von Hildebrand, who has been working with groups living along the lower Apaporis river.
“Yaigojé Apaporis became Colombia’s 55th, and third largest, national protected area in October 2009. And yet, just two days after the official announcement, a company was granted a mining title and began attempting to revoke the ‘protected area’ status. The same mining company is believed to be linked to a further 20 applications for mining exploration around Yaigojé Apaporis,” said Hildebrand.
The high price of gold in recent years has also attracted thousands of small-scale miners into fragile ecosystems. Yanomami Indians in northern Brazil and Venezuela whose populations were devastated in the 1980s by illegal goldmining face new invasions of gold miners, says tribal leader Davi Yanomami. “History is repeating itself,” he said on a visit to London last year. “Twenty years ago many thousands of gold miners flooded into Yanomami land and one in five of us died from the diseases and violence they brought. We were in danger of being exterminated then, but people in Europe persuaded the Brazilian government to act and they were removed.
“But now 3,000 more miners and ranchers have come back. More are coming. They are bringing in guns, rafts, machines, and destroying and polluting rivers. People are being killed. They are opening up and expanding old airstrips. They are flooding into Yanomami land.” More than 100,000 small-scale gold miners using rudimentary methods to extract gold from hillsides and rivers are thought to be active in Peru. In many cases they are competing with mega-mines which employ far fewer people.
According to PwC, one of the world’s top four industry auditors, government intervention and conflicts have mushroomed as commodity prices slump. “The gloves are off for the industry with widespread government intervention, internal industry conflicts and rising shareholder activism,” it said in its annual report.
Earlier this month anti-mining activists from 28 countries announced they would work together to seek a binding UN treaty and international tribunal to address the destructive impact of international mining. “It will give rights to people to sue mining corporations and hold them accountable for violations and crimes,” said Clemente Bautista of the Kalikasan People’s Network for the Environment.
“With an international mechanism we can join forces and file cases in an international tribunal,” said Selcuk Kozagacli, chairman of the Progressive Lawyers Association in Turkey. “Now more than ever do we need a united struggle worldwide to defend people.”
• This article was amended on 26 August 2015 to make clear in the graphic that disputes at the Chirana mine in Ghana pre-date its acquisition by Kinross.
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Our US national media are selling the idea that China is closing GLOBAL FACTORIES in older FOREIGN ECONOMIC ZONES to 'crack-down' on factory pollution when in fact these GLOBAL FACTORY CITIES have become TOO TOXIC in which to live. China as all global banking 1% ONE WORLD ONE GOVERNANCE MOVING FORWARD SMART CITIES-----is actually tripling the amount of environmental devastation because of huge mineral and water resources needed for SMART CITIES technology. So, China is closing toxic GLOBAL FACTORY CITIES, building NEW global factory cities and Foreign Economic Zones------all of which is ENVIRONMENTALLY DEVASTATING.
What is true of China is this-----it is exporting lots of the nastiest manufacturing to AFRICA and NORTH AMERICA. That is what we shared yesterday -----the kind of manufacturing making Chinese GLOBAL FACTORIES into toxic wastelands-----is what global banking 1% CLINTON/BUSH/OBAMA ----now TRUMP are building in US FOREIGN ECONOMIC ZONES----AFRICAN FOREIGN ECONOMIC ZONES.
THESE FAKE GREEN ENVIRONMENTAL NGOS-----KNOW THIS.
As does FAR-RIGHT WING GLOBAL BANKING 1% NATIONAL PUBLIC RADIO.......these few decades of FAKE NEWS.
Asia
China Shuts Down Tens Of Thousands Of Factories In Unprecedented Pollution Crackdown
October 23, 20174:52 AM ET
Heard on Morning Edition Rob Schmitz
In the gritty industrial town of Yiwu, workers prepare jeans to be dyed in a vivid range of colors.
Two months ago, this factory — and this entire city, located in China's eastern province of Zhejiang — was a much quieter place. Inspection crews from the environmental bureau had shut businesses down, cutting electricity and gas so that they could determine who was following China's environmental laws and who wasn't.
The boss of this factory, who asked that his name not be used for fear of punishment by local officials, says he's never seen anything like it.
"It had a big impact on our business," he says. "We couldn't make the delivery date since we [were] shut down. It's not just our factory. All the factories out here had this issue."
This is happening across the country: Entire industrial regions of China are being temporarily shut down, and the unusual sight of blue skies is reappearing as environmental inspectors go about their work. After decades of doing little about the pollution that has plagued much of the country, China's government may be finally getting serious about enforcing its environmental laws.
OH, REALLY????? WHILE US GLOBAL BANKING 1% ARE WORKING TO DISMANTLE ALL OUR ENVIRONMENTAL PROTECTIONS?
"So, basically, you're seeing these inspectors go into factories for surprise inspections," says Gary Huang, founder of 80/20 Sourcing, which connects foreign clients with China's supply chain. "They're instituting daily fines, and sometimes — in the real severe cases — criminal enforcement. People are getting put in jail."
In the past year, China's Ministry of Environment has sent inspectors to 30 provinces, where they've reprimanded, fined, or charged officials in more than 80,000 factories with criminal offenses. Entire swaths of Eastern China have halted production, prompting some companies to move entire supply chains to countries like India and Bangladesh to meet their orders.
"It's a huge event. It's a serious event. I think many of us here believe it will become the new normal," says Michael Crotty, president of MKT & Associates, a company that exports textiles from China. Crotty says in his nearly two decades in China, he's never seen a crackdown of this magnitude. "The consumers of China don't want red and blue rivers. They don't want to see gray skies every day."
