Current Savers Blog

The Chinese government this week announced the oil spill is all cleaned up in Dalian harbor, off the north coast of Liaoning province in China.

That was fast.

Not even two weeks ago, on July 17, a blast hit two oil pipelines and spread an estimated 1,500 tonnes of crude oil (462,000 gallons) into the Yellow Sea.

It’s a minute fraction of the amount of crude that has spilled into the Gulf of Mexico since the BP Deepwater explosion of April 20, with an estimated 414,000–1,186,000 tons — but it’s still significant enough for 8,000 workers and 800 fishing vessels to dive in to clean-up efforts, some literally.

While the U.S. continues to battle its own massive oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico, are there any lessons to be learned from China?

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Photos show from top to bottom:

A laborer cleans up oil at the oil spill site near Dalian port, Liaoning province July 23, 2010. REUTERS/Stringer

A worker (R) attempts to rescue his co-worker (L) from drowning in an oil slick while attempting to fix an underwater pump during oil spill clean-up operations at Dalian’s Port in Liaoning province, July 20, 2010. REUTERS/Jiang He/ Greenpeace

A laborer pours oil that he scooped up from the oil spill witha  helmet into an oil drum,n ear Dalian pport, Liaoning province, July 22, 2010. REUTERS/Stringer

A worker scoops oil from the oil spill site near Dalian Port, Liaoning province July 26, 2010. REUTERS/Stringer

Containers filled with oil cleaned up from the oil spill site are seen at a port in Dalian, Liaoning province July 25, 2010. REUTERS/Stringer

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This article by Teri Schultz originally appeared in GlobalPost.

Do you know how much of your beloved BlackBerry can be absorbed back into nature? Have you envisioned the end-of-life plan for your precious new iPad? Considered cradle-to-cradle care for your webcam?

High-tech entrepreneurs Marc Aelbrecht, Jean-Pierre D’Haese and Xavier Petre are betting that if you haven’t factored these questions into your purchasing choices yet, you soon will — and you’ll go looking for companies like theirs.

The three Belgians are the brains and consciences behind United Pepper, the first electronics producer in the world to receive certification for “fair trade,” signifying the sustainability of its production process and good working conditions in its manufacturing facilities in Vietnam.

Equally important to the company are its products’ biodegradability and recyclability. United Pepper makes a webcam so green it’s been known to sprout on occasion. The octopus-shaped Lili is filled with a fiber similar to cotton called kapok and sand from the Mekong River, and if it is kept too long in a damp environment, kapok seeds may send forth little tendrils through Lili’s cotton sheath.

It all comes as part of a focus on the complete lifecycle of electronics that the United Pepper trio  believes consumers must heed.

“We know these values will become the norm over time,” D’Haese said in an interview at the company’s sparse Brussels office. “We are very convinced — very convinced — that this will be a major evolution in the future.”

If that evolution doesn’t happen by consumer choice, it may be forced by legislation.

The European Union, which the United Nations estimates produces 8.7 million tons of e-waste per year, already has the strictest electronics recycling and disposal regulations in the world enshrined in its directive on Waste from Electrical and Electronic Equipment (WEEE ), but it is poorly enforced.

Last month a report prepared by the European Parliament as it seeks to reform the directive showed some EU countries have not even implemented one percent of the existing regulations.

Karl-Heinz Florenz, the German lawmaker who prepared the report, summed up EU-wide compliance as “absolutely appalling.”

While the majority — an estimated 65 percent — of electrical and electronic items sold in the bloc are turned in by consumers to their local collection sites, where it is sorted and prepared for dismantlemement and recycling, things go downhill from there — or, more literally, downstream — as the European Parliament report shows more than half of the collected waste “leaks to improper treatment and illegal exports.

It’s against EU law, for example, to ship off non-working appliances or electronics. Amid scandals of toxic European waste being dumped illegally on third-world countries, European leaders are currently in the process of tightening the WEEE laws even further and pledging better enforcement.

According to a draft text adopted by the European Parliament’s Environment Committee, which will go to a full vote in September, the percentage of e-waste that member states would be required to collect would change from being measured as four kilograms per inhabitant to 85 percent of the amount of waste produced by the country.

