Writankar Mukherjee KOLKATA

GLOBAL consumer electronics and mobile phone vendors are going green in India. Heavyweight brands like Nokia, LG, Samsung and Haier, among others, are planning to roll out products that will be positioned on an environmentfriendly platform. It is the first time that environment as a brand strategy has evolved in the Indian consumer electronics industry.

Ishta Vohra New Delhi

CALANGUTE, JULY 10

Pune, June 26 The Environment Status Report (ESR) of the Pune Municipal Corporation (PMC) will have a different feel to it this year, literally. For the first time the civic body is set to produce the annual report on recycled paper. The idea behind the initiative, the first of its kind in the state, is to send across the message that it practices what it preaches, on environment friendliness and tree conservation.

With the support of community participation, Environ, a city-based environmental NGO, is planning to make the recycling of plastic more productive in terms of employment generation and pollution control. Plastic waste, often occupying a considerable space in any household, and also a prime cause of flash flood in the city, can now even help

The hospitality industry is finding that "going green" saves money and prevents pollution. As a step in this direction, a few hotels in the Capital have introduced eco-friendly measures like using recycled paper and herbal soaps, planting trees around the property, non-toxic herbal pest control, noise filters...

In order to check proliferating hazardous e-waste recycling units in the national capital, Delhi Government is roping in private sector to regulate the process. "We have asked the private sector to come forward to develop an electronics waste management project on the basis of public-private partnership,' Delhi Environment Secretary JK Dadoo told PTI here. Delhi is emerging as the world's capital for e-waste recycling, a hazardous activity taking place without any regulations with the major dismantling taking place in unorganisedinformal sector.

Global warming, melting of glaciers, depletion of the ozone layer, rapidly vanishing ground water cache, drastic weather changes and ruthless felling of trees. When many of us are still clinical or insensitive to these issues, how on earth can we expect our corporate citizens to be concerned of environmental issues? Well, better late than never. Many Indian corporates, who only had mind for money so far, are increasingly waking up to these burning issues, and setting their priorities.

Civic bodies in the Mumbai Metropolitan Region could soon start sharing landfill sites to create environment friendly dumping grounds, thereby reducing the requirement of land for garbage. "Two to three civic bodies can possibly have a landfill site in common where they can dump their garbage, however the land will be only for bio-degradable waste," Metropolitan Commissioner Ratnakar Gaikwad said. The sites would be earmarked for certain civic bodies on the basis of their geographical proximity to the landfills.

Consumers could be paid for recycling their plastic bottles under a scheme proposed by the Campaign to Protect Rural England. CPRE president Bill Bryson and the Wombles launched the campaign in London's Leicester Square (Copyright CPRE) An extra 10 pence would be added to the cost of goods such as drinks which would be returned to the consumer after the bottle is taken to collection points.