China's crackdown reminds Crotty of 1970s America after the Clean Water Act was passed.
"At that time, we in the textile business saw many dyeing and printing houses shut down because they couldn't comply with the regulations. We're seeing a similar process taking place here in China, and it's much, much bigger. The disruption is larger," he says.
Crotty's colleague Archie Liu, general manager of MKT & Associates, estimates that 40 percent of China's factories have been at least temporarily shut down in the latest spate of inspections. He says that's a good thing.
"After all, factories will be better, more sustainable, and more socially responsible after being inspected," he says. "It's better for our supply chain. Then we can tell Walmart, Costco, and other retailers of ours that we're qualified and that everything we make for Americans are environmentally friendly."
After a quarter century of living in China, Shanghai environmental lawyer Peter Corne is gleefully celebrating the new environmental crackdown.
"This is better than a 100-percent pay raise for me," says Corne, managing partner at Dorsey & Whitney's Shanghai office. "I was just dreaming about it. I never thought it would come true."
Corne says what's most promising about this new enforcement are the new fees that are being imposed when factories, whose emissions are now monitored in real time, discharge more than the law allows.
"The implementation will be totally different," Corne says. "It won't be the environmental bureau that's implementing anymore. They'll just be monitoring. It will be the tax bureau that's implementing it."
This is crucial, says Corne, because China's tax bureaus are powerful entities backed up by rigorous laws that, when violated, are typically met with aggressive local enforcement. Corne's confident the economic hit will be temporary as companies that specialize in clean tech get a boost from so many factories now being forced to comply with much stricter laws.
But in the short term, that's little consolation for businessmen like Michael Crotty.
"So, short-term, the disruptions are pretty significant, and the timing, quite frankly, is difficult," Crotty says.
Difficult, because these shutdowns have impacted supply chains producing goods for the upcoming Christmas season in the U.S. Crotty thinks Americans will see an increase in prices on the shelves this holiday season due to the breadth of China's factory shutdowns.
But, he says, it's a small price to pay for a cleaner China.
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Indeed. Africa is MOVING FORWARD to environmental devastation because as usual global banking 1% make a few people extremely rich and they DON'T CARE what happens to the other 99% of sovereign citizens. Africa has been MOVING FORWARD to FOREIGN ECONOMIC ZONE environmental devastation these few decades of CLINTON/BUSH/OBAMA. Today African natural resources are stretched but not dire. If REAL left social progressive leadership in Africa were installed TODAY Africa would CONSERVE those resources it has by STOPPING MOVING FORWARD AFRICAN FOREIGN ECONOMIC ZONES with GLOBAL FACTORIES.
The FENCING-OFF of African real estate setting aside massive amounts of land preparing for these FOREIGN ECONOMIC ZONES have already led to a march towards extinction of most of African animals-----it has mineral mining by foreign global banking 1% global corporations soaring----and it is attaching to what remains of African regions with FORESTS. If these FOREIGN ECONOMIC ZONES and GLOBAL FACTORY construction continue Africa will be depleted of all natural resources ----from minerals to fresh water in less than several decades. Does Africa have to partner with global banking 1% to build GLOBAL FACTORIES and FOREIGN ECONOMIC ZONES to develop local, domestic small business manufacturing and plenty of jobs for 99% of African citizens? ABSOLUTELY NOT. Global banking 1% have attached themselves to all this African development and will fleece any global banking 2% player selling out the 99% of African citizens.
A few African leaders made billionaires saying WE DON'T CARE-----killing the future of 99% of African citizens. Global banking 1% are merely building infrastructure to get to those natural resources folks---they are not DEVELOPING AFRICA for African citizens.
."It's merely about getting access to raw materials and products," says Robert Kappel from Hamburg's GIGA Institute of African Affairs'.
Global Ideas
Africa's road to environmental destruction
Africa's raw materials are attracting investors and African states are hoping to capitalize by building roads connecting the continent. But activists warn developments could come at the expense of people and nature.
When ecologist Jeff Sayer started his career as a field researcher in Zambia in 1969, rhinos dotted the country's plateaus and he regularly witnessed herds of elephants trundling across the Luangwa Valley. Today, just a handful of elephants straggle around near the tourist lodges. Rhinos have disappeared completely.
"I never dreamed of how much would be lost in such a short time," says Sayer, blaming environmental mismanagement and political chaos for the destruction.
Now the ecologist sees a new unpredictable threat on the horizon for the continent. That's because - in spite of the recent commodities slump - Africa still has a lot to offer. Around 30 percent of global mineral deposits remain in the continent's ground, say Sayer and his colleagues at the Centre for Tropical Environment and Sustainability Science at Australia's James Cook University.
That wealth of resources remains largely untapped. Australian, Canadian, US and particularly Chinese firms are all vying for a piece of this promising market, wanting to invest in diamond, gold or manganese mining, say the researchers. Between 2000 and 2009, investment by Chinese firms alone quadrupled to more than $100 billion (90 billion euros).
For businesses, the financial returns are potentially huge, particularly as hunger for consumer products like mobile phones, tablets and jewellery grows. But so too is the threat to the environment.
Arteries for Africa's economy
Rhinos and elephants are disappearing in Zambia
The program that aims to push Africa toward prosperity is #link:http://pages.au.int/infosoc/pages/program-infrastructure-development-africa-pida:called PIDA# (Program Infrastructure Development for Africa) and was adopted in January 2012 in the Ethiopian capital, Addis Ababa. According to program participants, which include the African Development Bank, the African Union, the United Nations and various countries, pipelines and streets will make it easier for people, water and energy to get around, making the continent more attractive and competitive. To this end, around 30 million square kilometers of land have been surveyed and plans for the #link:http://www.au-pida.org/:entire continent drawn up#.