The European Commission’s version of the revision, which must be reconciled with the parliament’s, quantifies the collection requirement as 65 percent of the waste produced by weight. In addition, member governments would have to verify that they treat all the e-waste they collect in-country, theoretically heading off some of the illegal shipments to developing nations.

European consumers already have dedicated facilities where they can dispose of their unwanted electronics, and retailers also are required to take back items that are brought to them after they wear out.

But, citing a relatively low level of participation in this scheme — people don’t seem to want to make a trip to the “containerpark” just to get rid of an MP3 player — the commission wants producers to accept more responsibility, which also means more costs.

This would conceivably ensure more compliance, and also make it more feasible to recover any valuable — or hazardous — substances from the electronics and let whatever is possible go back into nature, an example of a “cradle-to-cradle” approach.

The European Committee of Domestic Equipment Manufacturers (CECED), which represents the European household appliances industry, feels the commission’s version puts too much responsibility on producers.

While manufacturers will remain committed to accepting returned electronics, the EU insists that member states take on the primary responsibility for collection and for reaching the required percentage of produced waste. The parliamentary draft supports this position.

The new legislation would also require more action in the design stages of electronic items, calling for new requirements to be put in place governing easier re-use, dismantling and recovery.

United Pepper’s products already incorporate these principles by having the tiniest possible electronics enclosed in eco-friendly wrappings that create the smallest possible “footprint” in their manufacturing. The webcam, Lili, can be disposed of by just pulling out the lens and minimal internal components, detaching the cable and letting the cotton and kapok compost.

Oscar, a USB hub, is even more biodegradable, similarly made of kapok, cotton, Mekong sand, cardboard and glue with no need for a cord, while a new webcam, Cube, is made of biodegradable wood — and Xavier Petre assures that trees are planted to replace those which are used.

“When you put 50 euros on the table to buy a webcam, you should know who is behind it and you should know what kind of material is used,” Petre said.

“It’s not as green as we want,” he acknowledged, citing the lens and cable which are not yet able to be made of biodegradable substances, “but we are able to move in the right direction.”

A few months ahead of the iPad rage, United Pepper also released a tablet PC. It’s selling well, capitalizing on the craze for the Apple product, but more attractive to customers who prioritize the green commitment of its manufacturers. (Apple ranked just below average among the major producers in Greenpeace’s May 2010 Guide to Greener Electronics, and then there are the horrific Foxconn suicides).

Later this year, United Pepper hopes to be able to replace the tablet’s metal shell with one made from a composite of rice husks and as soon as technically possible, to create a 100 percent biodegradable tablet.

The company states its goal as “to help make the world a better place, a place where corporate social responsibility and environmental engagement are on the top of everyone’s agenda.”

Yet Marc Aelbrecht refutes the suggestion that’s a rather utopian aim. “An idealist, in my mind, is someone who strives for something which is hardly reachable,” he said. “But this, this is possible. We can do this.”

More from Global Post.com:

EU learns a lesson about chemical waste

Special Report: Oceans

The story of cosmetics

The world’s worst zoos

Video: Heat in the Holy Land

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Photo shows a Blackberry mobile device, made by Research in Motion (RIM), on a shelf in Toronto, July 13, 2010. REUTERS/Bob Strong

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You’ve probably seen the disturbing images of pelicans so badly mired in leaking oil in the Gulf of Mexico that they can barely be distinguished as birds at all — they look like part of the muck.

But nearly three months after the blowout at BP’s Deepwater Horizon rig, there are other pelicans touched by the oil where the impact is far less apparent, though still real.

Take a look at some video I took during a boat trip on July 15 along West Pass, a long channel stretching out into the ocean from Louisiana’s southern-most tip:

 

The video was taken aboard a small, bobbing boat with a light wind distorting sound, but it clearly shows a section of a rocky jetty stretching into the Gulf. There were hundreds of pelicans and gulls perched on the jetty; the video only shows a short section.

