Category Environment & Development

Nostalgia and the Night Sky, Courtesy Earth Hour

By Neena Bhandari

Sydney, 03.04.2008 (IANS): Switching off lights for 60 minutes in a year on a perfect spring Saturday night in Sydney, when it was neither too hot nor too cold for comfort and most offices and businesses were closed anyway, one can’t help but question the contribution of the Earth Hour to the cause of tackling climate change.

An event that started in Sydney last year had about 25 countries participating this year. So is it, indeed, “Our (Sydney’s) gift to the world”? As one of the Sydney Morning Herald readers wrote in the letters’ column, “The headline shouts of our vanity, selfishness and self importance”.

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Veena Sahajwalla makes world first “Green” steel a commercial reality

By Neena Bhandari

Sydney, 10.11.2007 (IANS): Millions of tonnes of waste plastic will be recycled into steel. The breakthrough Australian “green” steel technology which cuts coke and coal demand and reduces emissions has been invented by University of New South Wales materials scientist Professor Veena Sahajwalla.

Sahajwalla, an alumni of Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur, told IANS “Plastic is simply another form of carbon. In making steel there’s essentially no difference between the polyethylene plastic in shopping bags and a natural resource like coal.”

Polyethylene plastic contains carbon, an essential raw material in electric arc furnace (EAF) steelmaking, which recycles steel from scrap metal and accounts for 40 per cent of the world’s steel production. Annual steel production is around 1.1 billion tonnes globally.

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When it comes to poaching, no one should be above the law

By Neena Bhandari

As humans and animals vie for space, a lot can be learnt from the Bishnois and other rural communities in India, which have for generations co-existed with the wildlife forming an integral part of the ecosystem. When in 1998 five Bollywood film stars from Mumbai went hunting in the forests on the outskirts of the historic city of Jodhpur in the western Indian state of Rajasthan and killed two black bucks and a chinkara (Indian Gazelle), they had expected to bag trophies not trouble.

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