Tag Archives: Panasonic

How one activist used a little shaming and a lot of patience to clean up Chinese factories

This story was originally published by Mother Jones and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

One humid July day, the Chinese environmentalist Ma Jun stood in front of an alley sandwiched by two warehouses at the factory of an Apple supplier called Catcher, a two-hour bullet-train ride south of Beijing. He wore safety goggles and scribbled in a notebook. Two Apple executives flanked him.

Guides from Catcher toured Ma around towering black tanks and large sheds containing vats and pipes that disposed of the toxic chromium waste produced in manufacturing parts for iPhones, iPads, and MacBooks. Apple and Catcher said the state-of-the-art system processed the waste without any discharge. Ma’s group, the Institute for Public and Environmental Affairs (IPE), was considering writing a report on the technology, if it could verify the claim. After a tour of the nearly 500-acre facility, Ma and the executives adjourned to an office conference room on the campus. The atmosphere was cordial, one of partners rather than adversaries.

Apple’s meetings with Ma weren’t always like this. The first one, at its California headquarters in 2011, when he confronted the company about environmental problems at multiple factories, was tense. IPE had issued a damning report on the behavior of tech companies in China, and Apple took a year and a half to set up a meeting with IPE. The discussion lasted about five hours, with Apple ceding little beyond a vague statement about transparency. More than seven years later, IPE has helped audit many of Apple’s factories and suppliers in China, and the group now ranks the company first on its list of the most transparent companies.

Apple isn’t the only company that Ma has helped push toward reform. Since IPE was founded in 2006, his team has gotten more than 1,300 factories to address environmental messes such as discharging waste into rivers. The secret to Ma’s success is a clever tool: IPE has compiled a database of more than 1.3 million environmental violations committed by Chinese factories. It publicly displays this information in online maps and apps, pushing factories and the brands they supply to clean up. Many of them do, agreeing to third-party audits approved by IPE and its partner organizations to clear their records from IPE’s database. With this, Ma has convinced two of the world’s most opaque institutions — international corporations and the Chinese government — that publicly monitoring pollution is in their interest. For his accomplishments, he has won the prestigious Goldman Environmental Prize and many other awards, making him a major face of China’s environmental movement.

Despite the accolades, Ma’s demeanor is humble and self-deprecating. He sees his work as an effort to help companies, not undermine them. His modesty is likely one of the reasons the Chinese government doesn’t feel threatened by him. “There were all these fire-breathing Greenpeace types,” one observer of the Goldman award ceremony told me. “And then there was Ma Jun.”

On smogless days in Beijing, the city’s west side is visible from IPE’s office tower. Ma Jun, 50, grew up there in the early years of the Cultural Revolution, born in 1968 to an engineer and government administrator. Mao Zedong had disbanded traditional schools, and Ma spent much of his childhood playing with crickets and beetles and exploring farmland. His childlike curiosity has stayed with him, though the fields have been overrun by Beijing’s sprawl. After graduating from college, he found a job as an assistant for the South China Morning Post, Hong Kong’s leading English newspaper. He cut out every environmental story he found, studying what few articles he came across, and spent vacations reporting on water pollution in China. The country’s rivers, he discovered, were catastrophically polluted and overdrawn. He wrote a book about the issue that reached a wider audience than he’d expected, and soon, among global environmental circles, it began drawing comparisons to Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring.

After the book’s publication, Ma worked for an energy consulting firm in Beijing and then left to study at Yale’s World Fellows program, which helps train up-and-coming leaders from around the world. He studied American environmental law, contemplating which regulatory tools could be best applied in China. By the end of his time in New Haven, he’d written a new book that argued for progressive legal reforms to Chinese environmental law, including ones that emphasized greater environmental transparency from both government and corporations along with remedies for the victims of pollution. Editors in China were afraid to publish it. “They told me I’d forgotten where I was,” he recalls.

Instead of publishing the book, he decided to implement its ideas through a non-governmental organization. For its first project, in 2006, Ma’s three-person staff mined every available government record of water pollution in China, transcribing them by hand, then publishing a rudimentary interactive map online. “In the beginning, all that work felt useless,” says Wang Jingjing, one of IPE’s early staffers, and now married to Ma. IPE’s first breakthrough came after Panasonic executives contacted it about one of their factories on the map. Together with IPE, they orchestrated a full cleanup. Soon, other companies began contacting IPE for help, often after journalists or activists used IPE’s map to expose factories’ environmental violations.