And the plans are ambitious. They foresee the expansion of a road network known as the Trans-African Highway. Running to an overall length of 56,683 kilometers - and stretching from Cape Town in the south to Cairo in the north, Dakar in the west to Djibouti in the east - it will serve as an artery for the economy. Times are changing.
"The new oil and gas discoveries across Africa have added further impetus for the need to modernize Africa’s infrastructure," says Shem Simuyemba, Chief Infrastructure Economist with the African Development Bank.
As such, new roads connecting African states and arming the continent for competition with the rest of the world aren't the only things on the agenda. Ports in Benin, Lagos, Ghana and the Ivory Coast are planned, as well as river dredging, new cables for telecommunications and energy, and hydroelectric dams.
Firms from around the world but particularly from China are racing to get a piece of the African market
It's a costly undertaking. The projects planned as far as 2040 come with a price tag of $400 billion (350 billion euros). The African Development Bank is looking to private investors at home and abroad to raise the cash, including through the China-backed multilateral Africa Growing Together Fund (AGTF) and the #link:http://www.afdb.org/en/topics-and-sectors/initiatives-partnerships/africa50-infrastructure-fund/background/:infrastructure fund Africa50#, says Simuyemba. Development banks can't carry these sums alone - a "new global partnership" is necessary to find financing quickly.
PIDA's modernisation drive harbors other costs too, say Sayer and his colleagues. Diggers don't stop at world heritage sites or nature reserves. Recently, UNESCO agreed to redraw the borders of the Virunga National Park in the Democratic Republic of Congo so firms could #link:http://alert-conservation.org/s/op_CA-apr-18-topLE.pdf:search for oil and gas reserves#. The park is home to the rare mountain gorilla, and if but if the ecosystem collapses it will also be catastropic for the tens of thousands of people who live there, Sayer continues. Others say the plan for infrastructural development will mainly benefit the firms.
"It's merely about getting access to raw materials and products," says Robert Kappel from Hamburg's GIGA Institute of African Affairs.
ABSOLUTELY!!!
Environmental concerns
New roads aren't the only projects in the pipelines, there are plans to expand ports too, like this one in Lagos, Nigeria
To assuage environmental concerns, the African Development Bank has promised that all planned projects will be assessed for their impact on nature according to international standards, and to grant local communities their say.
"As far as possible, such projects avoid protected conservation areas," says economist Simuyemba. Where this is not the case, "measures are built within the project to mitigate any adverse effects which may arise." He adds that African countries are now focusing more on development and cooperation, with conflicts becoming a thing of the past.
But Sayer believes thorough oversight is only possible in relatively stable countries such as Ghana. Environmental protection in less stable regions requires the help of the international community, which transform particularly biodiverse areas into untouchable nature reserves.
"If you could imagine Africa getting more prosperous," says Sayer, "you could imagine conditions where you expect to move to cities, to expect agriculture to be more modern, and be concentrated in a few years." It's a scenario he says could save a lot of forests across the continent.
Politics is the problem, says the ecologist. Many of the infrastructure projects will be built in places with broken political structures and no place for environmental protection.
So far, little of the mammoth project has been implemented. There are a few roads, but many are still without asphalt, and what has been completed is partly neglected because no money is available for maintenance. If and when more road-building begins in earnest, people should be the top priority, says Africa analyst Kappel. Roads should connect people in remote villages to marketplaces or bridge economic centers.
But, he concludes, "exactly this kind of road-building has been neglected for decades."
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As we shared yesterday global banking 1% are trying hard to REHABILITATE what have been vilified global corporations tied to environmental devastation---tied to sacking sovereign nation's free-market economy while installing GLOBAL FACTORIES as is now MOVING FORWARD in US FOREIGN ECONOMIC ZONES. The massive MARKETING AND PUBLIC RELATIONS blitz here in US national media is tied to the intent to bring NIKE GLOBAL FACTORIES to US FOREIGN ECONOMIC ZONES. It has nothing to do with REAL intentions of protecting NORTH AMERICAN ENVIRONMENT.
We read about a rising new GREEN NIKE describing the environmental devastation in terms of polluted waterways in China for example. The devastation of any global garment industry----shoes fall under garment is far-reaching. Why is NIKE and other shoe manufacturers like UNDERARMOUR changing from rubber soles to other materials being called GREEN?
NO------GLOBAL BANKING 1% ARE SIMPLY CREATING ECONOMIC CONDITIONS TO LOWER THE PRICE OF RUBBER AS RUBBER USES IN PRODUCTS SOAR.
Global banking 1% building GLOBAL FACTORIES and creating FOREIGN ECONOMIC ZONES in third world nations once having a sovereign economy around RUBBER PLANTATIONS.
'Home
Urbanisation and industrialisation hits rubber industry
‘Boosting production and quality through new technology, the way forward’
22 July, 2018
Rubber, a lucrative industry in the country at one time, is today in a precarious state due to rubber land being acquired for industrial and commercial activities across the country, the Colombo Rubber Traders’ Association (CRTA) warned last week'.
Addressing the 99th Annual General Meeting of the CRTA at the Ceylon Chamber of Commerce auditorium last week, out-gong Chairman of the Association Sunil Poholiyadde said over 4,000 acres of rubber land across the country has already been acquired for industrial and commercial activities.