What’s important to look for are the dark patches on the heads, beaks and wings of some of the pelicans; that is untreated black oil, according to Joao Talocchi of the environmental group Greenpeace. There was no black oil in the water nearby, or the reddish sludge of treated oil seen in the photo of the drenched pelican above, only a few isolated pea-sized beads of emulsified oil that appeared to have been treated with dispersant chemicals.

There’s no way to know how these birds came in contact with oil, but somehow it happened. And if they ingest the oil during preening, it could be toxic to them, Talocchi said.

“What happens when you look at those pelicans is that they’re not drowning and you say they’re OK,” he said after the half-day voyage, which left from Venice, Louisiana. “But they’re not, because oil is toxic. They lose the capacity of protecting themselves and making themselves waterproof … they lose heat and they can go hypothermic, can suffer hypothermia.”

He said pelicans and other water birds could be damaged by eating fish that have eaten material contaminated with oil. Though the pelicans and gulls on the jetty in the video can fly and from a distance appear health enough, Talocchi said they could be at risk from direct or indirect exposure to leaking oil.

Photo credit: REUTERS/Sean Gardner (oil-covered brown pelican sits in a pool of oil along Queen Bess Island Pelican Rookery, northeast of Grand Isle, Louisiana, June 5, 2010)

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Indonesia’s Sinar Mas came under heavy fire last week from non-government organization Greenpeace as a report named and shamed some of its biggest clients for their role in the destruction of rainforest and peatlands.

Following is a breakdown of the companies that made headlines July 3 to 16 for winning or losing credibility based on environment-related activity, led by Indonesian conglomerate Sinar Mas.

Selections of companies were made by Christopher Greenwald, director of data content at ASSET4, a Thomson Reuters business that provides investment research on the environmental, social and governance performance of major global corporations. These ratings are not recommendations to buy or sell.

Sinar Mas, Wal-Mart, Tesco, WH Smith, Hewlett Packard, Paperlinx

Greenpeace has named these companies as sourcing products from Sinar Mas’ APP subsidiary, which the NGO has demonstrated in a recent report is responsible for extensive deforestation in Indonesia through the destruction of rainforest and peatlands.  Deforestation is responsible for 20 percent of CO2 emissions globally, and Greenpeace has called on international companies to ban sourcing from Sinar Mas.  In response to the report, HSBC indicated last week that it has divested all of its shares from Sinar Mas.

A copy of the report is available here.

Zijin Mining Group Co. Ltd.

Chinese environmental authorities confirmed that nearly 2,000 tons of fish have been poisoned by over 9,000 cubic meters of leaking sewage in the Tingjiang River in Eastern China, which led to a temporary shutdown of one of the largest mines in the country.  Late last week, Chinese authorities also announced that three senior managers at the mine had been taken into custody as a result of the incident.  Shares of the Chinese mining giant have fallen more than 20 percent since the news of the leakage first emerged in early July.

Massey Energy, Layne Christensen

Both Massey Energy and Layne Christensen were recently subject to successful shareholder resolutions requiring the companies to address environmental concerns at their annual meetings, according to Ceres, a network of investors focused on sustainability issues.  A resolution requiring Massey to set quantitative targets for reducing greenhouse gas emissions received 53 percent of the votes of shareholders, while 60 percent of the shareholders of Layne Christensen voted in favor of a resolution requiring the company to report on its environmental, social and governance performance.  According to Ceres, 42 shareholder proposals addressing climate change issues received an average of 24.6 percent of the votes in 2010, up from 21.7 percent on average in 2009.

Anadarko Petroleum, Mitsui & Co.

While media attention has focused on the massive liabilities of BP in the Gulf Oil disaster, BP has requested Anadarko and Mitsui & Co. to pay $272 million and $111 million respectively for clean-up efforts thus far, corresponding to their 25 percent and 10 percent ownership stakes in the well.  Anadarko has contested the request, arguing that BP is wholly responsible for clean-up efforts given the company’s negligence in failing to prevent the blowout.

Valero Energy Corp.

