Environment

On October 21, 2015, when the European Clothing Action Plan (ECAP) was launched, it seemed to be quite an ambitious project. The €3.6 million pilot project funded by EU LIFE was meant to increase environmental and economic benefits by reducing the carbon, water and waste footprints of clothing in the EU. On December 31, 2019, the project drew to a close, and is likely to serve as a benchmark in the next few years, at least. The project involved UK charity WRAP, working in partnership with MADE...

There is such a term called a “creeping normality”. The expression was coined by American scientist Jared Diamond in his 2005 bestseller, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. He had touched upon the subject earlier too “while attempting to explain why, in the course of long-term environmental degradation, Easter Island natives would, seemingly irrationally, chop down the last tree.” The concept is put succinctly in the Wikipedia entry on the subject: Creeping normality (also called...

For one week the air pollution levels in Delhi and the NCR (National Capital Region) shot through the roof, forcing authorities to declare a public health emergency. Schools and colleges remained closed as Delhi-NCR choked under the dense fumes wafting in from neighbouring Punjab and Haryana. The capital region had its sources of pollution (from vehicular emissions to pollution caused by power plants), but the stubble burning in the two Northern states came as the last straw. Even though, at its...

About four years ago, the Karnataka government was accused of diverting 10,000 acres of land for various defence, scientific and developmental projects. The merits or demerits of the land-grab allegations aside, there was a rather interesting and disconcerting element that kept cropping up—that the state government thought there was no issue of note with the land concerned, for it was perceived to be a virtual wasteland, a swathe of unusable land that was now being put to good use. Therein lies...

It was a brazen scam that ought to have become a case study in itself; one that many knew of, but no one had quantified, either by design or default. The long and short of it, as Bangalore Mirror has found after examining court documents, was this: 228 trees were felled for a paltry Rs 2.47 lakh when they could have fetched at least 10 times that amount; lakhs of rupees were later siphoned off and shown as expenditure to fell the same (non-existent) trees for road-widening; and all this was done...

The advantage of hindsight is that one can always step back and ascertain the bigger picture. But when one extrapolates disparate developments, one can often land up with a picture that is disturbing. This is what Bangalore Mirror has found by examining court orders (both interim and final) passed in three distinct writ petitions that were filed over time in the Karnataka High Court, tracking the process of amending the Karnataka Preservation of Trees (KPT) Act, and tree-felling by the Bruhat...

As trees keep being marked and numbered for felling to ensure road-widening under the controversial TenderSURE project, a closer look at the entire process digs out one uncomfortable truth. The very law that was enacted and subsequently amended to protect trees in Karnataka and capital Bengaluru is increasingly being either violated or circumvented altogether for the felling of trees. One classic example is the method with which trees are being chopped down in a phased manner—all in small...

A week or so back, citizens woke up to the news that 18 huge trees on Nrupathunga Road had been shortlisted to be felled for execution of the controversial TenderSURE project on the stretch. With intermittent reports of TenderSURE-related tree-felling tricking in since then, the debate over TenderSURE now shifts from the question of lack of transparency in the entire process to one about the ecological damage that the execution of the project has already caused, and will also do in the future. A...

The statement issued by Evrnu and Levi's on the launch of the prototype talked about a circular economy. Are you planning to keep the concept / technology to yourself? Or, are you thinking of expanding to other brands and companies too? Paul Dillinger: Levi’s is deeply committed to research and development efforts that will reduce the resource impact of apparel manufacturing. With Evrnu, we see a potential solution to reduce overall impact of Levi Strauss & Co, and for the industry as a whole...

The Karnataka High Court's interim order of March 24, 2016 saying that the Union government cannot regulate the licence fee for seed technology might have come as a relief to Mahyco Monsanto Biotech Limited (MMBL), but the issues at hand are far from dead. In fact, there are many who believe that this is probably only the first battle in a long-drawn war that would be fought among many stakeholders. The order was essentially over a technical count since the licence fee was based on mutual...