“Land in the rubber growing areas is fast diminishing and this is a major obstacle to boost production and develop the crop. We had many pow wows with the authorities to stop the acquisition of rubber land which if not curtailed, would pose a major threat to the plantation,” Poholiyadde said.
KILLING RUBBER PLANTATIONS TO BUILD GLOBAL FACTORY FOREIGN ECONOMIC ZONES----WHICH IS WORSE ENVIRONMENTALLY?
Rubber grown in the traditional areas is no longer conducive due to rapid urbanization and industrialisation, the CRTA noted.
According to CRTA, the land acquired from rubber plantations have not been used for any purpose.
“Most of this land has been abandoned and it is of no use to anyone,” Poholiyadde said. Besides the rapid dwindling of land left for cultivation, the sharp decline in global rubber prices which has slumped by almost 50 percent has come has a double whammy to the industry.
Rubber prices dropped from around Rs. 600 per kilogram to Rs. 200 per kg in 2016. However, the price per kg increased marginally this year and currently stands at Rs. 350.
Smallholders account for nearly 70 percent of natural rubber production while the rest is held by corporates.
“Smallholders bank on prices and when prices drop they move into other occupations. Most of the plantation areas are home to various industries which offer employment to rubber farmers,” Poholiyadde said. The decline in prices, the acute shortage of workers especially affecting companies and the reduction in cultivable land have boiled down to low production which plunged from around 150 million kgs to 60 million kgs about two years ago.
“Production volumes have now increased to around 85 million kgs, which is a marginal increase. We cannot depend on smallholders alone to improve production. The Plantation Ministry must initiate measures to boost production and quality through new technology that will fetch a better price for rubber in the global market,” Poholiyadde said.
Incumbent Chairman Amanda Weerasinghe said since the first rubber seeds were planted in 1876, the rubber tree has not been fully made use of with the advancement of science.
“We should look at rubber not only as a commodity but also as a crop that has many benefits to be reaped.”
“The 10-year Master Plan for the rubber industry should be implemented by focusing on value addition. It would be a disaster if we continue to import raw material for exports,” Weerasinghe said.
The Ministry of Plantation Industries launched the plan for 2017-2026 with a target to record an export turnover of US$4,000 million by 2025. The rubber industry aims at being a US$ 3 billion industry by 2020.
However, rubber production which had an annual output of over 155,000 MT in the mid 1970s and Sri Lanka being the fourth largest rubber producer in the world, still hovered around 158,000 mt by 2011 while many countries increased their production volumes during the same period. Sri Lanka which had been a leading rubber producer has slipped to the sixth position among natural rubber producers in the world. The crop grown in around 200,00 hectares mainly in the wet zone has been extended to the dry zone as well.
Sri Lanka manufactures a wide range of value added products which comprise surgical, household and industrial gloves, hoses, tyres, tubes, auto parts , aviation tyres , rubber flooring, floor mats, carpets and footwear.
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NIKE as UNDERARMOUR and other GLOBAL GARMENT FACTORIES are MOVING FORWARD as fast as they can to robotic assembly of in this case SHOES. There will be fewer people in these GLOBAL FACTORY assembly lines but plenty of workers tied to factories manufacturing the PARTS of these shoes.
Below we see a newly PATENTED MACHINE by NIKE -----we see NOTHING ENVIRONMENTAL happening with this machine. It INCREASES the use of energy just to market a GIMMICK. The poly materials used are same old PLASTIC blend and soles still rubber.
What we see being marketed as GREEN tied to NIKE is something called TRASH SHOE. Recycling plastics as we discuss over and over breaking down recycled plastics into these kinds of MICROPLASTIC uses ----is the OPPOSITE of REAL LEFT ENVIRONMENTALISM because is increases the ability of plastics to leach into our ground water and soils.
These DESIGNER styles bring costs of sports shoes to record levels. HOW is this environmental? How is installing SMART TECHNOLOGY into garments-----ENVIRONMENTAL?
Nike is patenting a machine that will make its most popular shoe fit better
Leanna Garfield
Sep. 23, 2016, 9:32 AM
Nike's Flyknit sneakers are wildly popular worldwide — the franchise is expected to bring in $1 billion a year in revenue this year, according to Forbes.
Now, the company appears to be developing a machine that will make the shoes fit even better.
Called the "Portable Steaming System for Articles of Footwear," the device uses steam to customize how a pair of Flyknits fit an individual owner. As first reported by Investor's Business Daily, Nike filed a patent application for the machine with the US Patent and Trademark Office on September 22.
The patent's illustration basically looks like a steam monster engulfing a pair of sneakers:
An illustration of Nike's the "Portable Steaming System for Articles of Footwear."
US Patent and Trademark Office
Flyknits are unlike other Nike sneakers because the upper part (which wraps around the top and sides of the foot) is made of woven yarn and other fibers. The soft, stretchy material is designed to mimic the feel of a sock, offering a snug fit that can go nearly unnoticed by the wearer. The sneakers debuted in 2012 and now r etail for $130 to $270, depending on the model (Nike offers over 190 different pairs on its site).
According to Nike's patent application, the portable steaming system was invented by Bryan Farris, one of the company's Portland-based shoe developers. The customer puts on their Flyknits immediately after the hot steam has hit the yarn material, causing the fabric to shrink and offer a more snug fit. Each shoe can be customized to accommodate any differences between your right and left foot as well.
The machine resembles a device unveiled by Nike in 2013. A GIF from a video produced by The Next Web (below) shows a Nike worker placing the shoes in a black metal box, where they are steamed for about 30 seconds. The shoes' owner then puts them on so the shoes can mold to their feet.