Texas-based Premcor Refining Group Inc., a subsidiary of Valero Energy Corp., has been fined $4 million for underground storage tank leaks that occurred at Clark gas stations in 26 Ohio counties.  The company will also be required to pay for the cleanup of 55 contaminated gas station sites, in what the Ohio Department of Commerce has characterized as the largest gas storage leak settlement in its history.

Unilever N.V.

Unilever has recently published its paper and board packaging policy, which requires the company to source 75 percent of its paper products from sustainable sources by 2015 and 100 percent by 2020.  Currently the company sources 62 percent of its paper products from sustainable sources, and Unilever is the first global consumer products company to make a commitment to source 100 percent of its paper products from sustainable sources by a specific date.

A copy of the company’s policy is available here.

PG&E

Despite being the 35^th-largest utility in the United States, Pacific Gas & Electric has the lowest CO2 emissions / MWh of electricity among the largest 100 U.S. utilities due to its avoidance of coal, according to a recent report published by the Natural Resources Defense Council.  PG&E has also recently been in the news for joining forces with the California Solar Energy Industry Association and the California Wind Association in countering opposition by several Texas oil companies to California’s Global Warming Solutions Act, which aims to reduce California’s CO2 emissions by 2020 in line with Kyoto Protocol goals.

A copy of the NRDC report is available here.

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Photo shows an aerial view of a cleared forest area under development for palm oil plantations in Kapuas Hulu district of Indonesia’s West Kalimantan province July 6, 2010. The area belonged to Indonesian agribusiness firm Sinar Mas, according to a Greenpeace activist who accompanied journalists on a trip to the area. REUTERS/Crack Palinggi

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Forget the BP oil spill for a moment. An international PR war is heating up this week between environmentalists and the oil industry over an entirely different sore spot: The Alberta oil sands in northern Canada.

Billboards targeting the region with the largest crude reserves outside the Middle East sprang up in four major U.S. cities this week in the launch of a multi-million dollar, multi-year campaign led by NGO Corporate Ethics International.

The campaign, supported by a network of foundations including Polaris Institute, Friends of the Earth and Earthworks, is scheduled to also run in Europe and Asia.

Billboards in Denver, Portland, Seattle and Minneapolis urge U.S. travelers to boycott Alberta, (dubbed “The Other Oil Disaster,”) because the energy-intensive extraction process of the oil sands is destroying wildlife and habitat on a scale that far exceeds other hotbeds for environmental concern, including the BP oil spill, according to their website.

“We think that actually in the end there’s no comparison. The tar sands are much worse (than the BP spill),” Corporate Ethics director Michael Marx told the Edmonton Journal.

Unlike conventional oil and gas, production of oil sands is more carbon-intensive because it requires the use of hot water and chemicals to separate the sticky black bitumen from the sands. The used water then collects in toxic ponds. Upgraders convert the bitumen into synthetic light oil that is shipped to refineries in Canada and the United States.

Last month, a judge found Syncrude Canada Ltd, Canada’s largest oil sands producer, guilty in the deaths of 1,600 ducks that landed on one of the “tailings ponds” in 2008, and ruled the company should have had deterrents in place. The company faces maximum penalties of C$800,000.

But the oil sands are a major source of revenue for the Canadian province. After investment in the region collapsed during the financial crisis, companies have again begun to spend on new oil sands projects and the Energy Resources Conservation Board expects output to reach 3.2 million barrels by 2019.

Last week, the province paid $55,000 to run a half-page ad in the Washington Post to defend the oil sands industry, after 50 U.S. Congress members urged Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to delay the $12-billion Keystone XL pipeline expansions to Texas.

“Most Americans, and probably most Canadians, don’t know we are the largest supplier of petroleum to the United States, bigger than Saudi Arabia, bigger than Venezuela,” spokesman to Alberta’s premier Jerry Bellikka told The Edmonton Journal.

Following the Syncrude incident, the Alberta government tightened regulations and now requires companies to prepare plans for the ponds and file reports on them annually.

During the court case, the oil industry mounted a PR blitz about how it is tightening procedures and developing new technology to stop the spread of tailings ponds and deal with the waste.

The boycott campaign “absolutely will affect business,” Ken Fiske, vice-president of tourism and marketing for the Edmonton Economic Development Corporation, told the Journal.

