yummy utensils: Instead of wiping their dishes and bowls clean, people can now munch and chew them up after meals. A Taiwanese inventor, Chen Liang has launched edible containers made of wheat grains and chaff which are environmentfriendly because they do not need to be washed with detergent. They also offer an alternative to disposable containers which cause pollution. The tiny Taiwan Su Gu Company manufactures 18,000 bowls a day. Each bowl costs about US $0.15. Says Chen, "The product should have great market potential at the time of rising environmental consciousness."

preening up: Acquiring a green image is on top of the agenda for the Hyderabad-based Nagarjuna group. The group has developed a green belt and water bodies over 270 ha around its fertiliser plant in Kakinada, Andhra Pradesh.Treated effluents from the factory have been used to cultivate the green belt on a highly saline marshy area. The Rs 15 billion group is setting up a 1,000 MW thermal power plant at Nandikur and a steel plant near Mangalore, Karnataka. "We will enlist the help of environmentalists to minimise the damage to ecology" said K S Raju, chairman and managing director of the group.

changing tracks: Honda, the Japanese car company, is going green by branching out into industrial waste recycling. It has tied up with Itochu Corporation, a Japanese trading company and EIN-Engineering, a Japanese producer of waste recycling equipment. The US $3.72 million joint venture, to be called Honda UGR, will be operational at a new plant in Shizuoka, western Japan, from April '97. It will produce floor tiles and decorative housing materials from deformed plastic components and other factory waste from the Honda plants.

airy advantage: Wind energy could be a solution not only for power-starved regions but also for areas facing water shortage. German scientists have successfully used wind power for running desalination plants to extract potable water from sea. A commercial wind energy plant is coming up on the island of Rugen in Germany at a cost of around Us $2.3 million. Seawater is initially transported into a electrically-heated steam boiler inside which water evaporates. The vapour then passes through a compressor, which runs on wind power.

cleaning tools: With the demand for pollution control equipment shooting up, the setting up of a manufacturing facility for pollution control equipment by the Hyderabad-based Sandhya Environs (India) Ltd will be a boon for Indian companies. The Rs 73.5-million facility will be established in collaboration with two European companies. While the UK-based Dust Extraction (International) will provide know-how for the manufacture of dust extraction equipment, Saunier Duval Setri Espanola SA of Spain will make available technology for the manufacture of incinerator systems and material handling equipment.

swift chip: Digital Equipment Corporation, Bangalore, has claimed to have developed the world's fastest microprocessors with the highest performance level - 500 MHz and 433 MHz versions of its latest microprocessor. The chip has peak execution rates of up to two billion instructions per second, which will improve the high performance computing, on-line transaction processing, data warehousing and visual computing applications.