The machine was available in Nike's London and New York City flagship stores for a limited time in 2013. When customers bought a pair of Flyknits, they could get them steamed for free.
Nike is also developing other sneaker innovations. At an event in March, the company introduced its "Back to the Future"-inspired HyperAdapt self-lacing shoe, which will become available at select US stores in late November (a year after protagonist Mart McFly wears them in the movie). This year, the company also unveiled its Vapormax sneakers, which feature a bubbly midsole that increases flexibility and bounce without compromising support.
These shoes, along with the new steaming machine, provide an intriguing glimpse into the future of sneaker technology.
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One of the biggest EXPENSES for corporations as GLOBAL FACTORIES consolidated local small business manufacturing into MONOPOLIES-----then GLOBAL MONOPOLIES-----was was to do with the consolidated WASTE produced at these huge factories. We watched as global corporations placed heaping loads of waste on a slow boat to third world using those regions as DUMPING GROUNDS because developed nations had ENVIRONMENTAL STANDARDS keeping their societies from being made TOXIC WASTE DUMPS.
Why are global corporations creating this FAKE GREEN policy of ZERO WASTE? To lower industrial production costs. By PRETENDING the processes inside GLOBAL FACTORIES are actually creating ZERO WASTE-----which none of these policies are ACTUALLY DOING-------they are keeping industrial waste in what were developed nations just as TOXIC as ever----using MARKETING TERMS to make that local toxic dumping OK------
WE ARE GREEN SAY MOVING FORWARD GLOBAL FACTORY---LOOK, WE HAVE DECLARED WE HAVE ZERO WASTE.
So, NIKE is super-sizing the industrial components of its manufacturing process all while global banking 1% media outlets and FAKE ENVIRONMENTAL NGOS pretend this is all REALLY ENVIRONMENTAL. FORBES says this is all environmental---so it must be.
'the company plans to send zero waste from contracted footwear manufacturing to landfills by fiscal year 2020'.
ZERO WASTE policy is simply global corporations refusing to pay to ship the toxic waste to third world nations. Don't think third world nations are getting a break---they are seeing GLOBAL FACTORIES and FOREIGN ECONOMIC ZONE building soaring.
May 18, 2016, 01:34pm
Here's How Nike Is Innovating To Scale Up Its Manufacturing
Trefis Team Contributor Great Speculations i
In addition to being one of the eight companies who are testing the world’s first 3D printer designed for large-scale manufacturing, Nike‘s patents have nearly doubled since 2009 and the company has the third largest U.S. portfolio of design patents. This clearly indicates Nike’s focus on product innovation and technology to create a manufacturing edge for itself. The acceleration of patent filins in the past few months reveals the company’s focus on new ways to manufacture products. Globally, Nike has 19,500 patents and patent applications, which is significantly high when compared to competitors. The comparative number for Adidas is around 2,400. As the company works towards meeting its revenue target of $50 billion by the end of 2020, investment in innovative products and manufacturing techniques will be key to achieve this target.
Sustainable Innovation As An Engine For Growth
While Nike has an ambitious revenue target for 2020, the company plans to achieve this as sustainably as possible. Recycled materials are being used in 71% of Nike’s footwear and apparel products and the company plans to send zero waste from contracted footwear manufacturing to landfills by fiscal year 2020. The company management stated that it is looking at sustainability as a way to unlock greater performance from its gear by thinking about manufacturing and design differently. An example of this innovation is Nike’s Flyknit which features a one-piece upper in the shoe and doesn’t require multiple cuts that are typically used to build a sports shoe. Since this innovation eliminates waste, the use of this technology has reduced Nike’s environmental footprint by 3.5 million pounds of waste.
Nike is looking at innovative manufacturing techniques to increase scale in a sustainable way. The company plans to work with “fewer, better contract factories’ in an effort to overhaul its manufacturing operations. Innovations such as 3D printing of its products will support these efforts. While Nike has been investing in 3D printing for a few years now, its participation in testing the new HP mass scale 3D printer indicates that the company plans to use this technology for mass scale production soon. Nike also plans to use the 3D printing technology for customized shoes which consumers can get made at its outlets.
3 D TECHNOLOGY IS PLASTICS------NOTHING GREEN GOING ON WITH MORE USES FOR PLASTICS
As per our estimates footwear is the most valuable segment for Nike accounting for nearly 50% of its valuation. We expect Nike’s global market share in the footwear market to increase steadily from 23% in 2016 and reach around 30% by the end of our forecast period.
In its latest quarterly results (Q3 2015) Nike registered an 11% increase in footwear revenues compared to the same period last year. The company also reported an EPS (earning per share) of $0.55 in this quarter, higher than the consensus analyst estimate of $0.48.
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Below we see CANADA selling this FAR-RIGHT WING global banking 1% policy of ZERO WASTE as really GREEN. Oh, look there is a HIERARCHY at a time when MOVING FORWARD ONE WORLD is dismantling every US agency tied to OVERSIGHT AND ACCOUNTABILITY for global corporations.
Zero Waste Hierarchy
Released: April 2014
This resource offers guiding principles and describes a progression of policies and strategies that support a zero waste system. The hierarchy is aspirational and promotes the highest and best use of materials as practical and possible.
What we are seeing MOVING FORWARD in US FOREIGN ECONOMIC ZONES is privatization of all US PUBLIC WATER AND WASTE to global corporations. Our 99% WE THE PEOPLE are being told these global corporations are going to require everyone to recycle and lower WASTE. What are GLOBAL FACTORIES in US FOREIGN ECONOMIC ZONES doing? They are SUPER-SIZING INDUSTRIAL WASTE.