IPE’s reputation continued to grow within environmental circles, and in 2014, it released a pollution-tracking app now called the Blue Map. The app’s greatest success came amid somewhat awkward circumstances: in China’s most famous environmental documentary film, Under the Dome — which the government first promoted and then censored — Chai Jing, the film’s reporter-director, gave the app a shout-out, encouraging people to download it. The film received around 300 million views within a week of its release, and the app crashed. To get it back online, IPE turned to software engineers who manage train ticketing systems during China’s lunar new year, the greatest annual migration in the world, when 400 million people return home for the holidays.

For thousands of years, Chinese rulers have struggled to enforce laws passed in Beijing at the local level. “Heaven is high and the emperor is far away,” goes one proverb. Local officials are largely promoted based on economic growth, which makes them wary of enforcing costly environmental laws. It’s common, for example, for officials to tip off factories before environmental inspections occur, reminding them, say, to turn on the scrubbers that clean the emissions passing through a smokestack. Regulators and judges have limited power to prevent such moves, since they’re subordinate to these officials or can be easily ignored. In the short term, it’s often more effective for IPE to sidestep local governments and directly contact brands and factories about the information it’s collected. After seeing their records made public, factory owners often agree to address them. “What we’ve done is kind of like Chinese acupuncture,” Ma told me. “You press one spot in one place, and that causes a reaction in another.”

If IPE can persuade companies to behave better, Ma argues to skeptical officials, this makes the Communist Party look more effective and enhances social stability — the only performance metric the government considers as important as economic growth. It’s working: Over the years, as Ma has won the trust of China’s leaders, his access to them has increased. A few weeks after the Catcher visit, he spent two days in a neighboring province training local officials on the benefits of transparency. “It’s funny, local regulators love him,” says Alex Wang, a former lawyer at the Natural Resources Defense Council, who is on IPE’s board.

In China, environmental activism tends to be tolerated more than other types of advocacy, even under President Xi Jinping’s more repressive politics. Yet Ma is careful not to push the government too far. Scholars who study Chinese politics sometimes refer to its authoritarianism as strategically “consultative” of civil society; officials have actively asked for comment and feedback from grassroots groups and independent experts on major policies like the 2014 Environmental Protection Law. Influential public figures like Ma have developed a kind of expert status in official circles, and they’ve worked hard to keep the Chinese government open to allowing — and even inviting — such public feedback. Sometimes, maintaining that cooperation requires backpedaling and finesse. Once, a team from one of IPE’s partner NGOs was driving around the countryside with a camera, photographing factories with violations listed in IPE’s database. It posted the photos on social media, revealing the precise locations of the pollution. Ma received a firm order to halt the project, which was unnerving the government. He assented, knowing that alienating officials could result in IPE losing favor, or even being shut down.

Ma knows that this delicate dance means progress is slow. Moving hundreds of China’s millions of factories toward compliance, “is only a drop in the bucket,” he admitted to me. IPE, with 37 staffers, cannot monitor all of Chinese manufacturing on its own, and it will need more reform and resources from the government to scale up its approach. State-owned enterprises, too, will need to become more transparent.

At the Catcher tour, the wrap-up meeting in the conference room ended well. Ma smiled and said he was impressed with the factory’s efforts. There was just one matter left to be sorted out: At the end of the disposal system sat a white container about the size of a doghouse, holding the final waste product, which was shipped to a recycler. For Apple and Catcher to receive the zero-discharge rating they sought, IPE would have to confirm that the waste was being properly disposed of offsite. The executives promised to follow up on that, and the mood in the room remained jovial.

In the car ride back to the train station, Ma was reflective. A week earlier, in Beijing, Dell officials had arrived to discuss speeding up their environmental auditing process, challenging Apple for the top spot in IPE’s rankings. “To see what the best companies can do now,” he said optimistically, “it’s just incredible.”