What do you think? Is the oil sands a bigger environmental concern than the BP oil spill?

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Image shows one of the “Rethink Alberta” billboards launched in four U.S. cities the week of July 13, 2010, reprinted courtesy of Corporate Ethics International. REUTERS/Handout/Corporate Ethics International

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Avoid mopping your floor, laundry and washing your dishes during the day and save energy in the process – that’s what power utilities in the U.S. are telling customers this summer.

Heard this before?

The difference is this year, heat waves have already caused blackouts and power-grid strain across the country, and it’s only mid-July. This begs the question: Do power utilities want less of your business?

Heat waves last month meant increased cooling needs – up as much as 76 percent in some regions – which adds in turn to the threat of power outages.

At least four power companies: Duke Energy, Dominion Virginia Power, Allegheny Power and FirstEnergy have already come up with their own power saving tips, like adjusting thermostats.

Duke Energy says “a ceiling fan will create wind, it will not cool a room, so be sure to turn if off when you’re not home.” It adds “on hot days, cook outdoors, use a microwave oven or prepare cold meals to avoid excess heat in the home.”

FirstEnergy, meanwhile, says residents in the areas that it serves can avail of a discount of $1 per CFL light bulb, which can lead to a household cutting its power bill by up to 15 percent — an attractive option during a recession.

According to the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), replacing 10 60-watt incandescent bulbs with 13-watt CFL bulbs will save $420 over the life of the bulbs.

It also encourages installing smart meters that shift power consumption to off-peak hours.

“Choose an Energy Star-qualified room AC, and with the money you save in energy costs, you could buy an MP3 player,” DOE says on its website.

Have you noticed a push in your community to cut back on energy use? Do you think the energy efficiency trend will go beyond the summer?

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Photo shows Tarya Seagraves-Quee loading laundry into a washing machine at a laundromat in Cambridge, Massachusetts, July 8, 2009. REUTERS/Brian Snyder

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Following in his estranged wife’s footsteps, electric carmaker Tesla’s colorful co-founder and Chief Elon Musk is now blogging about his messy divorce. In a lengthy recounting in the Huffington Post, Musk said he wants to ”correct the record” on his personal life but would “rather  stick a fork in my hand” than do it.

“Much as one may wish for privacy, in the 21st century it just doesn’t exist,” he said.

Musk then goes on to counter what he called “awful things…that are simply false” point-by-point in about 1,600 words. Among the main things he addressed were his finances and how he met his girlfriend.

Musk’s estranged wife and author of supernatural thrillers, Justine Musk, is seeking 10 percent of her husband’s stake in the carmaker in a contentious divorce case that has gone on for two years.  Musk has also said in court documents relating to the divorce that he was out of cash and lived off loans from friends.  The couple have five sons together.

Musk stressed that the report of him being broke was not ”some sort of strategy in the divorce” but was a result of his efforts to save the carmaker in 2007.

“Rather than allow Tesla to die, I committed almost all my cash reserves to the company, leaving a few million dollars to cover living expenses,” he said in the blog. “I own no homes (not even my residence at this point), yachts or expensive artwork. My clothes are mostly jeans and t-shirts and I almost never take vacations, apart from kid related travel.”

Musk rents a home in the ritzy Bel-Air neighborhood ofg Los Angeles. (To know more on Tesla and Musk, here’s Reuters Special Report:  http://www.reuters.com/articl e/idUSTRE65R5EI20100628

  Musk said the legal fees relating to the divorce proceedings forced him to seek loan from friends.  
“The legal and accounting bills for the divorce total four million dollars so far, which is an average of roughly $170,000 per month for the past 24 months,” he wrote.

He also sought to correct the stories that said he “ran off with an actress,” saying there was “no third party involved in the break-up at all.”

He had filed for divorce before he met his current girlfriend Talulah Riley, he added.

For the full saga, here’s the link: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/elon-musk/ correcting-the-record-abo_b_639625.html

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With all the comparisons to the Exxon Valdez spill of 1989, there’s at least one arena where BP appears to be head and shoulders above its oil-spill predecessor — suffering public mockery.