It is clear what that ZERO WASTE HIERARCHY will focus upon-----NOT those global corporate campuses--but our 99% of trash cans. THINK ZERO TOLERANCE by police these few decades was harsh----MOVING FORWARD far-right wing global corporate FASCISM will make us shiver if we produce waste.
So, what do GLOBAL FACTORIES declaring themselves ZERO WASTE-----do to PRETEND they are being GREEN?
What is Zero Waste?
Zero Waste is a philosophy and a goal. Only by “closing the loop” can we hope to develop a sustainable economy. The idea is to reduce consumption as much as possible by using design-for-environment in all products and their packaging, and to make all products and packaging recyclable. Achieving Zero Waste depends on designing products and industrial processes so that their components can be dismantled, repaired and/or recycled. Zero Waste means linking communities, businesses and industries so that one's waste becomes another’s feedstock. It means preventing pollution at its source. It means new local jobs in communities throughout British Columbia.
Zero Waste
Definition From the Zero Waste International Alliance:
"Zero Waste is a goal that is ethical, economical, efficient and visionary, to guide people in changing their lifestyles and practices to emulate sustainable natural cycles, where all discarded materials are designed to become resources for others to use.
Zero Waste means designing and managing products and processes to systematically avoid and eliminate the volume and toxicity of waste and materials, conserve and recover all resources, and not burn or bury them. Implementing Zero Waste will eliminate all discharges to land, water or air that are a threat to planetary, human, animal or plant health."
Zero Waste Initiatives in British Columbia
- In June 2006, RCBC redefined its mission statement to be a multi-sectoral organization promoting the principles of Zero Waste through information services, the exchange of ideas, and research. A milestone for RCBC as more and more regions in the province moves toward making Zero Waste its goal.
- On May 26, 2006 Metro Vancouver (formerly Greater Vancouver Regional District) directors voted unanimously to adopt a Zero Waste philosophy. In 2009, the region officially launched the Zero Waste Challenge, with an interim goal of a 70% diversion rate. Recently, Metro Vancouver announced plans to ban residential organics from landfills and transfer stations. The Cities of Vancouver, Richmond, Burnaby, New Westminster, Port Coquitlam, Coquitlam, and Port Moody have already implemented residential organics collection programs. The City of Surrey is currently running a pilot program.
- In November 2000, the Regional District of Kootenay Boundary endorsed the concept of Zero Waste. The region officially adopted it later as a waste management strategy in March 2002. The new strategy, called "Bringing Zero Waste to Kootenay Boundary - A Strategy for a Waste Free Future" provides a blueprint for moving from concept to implementation. It consists of eight initiatives to be pursued at the local level and ten initiatives involving local government efforts to influence change at the provincial level. The strategy is broad-based, targeting increased materials efficiencies in businesses, local economic development through "resource recovery" and public policy renewal to facilitate the development of a zero waste economy.
- The Regional District of Nanaimo adopted the goal of zero waste in 2001 to address its urgent disposal capacity shortfall. In 2005, the RDN banned commercial food waste from the landfill. A commercial food waste diversion program involving businesses and organizations diverts more than 6,000 tonnes of food waste and organic compostables annually from the landfill. The RD followed up in 2007, launching a pilot program for residential organic compostables. The program is now in full swing, serving over 52,000 single family homes.
- In 2002, the Town of Smithers partnered with Footprint Environmental Strategies to develop a Triple Bottom Line audit and business plan template for local businesses as well as examine how taxes, fees, and charges can be used to promote choices that support community sustainability.
- In June 2002, the board of directors of Ridge Meadows Recycling Society adopted a "Plan for Zero Waste". The Society, a community-based recycler celebrating its 40th anniversary in 2012, intended to raise awareness about the concept of zero waste at all levels of government and to "lobby business and industry to adopt policies and practices to make zero waste a reality."
- In September 2009, Kamloops City Council opposed an incineration plant by a vote of 9-0. Zero Waste BC was formed shortly after, in an effort to unify Zero Waste voices across the province.
Zero Waste Resources
Zero Waste Hierarchy
Released: April 2014
This resource offers guiding principles and describes a progression of policies and strategies that support a zero waste system. The hierarchy is aspirational and promotes the highest and best use of materials as practical and possible.
On the Road to Zero Waste: Priorities for Local Governments
Released: June 2009
Summary:
This report provides guidance to municipal and regional governments across B.C. on the actions, tools and opportunities available to them to increase the 3Rs and move closer to achieving zero waste.
Zero Waste One Step at a Time - Benefits and Applications for Retail Businesses
Released: May 2002
This discussion paper introduces the concept of zero waste as a tool that will assist retail and other types of businesses to not only increase their economic efficiency but also move towards long term sustainability in our overall economy.
Zero Waste in the ICI and Retail Sectors: Mountain Equipment Co-op, a national retail chain, has committed to a Zero Waste goal. Through creative repurposing, targeted re-training, and implementation of composting programs, MEC achieved a 92% diversion rate in 2007. The company also developed an online gear swap, to help members trade their gently used items. This impressive reduction in waste resulted in $216,000 savings in disposal costs!