This article is from – 

How one activist used a little shaming and a lot of patience to clean up Chinese factories

Posted in Accent, alo, Anchor, FF, G & F, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Panasonic, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments Off on How one activist used a little shaming and a lot of patience to clean up Chinese factories

Tesla’s going big — like, 18-wheeler big.

In a long-awaited decision, the Nebraska Public Service Commission announced its vote Monday to approve a tweaked route for the controversial tar sands oil pipeline.

The 3-2 decision is a critical victory for pipeline builder TransCanada after a nearly decade-long fight pitting Nebraska landowners, Native communities, and environmentalists activists against a pipeline that would carry tar sands oil from Alberta to refineries on the Gulf Coast.

After years of intense pressure, President Obama deemed the project “not in the national interest” in 2015; President Trump quickly reversed that decision earlier this year. But TransCanada couldn’t go forward without an approved route through Nebraska, which was held up by legal and political proceedings.

In the meantime, it’s become unclear whether TransCanada will even try to complete the $8 billion project. The financial viability of tar sands oil — which is expensive to extract and refine — has shifted in the intervening years, and while KXL languished, Canadian oil companies developed other routes to market.

The commission’s decision also opens the door to new litigation and land negotiations. TransCanada will have to secure land rights along the new route; one dissenting commissioner noted that many landowners might not even know the pipeline would potentially cross their property.

Meanwhile, last Thursday, TransCanada’s original Keystone pipeline, which KXL was meant to supplement, spilled 210,000 gallons of oil in South Dakota. Due to a 2011 Nebraska law, the commissioners were unable to consider pipeline safety or the possibility of spills in their decision.

See original article: 

Tesla’s going big — like, 18-wheeler big.

Posted in alo, Anchor, FF, G & F, GE, Green Light, LAI, LG, ONA, Panasonic, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Tesla’s going big — like, 18-wheeler big.

Nebraska gives the green light to Keystone XL — with a twist.

In a long-awaited decision, the Nebraska Public Service Commission announced its vote Monday to approve a tweaked route for the controversial tar sands oil pipeline.

The 3-2 decision is a critical victory for pipeline builder TransCanada after a nearly decade-long fight pitting Nebraska landowners, Native communities, and environmentalists activists against a pipeline that would carry tar sands oil from Alberta to refineries on the Gulf Coast.

After years of intense pressure, President Obama deemed the project “not in the national interest” in 2015; President Trump quickly reversed that decision earlier this year. But TransCanada couldn’t go forward without an approved route through Nebraska, which was held up by legal and political proceedings.

In the meantime, it’s become unclear whether TransCanada will even try to complete the $8 billion project. The financial viability of tar sands oil — which is expensive to extract and refine — has shifted in the intervening years, and while KXL languished, Canadian oil companies developed other routes to market.

The commission’s decision also opens the door to new litigation and land negotiations. TransCanada will have to secure land rights along the new route; one dissenting commissioner noted that many landowners might not even know the pipeline would potentially cross their property.

Meanwhile, last Thursday, TransCanada’s original Keystone pipeline, which KXL was meant to supplement, spilled 210,000 gallons of oil in South Dakota. Due to a 2011 Nebraska law, the commissioners were unable to consider pipeline safety or the possibility of spills in their decision.

Original article:

Nebraska gives the green light to Keystone XL — with a twist.

Posted in alo, Anchor, FF, G & F, GE, Green Light, LAI, LG, ONA, Panasonic, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Nebraska gives the green light to Keystone XL — with a twist.

5 Healthy, Green Home Hacks

If you think you are too small to make a difference, try sleepingwith a mosquito. ~Dalai Lama XIV

No. Really.

A lot of people ask me if one small change in their daily habit is really going to make a difference and to that I reply, of course!

Lets face itit can be overwhelming trying to change all of your (bad) habits at once, but my motto is to take baby steps. Its more fun. Its more do-able. And, youre more likely to stick with your new habit over the long run.

To get started, here are a few reuse home hacks that will not only help heal our beautiful planet, but will pad your wallet with some generous savings.

But first, listen to myGreen Divas at Home radio show segment. Then read on for more!

Now do I have your attention?

