Indian construction industry is set to grow by 7-8 per cent annually, according to a study undertaken by the Indo-American Chamber of Commerce (IACC).

The study points out that the urban transport infrastructure investment in cities with population of 1,00,000 or more during the next 20 year would be the order of 50 billion US dollar. Only 16 per cent of India's population has access to basic sanitation facilities.

Of 4000 towns and cities in India, only 71 have waste water collection, treatment and disposal systems. Municipalities and other local bodies should be encouraged to undertake waste water collection, treatment and disposal systems projects by offering attractive fiscal incentive, the study added.

The study titled "Potential of the Indian Construction- A Perspective" will form the core of the forthcoming Indo-US Business Summit to be held in New Delhi on 9-10 February 2005.

The sudy also points out that the road sector in India has received a critical boost on account of the Golden Quadrilateral Project, which had helped in generating employment opportunities.

Airports should be upgraded to match international standards while the capacity of Indian ports also needs to be increased, it said, adding construction of new greenfield ports and privatisation of existing ports are required for creation of additional opportunity.

SAN FRANCISCO - San Francisco, which has long prided itself on environmentally friendly policies, is debating whether it should become the first US city to tax grocery bags to encourage recycling.


On Tuesday, the city's Department of the Environment will vote on whether to recommend a 17 cent fee on each bag, be it paper or plastic, in an effort to curb the use of an estimated 50 million bags a year in the Californian city.
An economic impact study and city legislative review still lie ahead, which means it would likely be 2006 before such a measure would take effect if it passes, said Ross Mirkarimi, a city legislator who backs the idea.

Environmentalists say that plastic bags create significant litter problems, are rarely recycled and are a threat to marine life. They add that 14 million trees a year are needed to make 10 billion paper grocery bags nationwide.

The city uses 90 percent plastic, 10 percent paper, so the problem is largely plastic.

The Environment Department says the 17 cents figure represents costs to the city to clean up and dispose of each plastic bag.

"We would be setting a trend, certainly, of a city of our size to be issuing this kind of supplantation of plastic bags for an alternative, something more environmentally friendly," Mirkarimi said in an interview.

Mirkarimi and others backing the idea hope consumers will change to reusable cloth bags or recycle plastic an paper bags.

Plastics industry groups oppose the measure and dispute some of the statistics used by San Francisco officials.

Donna Dempsey, an official at the Society of the Plastics Industry, said, for example, that a San Francisco Environment Department claim that the United States uses 12 million barrels of oil annually to make 30 billion plastic bags is just wrong.

Instead, she gave a figure of one million barrels of naphtha, an petroleum derivative.

California state legislators may also consider the issue later in the year. Assemblyman Paul Koretz said he was considering new legislation aimed at reducing the amount of overall packaging American consumers use, although a similar bill of his did not even get out of committee two years ago.

"Bag fees are working in Ireland, Australia, Taiwan Bangladesh and other places," he said in an interview. "Far too many producers and retailers only consider price and consumer convenience in their packaging decisions and leave the public to foot the bill."

Some countries already charge for grocery bags, including Ireland, which imposed a 15 cent fee per bag in 2002. Shoppers in other countries such as Russia have long relied on bringing their own fishnet bags and even shopping strollers to haul home groceries and other goods.

Story by Adam Tanner

REUTERS NEWS SERVICE

SAN FRANCISCO - San Francisco, which has long prided itself on environmentally friendly policies, is debating whether it should become the first US city to tax grocery bags to encourage recycling.


On Tuesday, the city's Department of the Environment will vote on whether to recommend a 17 cent fee on each bag, be it paper or plastic, in an effort to curb the use of an estimated 50 million bags a year in the Californian city.
An economic impact study and city legislative review still lie ahead, which means it would likely be 2006 before such a measure would take effect if it passes, said Ross Mirkarimi, a city legislator who backs the idea.

Environmentalists say that plastic bags create significant litter problems, are rarely recycled and are a threat to marine life. They add that 14 million trees a year are needed to make 10 billion paper grocery bags nationwide.

The city uses 90 percent plastic, 10 percent paper, so the problem is largely plastic.

The Environment Department says the 17 cents figure represents costs to the city to clean up and dispose of each plastic bag.

"We would be setting a trend, certainly, of a city of our size to be issuing this kind of supplantation of plastic bags for an alternative, something more environmentally friendly," Mirkarimi said in an interview.