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This was the first attempt by global banking 1% to PRETEND they are working towards ZERO WASTE. Don't think this WASTE TO ENERGY INCINERATOR being pushed out was a loss to global banking corporations having PATENTED this process. Across the nation these FAKE GREEN PATENTED WASTE TO ENERGY products were bought by global banking 5% freemason/Greek local pols and players pretending our US cities were being GREEN. We are glad this community was successful in fighting this GREEN INCINERATOR----but the goals of GLOBAL FACTORIES and US FOREIGN ECONOMIC ZONES is to install these FAKE GREEN INCINERATORS all over global corporate campuses.
This is what we call a FALSE FLAG. It appears local citizens are winning in environmental justice when MOVING FORWARD intends on using these FAKE GREEN incinerators throughout GLOBAL FACTORY CITIES. So, indeed, GLOBAL FACTORIES will burn all that waste that used to be shipped on huge barges to third world nations----just as TOXIC while PRETENDING it is all GREEN. This is worse than the FAKE GREEN policy called GREEN COAL and FRACKING natural gas as GREEN ENERGY.
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BALTIMORE (WJZ) — A dangerous chemical spills in Baltimore and created a toxic acid cloud over some neighborhoods, forcing some people to shelter inside their homes for two hours.
The cloud threatened neighborhoods near a chemical plant and caused everyone to shelter in place.
CURTIS BAY is our west Baltimore community in direct pathway of what will become GLOBAL FACTORIES the size of US cities. It is the destination of medical waste which will soar as Baltimore expands into a global health system and tourism-----it will soar as medical products tied to PATENTING PHARMA----BIOLOGIC AND BIOTECHNOLOGY PRODUCTS. So, there is not intent in BALTIMORE to be GREEN-----to provide oversight and accountability of global corporations as to ZERO TOLERANCE WASTE.
ZERO WASTE policy means all of what will be exploding numbers of chemical manufacturing factories will KEEP that waste local. This policy is setting the stage for US FOREIGN ECONOMIC ZONES to operate as they do overseas-----don't worry about getting rid of toxic waste.
WE KNOW this is FAKE GREEN policy and so do FRIEND OF THE EARTH----SIERRA CLUB------LEAGUE OF CONSERVATION VOTERS----which will PRETEND ZERO WASTE is really environmental.
Baltimore Scraps Its Waste-to-Energy Plan Mar 22, 2016
Plans for an incinerator in South Baltimore have been halted, and the community could be better off that way.
A years-long, youth-led campaign to prevent the construction of a waste incinerator in the south Baltimore neighborhood of Curtis Bay has inched closer to victory.
Last week, the Maryland Department of the Environment alerted the New York-based company Energy Answers International that its permit to build an incinerator that would convert trash into energy is no longer valid. The proposed plant would generate 160 megawatts of electricity by burning an estimated 4,000 tons of solid waste per day. The facility would spread over 90 acres, making it the largest incinerator in the U.S. if built, according to the Environmental Integrity Project.
The incinerator would also sit just a stone’s throw from a number of schools and parks, not to mention hundreds of homes that are already in close proximity to a cluster of pollution-producing facilities. This is why students from those schools and their families have been protesting the construction of the waste-to-energy plant since Energy Answers began building it in August 2013. The Curtis Bay neighborhood already suffers the worst levels of air pollution in the state.
The map and chart below, created using the EPA’s EJ SCREEN mapping application, shows that the area within a mile of the proposed incinerator site registers extremely high levels of ozone and particulate matter emissions. Both of these air pollutants are responsible for asthma and respiratory disease-related deaths, especially among children and people of color. It may even play a role in increasing urban violence.
The neighborhoods around the planned incinerator also are dense with old housing containing lead-saturated paint, which increases health risks tied to toxic lead exposure.The Flint water disaster has heightened the nation’s awareness about the dangers of lead contamination. Consider in that context that the incinerator was permitted by the state to release up to 1,000 pounds of lead into the air yearly, along with 240 pounds of mercury, as the Chesapeake Physicians for Social Responsibility’s Gwen Dubois wrote in a Baltimore Sun op-ed last November.
Dubois says that Curtis Bay and neighboring communities of Brooklyn and Hawkins Point have higher levels of heart disease, lung cancer, respiratory disease, and diabetes than the rest of the city.
“Is it related to the pollution? I believe it is,” Dubois tells CityLab. “Can I prove it? No. Do I think we ought to put more pollutants in the air that cause these things? No. Are our own citizens benefitting from it? No.”
The United Workers began working with a group of students in the neighborhood, banded under the name Free Your Voice. The kids learned from organizers about the potential dangers of the incinerator and helped the group rally against Energy Answers’ plans. The youth group held marches, went door to door gathering signatures for a petition, and flooded public meetings with artistic performances to express their opposition.
They scored a huge victory in February 2015 when the Baltimore Regional Cooperative Purchasing Committee pulled out of an agreement to buy energy from the future plant. The city of Baltimore then pulled its support a month later, leaving Energy Answers without two of its biggest customers for the $1 billion project. Still, the company refused to halt its plans.
The Free Your Voice group led a march to Maryland’s Department of the Environment offices last December to deliver a petition signed by thousands who opposed the waste-to-energy plant. A few people were arrested during that delivery, including Dubois, for refusing to leave the premises. In January, a United Nations working group toured the site as part of a U.S. visit, then criticized the state in its report back:
The highest polluting industrial facilities, across a range of sectors from farming, mining to manufacturing, are more likely to be situated in poor and minority neighbourhood, including those of people of African descent. For instance, we are concerned about the possible health risks to people of African descent on account of the incinerator project in Curtis Bay, Baltimore and the lead contaminated water in Flint, Michigan. African American communities are calling for environmental justice as they are concerned that they are disproportionately exposed to environmental hazards impacting their health and standard of living.