1. Clean with Microfiber Towels vs. Paper Towels

Paper towelsmay be the default for tackling household cleaning tasks, but absorbent microfiber towels can do anything paper towels or wipes can do, and microfiber usually does a better job of whisking up dirt and grease. They wont scratch surfaces, leave no lint behind, and can be washed about fifty times. Buy several so you can throw them in the wash and grab another as you clean.

Reducing yourpaper towel usewill help conserve trees and cut down on the pollution produced in the bleaching process. Using one roll of paper towels per week, at $1.25 per roll, will cost you $70 per year. A stack of reusable microfiber towels is about $19.99. Thats an annual savings of around $50.00!

2. Reuse Plastic Snack Bags

Do your part to reduce the over 20 million disposable snack bags that end up in landfills each year. Most families spend $85 a year on disposable plastic baggies according to the Sierra Club. Plastic disposable Ziploc bags make convenient food storage and freezer bags, but discarding them is a waste of money and resources.

The Blue Avocado (re)zipSeal Reusable Snack and Sandwich Bags can easily extend their life tenfold. PVC-, lead- and BPA-free, each (re)zip features a unique double-lock closure that keeps liquids and food fresh inside. Using just onere(zip) at least twice a week can eliminate over 100 disposable plastic baggies per year. With a one time investment of $5.95-9.95 vs. repeatedly purchasing new resealable bags equals long-term saving of hundreds of dollars.

Or, try Baggie Wash; the first-of-its-kind dishwasher accessory that allows you to easily clean and reuse your zipper-style food storage bags 50 times.Bag-E-Wash fits any make/model dishwasher and adjusts to fit any Ziploc style reusable bag from sandwich size up to gallon size bags.Just one box (30) of gallon size bags washed and dried with Bag-E-Wash and reused 50 times each keeps 1,500 bags out of our landfills & oceans. This equals asavings to you of $150.One time investment of $5.95-9.95 vs. repeatedly purchasing new resealable bags = long-term saving of hundreds of dollars.

3. Recharge Your Power

Did you know Americans purchase nearly three billion dry-cell batteries every year? Many of these contain toxic heavy metals like cadmium, mercury, andlead. Cadmium can cause damage to thekidneys, birth defects, andcancer. Mercury and lead are very potent neurotoxins. Whenbatteries end up in the landfill, these toxins can contaminate water supplies.

Newer pre-charged and ultra-low self-charge batteries are even more efficient and cost effective than their rechargeable predecessors. For example,some brandscan be used right out of the package and recharged up to 2,100 times. At around $21 for a four pack of AA batteries and charger, youre looking at less than half a cent per battery; a long-term savings of roughly $983.50 over each batterys lifetime.

4. BYOB

An estimated 500 billion to one trillion plastic bags are used annually worldwide. More than 14 million trees were chopped down to manufacture the 10 billion paper grocery bags used in the U.S. in 1999. Thats more than one million per minute!

Less than five percent of shoppers in America are using canvas, cotton, or mesh bags. Take a reusable cloth bag to the store. If not for you, do it for sea life. Of all known species of sea turtles, 86 percent have had problems of entanglement or ingestion of marine debris thousand years to decompose. Does this mean paper bags are more environmentally friendly than plastic? Although recycled more often, the production of paper sacks produce seventy percent more air pollutants and take up more space in the landfill than plastic bags.

5. Use Reusable Cutlery vs. Disposable

To reduce environmental impact, tryPreservespurposeful plastic products which utilize recycled plastics from yogurt cups into toothbrushes, storage containers and cutlery consisting of #5 polypropylene plastic (safe food grade material) thatsBPA-freeand dishwasher safe.

Another smart choice for plates and cutlery is bamboo. It is a fast growing, abundant, woody, perennial, evergreen plant that can grow three to four feet in one day! It can even be used for construction of houses, bridges, fences and furniture due to the durability of its short fibers.

Bonus:

Listen to the latest full episode of theGreen Divas Radio Show! It’spacked with fun and useful information from a lively conversation with Mariel Hemingway and Bobby Williams about creating mindful and sustainable relationships to eating sustainably with Dr. Karen Lee and one of our fav green dudes Rob Greenfield talks about living a zero waste life.

Catchthe latestGreen Divas Radio Showand other green, healthy and free radio showsdaily onGDGDRadio.com(or get theGDGD Radio app)!