Mirkarimi and others backing the idea hope consumers will change to reusable cloth bags or recycle plastic an paper bags.

Plastics industry groups oppose the measure and dispute some of the statistics used by San Francisco officials.

Donna Dempsey, an official at the Society of the Plastics Industry, said, for example, that a San Francisco Environment Department claim that the United States uses 12 million barrels of oil annually to make 30 billion plastic bags is just wrong.

Instead, she gave a figure of one million barrels of naphtha, an petroleum derivative.

California state legislators may also consider the issue later in the year. Assemblyman Paul Koretz said he was considering new legislation aimed at reducing the amount of overall packaging American consumers use, although a similar bill of his did not even get out of committee two years ago.

"Bag fees are working in Ireland, Australia, Taiwan Bangladesh and other places," he said in an interview. "Far too many producers and retailers only consider price and consumer convenience in their packaging decisions and leave the public to foot the bill."

Some countries already charge for grocery bags, including Ireland, which imposed a 15 cent fee per bag in 2002. Shoppers in other countries such as Russia have long relied on bringing their own fishnet bags and even shopping strollers to haul home groceries and other goods.

Story by Adam Tanner

REUTERS NEWS SERVICE

From SEI Newsletter Issue 25 - January 2005
2004 a Banner Year for 2004

Renewable Energy Access reports that 2004 was a banner year for renewable energy! PV production capacity reached the 1GW mark; Global Wind Power continued to blow at hurricane strength, even with a downturn in the U.S. market; Bioenergy gained critical momentum powered largely by biodiesel; Ocean Energy moved from a few ripples to serious swells in Europe and the U.S.; Green Energy purchases became synonymous with sustainable business practices; and lots more. Read RenewableEnergyAccess.com's four part series presenting their choices of 2004's top news http://www.renewableenergyaccess.com/rea/news/story?id=20460

The Globe Review Column
CITYSPACE SOUTHEAST ASIA

Grappling with a vast ground zero; The areas devastated by tsunamis are about to become gigantic construction sites. The challenge now is to build something human and beautiful for those who lost so much, LISA ROCHON writes
LISA ROCHON
12 January 2005
The Globe and Mail
English

After the nightmare of disaster comes the nightmare of reconstruction. Even as the dead are being buried and emergency tents are being pitched on the flats, Southeast Asia is rebuilding.

In a few months, the devastated coastlines will be transformed into massive construction sites. In a decade, the romanticism of wooden fisherman huts raised on stilts above the water could be entirely swept away, replaced by a developer's dream of concrete apartment towers. Beachside.

Preventing that kind of brutal reconstruction from taking place depends on how quickly architects, landscape architects and urban designers can bring their compassion and intelligence to the vast, meandering ground zero of Southeast Asia. Three e-mails received at the time of this writing indicate the kind of response that has been forthcoming from the global architectural community.

Internationally acclaimed Japanese architect Shigeru Ban writes that he will be involved in rebuilding villages destroyed by the tsunami in Sri Lanka. Besides producing among the most published, transcendent private residences such as the Curtain Wall House in Tokyo, Ban used donated paper tubing to design refugee shelters and an iconic community centre following the 1995 Kobe earthquake.

Immediately following Ban's message, another e-mail comes from Graeme Bristol, an activist Canadian architect involved in human-rights issues who is working in Bangkok. He's just back from visits to the hard-hit areas of Phuket and Khao Lak. The concrete structures there, he says, didn't fare any better than the lighter, wooden ones. Prefabricated housing is already starting to go up in some of the devastated villages, he reports. The Thai army is seeing to that. The architecture is quick and dirty; it's also monotonous and meaningless.

The danger is that temporary prefabs become permanent housing. Funding dries up. It has happened countless times in areas devastated by natural disasters. Take a look at parts of Jamaica, where people are still living in rough emergency housing 30 years after the hurricane hit. In December, 2003, an earthquake laid to waste the city of Bam, Iran, a calamity that killed 31,000 people. Tens of thousands continue to live in tents or temporary housing outside of the city. The message from Bristol and other experts in Canada is, get the people as soon as possible into well-designed permanent housing, which can take as little time to construct as inadequate temporary housing.

A third e-mail comes from Cameron Sinclair, executive director of Architecture for Humanity, a non-profit organization founded five years ago to promote architectural solutions in humanitarian crises.