All of this played a role in the state’s decision to invalidate Energy Answers’ permit last week, but so did the actions of the company itself. As noted in the state’s letter explaining the permit revocation, Energy Answers failed to do any construction at the project’s site since October 31, 2013. Under the permit rules, a company can’t let construction stall for longer than 18 months. This March marks month 29 with no activity on the 90-acre lot, putting Energy Answers well over the time limit.
The environmental department’s suggestion to pull the permit now sits with the state’s public service commission, which will make the final decision. It hadn’t yet scheduled a public hearing on the matter as of March 21, but the commission’s communications director, Tori Leonard, says she expects them to take it up on March 30. Until then, the project is, as DuBois puts it, “on ICU until a doctor comes and declares it dead.”
If such a declaration is made, it will be the second waste-to-energy plant killed off in the Baltimore region within a month. An incinerator that’s been running in Harford County, just northeast of Baltimore County, closed on March 17 after operating for 30 years.
Now, is waste-to-energy technology bad in general, or just bad for Baltimore? If it involves combustion—burning solid wastes—then it is bad in general, says the Environmental Integrity Project attorney Leah Kelly, who studied the issue for a 2011 report. There are a number of waste-to-energy plants operating or in development in other states and countries, and using other energy-extracting processes like gasification. But when using combustion, Kelly says she’s “never heard of one that burns trash cleanly.”
The Free Your Voice kids of Curtis Bay, meanwhile, are hoping that the would-be incinerator site will instead be used by companies that can bring cleaner, greener jobs to the community.
“Community members have been working to bring truly green, community-driven, positive alternatives like solar, recycling, and composting that provides good jobs for residents and doesn't put our lives at risk,” says Destiny Watford, one of the teens leading the effort. “The incinerator was holding us back from that positive vision.”
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'But the measure did not advance to the floor of the House of Delegates in the session’s final days'.
After all that media press about a WIN AGAINST INCINERATORS at Curtis Bay pretending Maryland Assembly voted against these incinerators-----here we see this never actually happened. Not only did Maryland Assembly not vote to stop incinerators is left its GREEN SUBSIDY intact.
It does not matter which MARYLAND ASSEMBLY pol voted against this INCINERATOR----because MOVING FORWARD US FOREIGN ECONOMIC ZONES will ignore any local, state, or US law that harms CORPORATE PROFIT and having to haul away huge amounts of toxic waste is COSTLY. When we allow MOVING FORWARD GLOBAL FACTORIES IN US FOREIGN ECONOMIC ZONES---there will be complete and total environmental devastation.
General Assembly keeps green-energy subsidy for incinerator, kills other environmental bills
Scott Dance
Contact Reporter
The Baltimore SunApril 9, 2018
A challenging General Assembly session for environmental groups ended with the failure of two key proposals — one to measure the loss of Maryland forests and another to end green-energy subsidies for a Baltimore trash incinerator.
Neither bill came up for votes in the state Senate on Monday, the last day of the legislature’s 90-day lawmaking session.
The last-minute legislative defeats followed several other losses earlier in the year: the General Assembly shot down proposals to grow the state’s supply of renewable energy and to enact bans on polystyrene foam and a harmful pesticide known as chlorpyrifos.
Alison Prost, Maryland executive director of the Chesapeake Bay Foundation, said she expected state lawmakers to be more eager to act on environmental issues, given that many of them expressed concerns that President Donald Trump has weakened some federal clean air and water standards.
CHESAPEAKE BAY FOUNDATION LEADERS KNOW----JUST AS WE DO ----MOVING FORWARD GLOBAL FACTORIES IN US FOREIGN ECONOMIC ZONES --LIKE BALTIMORE WILL NOT ONLY KILL THE CHESAPEAKE BAY---BUT THE ENTIRE REGION.
“I am puzzled by the lack of priority given to the environment given that you can’t go far in Maryland without being near the water,” Prost said.
Lawmakers did not ignore the environment altogether. They passed proposals to protect the state from the possible harms of offshore oil and gas drilling and to preserve efforts to build wind farms off the state’s coast.
But environmentalists classified those measures as defensive moves to prevent further pollution, instead of efforts to more aggressively clean the Chesapeake Bay and slow global climate change.
“There were certainly some disappointments,” said Kristen Harbeson, political director for the Maryland League of Conservation Voters.
Environmental advocacy groups urged the General Assembly this year to close loopholes in state forest conservation laws that have allowed the clearing of some of Maryland’s largest and most dense forests — in some cases without requirements to replant any trees. Developers and county and municipal governments disagreed with elements of the proposal that would have made construction projects and tree planting efforts more expensive and logistically challenging.
And there was disagreement over whether forest loss is occurring.
Gov. Larry Hogan’s administration says the state’s tree canopy is growing, but environmental groups say that doesn’t take into account the higher ecological value of dense forests.
As a result, the bill was watered down to simply require the state to collect more data on forest losses. But that measure came one vote shy of final passage in the Senate on Monday.
“This was just trying to get us the data needed to answer the tough policy questions,” Prost said. “And the General Assembly couldn’t get it done.”
Days earlier, the Senate passed a bill that would have removed a “green energy” label from trash incinerators like a facility in Baltimore. Doing so would have stripped the incinerator of millions of dollars in subsidies paid through Marylanders’ electricity bills.
A recent Baltimore Sun investigation showed that a state renewable energy program sends millions of dollars to paper mills and trash incinerators that produce greenhouse gases and pollution.
But the measure did not advance to the floor of the House of Delegates in the session’s final days.
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