They can thank the age of social media.

There’s the fake Twitter account, BPGlobalPR, posing as the public relations mouthpiece for an arrogant powerhouse. Today it tweeted its 184,466 followers: “Attention lazy fishermen! If you won’t clean our mess, we’re taking your money. Fair is fair.” They also produced this fake press conference.

YouTube, not around in 1989, is brimming with satirical videos targeting BP. There’s BP spills coffee, now at more than 9 million views.  Spoof ads are also hot contenders for “viral” status:  Oil is natural and the slickly produced BP Bringing People Together are two of the more popular.

Parody t-shirts are a dime a dozeon on the Internet, with slogans such as “BP. We’re bringing oil to American shores.” Or the oil-smeared “BP Cares”.

Are Americans being too hard on the company? The spill in the Gulf of Mexico has so far cost the company $3 billion in clean-up costs. On a daily basis, BP repeats its commitment to taking full responsibility and will pay for all legitimate claims.

But the public is ruthless, and a question emerges, are critics hiding behind the anonymity of the blogosphere?

The Boycott BP group on Facebook is climbing with more than 450,000 followers — but actual protest rallies draw only a fraction of that.

Earlier this week, the UK’s Metro unleashed this doozie: a rare, early 1970s board game called “Offshore Oil Strike” produced by BP and partner Printabox where tycoons compete at exploring for oil and avoid hazard cards which threaten rig blowouts and oil spill costs.  No joke, although an odd self parody given the current situation.

The late Texan columnist Molly Ivins wrote, “Satire is traditionally the weapon of the powerless against the powerful.”

Is that what BP is now enduring? Intellectual egg tossing by people with no power?

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Photo shows a protester holding a syrup covered plastic earth ball to protest against the BP oil spill on the North side of the White House in Washington June 16, 2010.  REUTERS/Larry Downing

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BP’s vast and spreading oil disaster is killing ever more birds and other wildlife in the Gulf of Mexico — but one of the worst spills for birds was a harmless-sounding 5 tonnes of oil in the Baltic Sea in 1976.

That spill from a ship killed more than 60,000 long-tailed ducks wintering in the area after they fatally mistook the slick for an attractive patch of calm water, according to Arne Jernelov, of the Institute for Futures Studies in Stockholm, writing in today’s edition of the journal Nature.

By contrast, he writes that fewer than 1,200 birds have  so far been recorded killed after the explosion of the Deepwater Horizon rig, which has led to a leak of a gigantic 250,000 to 400,000 tonnes of oil in the Gulf of Mexico.  About 60,000 birds were killed off Alaska in 1989 by the accident usually known as the Exxon Valdez spill (…Exxon’s website calls it The Valdez Oil Spill ), previously the biggest spill off the United States at 37,000 tonnes.

By my maths, the Baltic Sea spill killed one bird for about every 80 grams of oil (…an amount easily spilt when filling up a car), the BP spill (so far) one per 200-330 tonnes. Even tiny amounts of oil can mean that birds’ feathers stick together and let chill water, like in the Baltic Sea, get to their bodies through what is normally a layer of insulation. They can then die of cold.

Jernelov gets backing from the Global Marine Oil Pollution Information Gateway, linked to the U.N. Environment Programme.

“There is no clear relationship between the amount of oil in the marine environment and the likely impact on wildlife. A smaller spill at the wrong time/wrong season and in a sensitive environment may prove much more harmful than a larger spill at another time of the year in another or even the same environment. Even small spills can have very large effects,” it says.

“In a cold climate an oil spot the size of 2-3 square centimetres can be enough to kill a bird,” it says.

It also says that penguins give another example of a how small spills can cause big problems for birds.

A collision of two oil tankers off South Africa in 1977 released 31,000 tonnes of oil and polluted just 47 African penguins, it says. But a far smaller spill of 1,000 tonnes of oil after the sinking of the Treasure in 2000 oiled 20,000 penguins and another 20,000 were removed from their breeding colonies on Dassen and Robben islands to avoid getting them soiled.

The conclusion: don’t spill oil.