Written by Green Diva Lisa Beres | Main image viaShutterStock

Disclaimer: The views expressed above are solely those of the author and may not reflect those of Care2, Inc., its employees or advertisers.

Continued here:

5 Healthy, Green Home Hacks

Posted in alo, bamboo, FF, G & F, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Panasonic, PUR, Radius, Sprout, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on 5 Healthy, Green Home Hacks

Panasonic BK-3HCCA4BA eneloop pro AA High Capacity New Ni-MH Pre-Charged Rechargeable Batteries, 4 Pack

[amzn_product_post]

Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Panasonic BK-3HCCA4BA eneloop pro AA High Capacity New Ni-MH Pre-Charged Rechargeable Batteries, 4 Pack

Recycle Denim Through Jan. 31 and Help Insulate Homes

Now through Jan. 31, if you drop off your old denim at a Fresh Produce store, you’ll receive a discount and the old denim will be turned into insulation. Photo: Shutterstock

Recycling your old blue jeans obviously benefits the environment, but now through the end of January, if you recycle your jeans at a Fresh Produce retail store, it will also benefit you and communities in need.

Fresh Produce, a national apparel brand for women, is teaming up with Cotton Incorporated, the marketing and research company for cotton, and Blue Jeans Go Green, a denim recycling initiative, to make this happen. When you return your old denim — any style, any brand — to one of Fresh Produce’s 24 stores this month, you’ll receive 15 percent off Fresh Produce’s new denim line, KUT. Then Blue Jeans Go Green will turn the old denim into housing insulation, which will be donated to communities that need it.

“We love the bright colors Fresh Produce apparel is known for and we know that their customers will love this unique program that gives new life to unwanted denim,” Andrea Samber, co-director of strategic alliances for Cotton Incorporated, said in a press release. “By donating jeans and other denim items to Blue Jeans Go Green, Fresh Produce customers are not only helping to divert textiles from landfills, they are helping provide housing insulation to communities in need and getting a discount on new denim purchases at Fresh Produce.”

While this partnership between Fresh Produce and Blue Jeans Go Green is new, the denim recycling program has already made quite an impact. To date, more than 600 tons of denim has been diverted from landfills by Blue Jeans Go Green, and the organization has insulated more than 1,000 homes across the country with their UltraTouch Denim Insulation. Blue Jeans Go Green has also partnered with many organizations, including universities and Habitat for Humanity chapters, to help accomplish its goals.

The denim Blue Jeans Go Green collects is turned into UltraTouch Denim Insulation, made by Bonded Logic Inc. Photo: Bonded Logic

Blue Jeans Go Green has received more than a million pieces of denim thus far, and you can add to this number by dropping your old jeans off at a Fresh Produce location through Jan. 31. If you’re interested in recycling old denim but don’t live near a Fresh Produce store (find locations here), you can also mail your old jeans to Blue Jeans Go Green directly.

earth911

Visit link: 

Recycle Denim Through Jan. 31 and Help Insulate Homes

Posted in alo, eco-friendly, FF, G & F, GE, ONA, Panasonic, PUR, Safer, solar, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Recycle Denim Through Jan. 31 and Help Insulate Homes

Panasonic MC-CG917 “OptiFlow” Bag Canister Vacuum Cleaner

[amzn_product_post]

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , | Comments Off on Panasonic MC-CG917 “OptiFlow” Bag Canister Vacuum Cleaner

Panasonic NI-C78SR Steam/Dry Iron with Stainless-Steel Soleplate

[amzn_product_post]

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , | Comments Off on Panasonic NI-C78SR Steam/Dry Iron with Stainless-Steel Soleplate

Panasonic NN-SD681S Genius “Prestige” 1.2 cuft 1200 Watt Sensor Microwave with Inverter Technology & Blue Readout, Stainless Steel

[amzn_product_post]

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Panasonic NN-SD681S Genius “Prestige” 1.2 cuft 1200 Watt Sensor Microwave with Inverter Technology & Blue Readout, Stainless Steel

Panasonic NI-E200T U-Shape Titanium Soleplate Steam-Dry Iron

[amzn_product_post]

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , | Comments Off on Panasonic NI-E200T U-Shape Titanium Soleplate Steam-Dry Iron