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If there’s any tech company that has been able to constantly transform itself over the past century to actually be sustainable, it’s got to be IBM.

Last week the global IT giant announced its efficiency figures for 2009 and it meant good news for the environment, a bi-weekly analysis of companies in the news by ASSET4 data providers shows.

Selections of companies were made by Christopher Greenwald, director of data content at ASSET4, a Thomson Reuters business that provides investment research on the environmental, social and governance performance of major global corporations. These ratings are not recommendations to buy or sell.

Here is a breakdown of the companies that made headlines June 19 to July 2 for winning or losing credibility based on environment-related activity.

IBM

In its latest environmental report which was published last week, IBM announced not only that it had exceeded its internal environmental targets by reducing CO2 emissions by 142,000 tons and electricity consumption by 246,000 MwH, but also that the company’s 1900 energy conservation projects had led to a savings of $26.8 million during 2009.  The results are consistent with IBM’s own emphasis upon the positive material impacts of environmental investments in the company’s green IT marketing campaign.

General Electric

General Electric announced it will double its investment for its “ecomagination” products to $10 billion over the next 5 years.  Its environmental line of products, which includes wind turbines, battery technologies, and more energy efficient appliances, has generated $70 billion in sales since its launch in 2005.  Although the unit failed to meet its 2010 target of $25 billion in annual sales by 2010, it nonetheless generated sales growth of 6 percent in 2009, ahead of the overall company’s flat sales growth for the year.  GE has indicated that it sees the greatest opportunities in China and South Korea, where government stimulus packages include significant investments in energy efficiency initiatives.

The company’s ecomagination annual report is available here.

Ingram Micro, Inc.

Ingram Micro announced that it had become the first technology distribution company to be included as a partner company in the EPA’s Climate Leaders program.  The Climate Leaders program works with companies to develop comprehensive strategies for reducing greenhouse gas emissions, reporting on progress and sharing best practices.   A full list of the Climate Leaders is available here.

Royal DSM, N.V.

The Dutch chemical company DSM announced last week a breakthrough in enzyme technology which could lead to the doubling of the effectiveness of using yeast to convert biological waste into bioethanol.  The company claims that its new enzyme technology is an important step in developing cost efficient second generation biofuels which do not compete with traditional food supplies, and which UBS has estimated could represent an $80 billion market by 2022.

Costco Wholesale

Greenpeace has taken a more aggressive stance against Costco, recently hanging a banner from one of the company’s outlets in Vancouver, Canada with replicas of at-risk fish species that the retailer sells.  The action follows Costco’s last-place ranking in a report published by Greenpeace Canada earlier in the month of June which examines the policies of Canadian food retailers for sustainable sourcing of sea food.  Greenpeace claims that Costco is unique among food retailers in Canada for failing to adopt any policy on purchasing seafood from sustainable sources.  A copy of the report is available for download here.

IOI Berhard

The Malaysian palm oil giant IOI has recently come under additional criticism from the large Swiss grocery chain, Migros, which has launched a formal complaint against the company following investigative reports by the BBC and a recent critical report by Friends of the Earth on the company’s palm oil practices in Western Kalimantan, Indonesia.  Although IOI is a leading member of the Roundtable for Sustainable Palm Oil, the report accuses the company’s practices to be in violation of the Roundtable’s principles as well as Indonesian national law.   A copy of the report is available here.

The Economist summarized many of the controversial issues surrounding palm oil in a recent article here.

EDF

NGOs Greenpeace and Ecotricity have strongly criticized EDF’s recent “Green Britain Day” event, and claim that the company is misleading the UK public over its environmental performance.  Both NGOs argue that the company is one of Britain’s most significant polluters, importing 300 million tons of coal annually and producing over 1,400 tons of nuclear waste, while EDF defends its nuclear energy program as an effective means of reducing overall CO2 emissions.  The disagreement underscores the currently conflicting views regarding the status of nuclear power as a means of addressing climate change.

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Photo shows employees following a speech at the booth of IBM at CeBIT computer fair in Hanover March 3, 2009. REUTERS/Hannibal Hanschke

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