Architecture for Humanity has local architects on the ground in Banda Aceh, Indonesia, and Kirinda, Sri Lanka. “It's impossible to think about rebuilding the entire region,” says Sinclair, based in Hoboken, N.J. One community at a time is the way to go.

So far, Architecture for Humanity has raised $100,000 (U.S.) to help rebuild small communities in Southeast Asia. Where will the money go? Sinclair says it will all be funnelled into the cost of building up communities from the debris. Specifically, in a region where labour costs are among the cheapest in the world, it requires $2,400 to put up a one-room wooden house, says Sinclair. It takes $20,000 to put up a school and $30,000 to construct a medical clinic.

The idea is catching on. The American Institute of Architects has thrown its support and $10,000 behind the design aid being spearheaded by Architecture for Humanity. Another important endorsement has come from New York New Visions, a coalition of architects and designers that was instrumental in shaping the competition process for ground zero in New York following Sept. 11. Vancouver's hip design store Inform Interiors is providing a substantial donation from the proceeds of its January sale. “I truly believe that good design and architecture can make a difference,” says Nancy Bendtsen, who trained as an architect before becoming Inform's co-owner. “Especially with limited resources, you need to use your brains. We like all the things that Architecture for Humanity is doing.”

Architecture for Humanity has a proven track record for engaging advanced thinkers in architecture and design and getting their ideas translated into built form. About 1,000 teams of architects from 53 countries have participated in its international design competitions. As a result, for example, there have been innovative housing ideas for refugees returning to Kosovo, such as Deborah Gans and Matt Jelacic's Extreme House. Competitors from around the world submitted ideas for mobile health clinics to combat HIV/AIDS in Sub-Saharan Africa. In their design, Nicholas Gililand and Gaston Tolila of Paris used colourful African tapestries on wing-like canopies, as an idea to attract people to the clinic.

Pierre Bélanger, an associate professor from the University of Toronto's Faculty of Architecture, Landscape and Design, won the competition in 2001. His health clinic sits within a retrofitted Mercedes-Benz bus that the car manufacturer donated. Bélanger's mobile unit starts its healing journey in Nigeria two weeks from now.

Too often, ham-fisted and maladroit are the words to describe the contribution of foreigners working their so-called magical designs over devastated communities. Kenzo Tange's skyscraper city imposed during the 1960s on the fine-grained city of Skopje, Macedonia, is one of the all-time calamities of design. Besides its inappropriate cultural response, the design called for housing blocks to be built close enough to fall onto each other, or, in one case, on a daycare centre, in a region with a continued high risk of earthquake activity.

Meaningful, long-term solutions can only occur when well-meaning foreigners collaborate with local players. In Indonesia's Aceh province, Architecture for Humanity plans to build a school with local architects. The area is desperate for deep reconstruction. “Of the region's 2,000 teachers,” Sinclair says, “1,000 have died. Sixty per cent of the 1,200 schools are gone. A number of the orphans are being picked up by street gangs. So, it's really important to restore some reality back to these people.”

Because design intelligence is being translated by Architecture for Humanity into reality, my recommendation is to support the organization with your donations.

Canadian architects can contribute their expertise. Sri Lanka's Minister of Construction is already talking about new concrete towers sited 500 metres back from the beach. That might suit the wealthy locals and tourists. But where do the poor go? How to rebuild a fishing village so that people can return to the intimacy of their original community will require lobbying from architects around the world. Plans worked out between professionals and villagers should favour ideas of place over the placelessness of cement block, prefabricated housing. The significance of public space should be honoured, as well as how to site a community safely back from the water.

Avi Friedman, director of McGill University's affordable-homes program, has produced low-cost wooden housing for communities in Europe, Latin America and North America. The program's innovative housing, designed to grow and be adapted by its users over time, is the result of a 15-year investigation. One of the advantages of wood construction is that it takes a fraction of the time needed to construct a formulaic cement-block dwelling, Friedman says. “Here is an opportunity for Canadian architects to show their compassion for the devastated region,” he says, “I would be delighted to make my plans available to them.”

Internetwork for Sustainability
http://www.insnet.org

Tsunami Impact
The world is left in deep shock after a devastating impact of nature. But nature is not the only force to blame for the toll it took. Economical development lead to attracting businesses and people to area's that are known for their risks. Natural protection has been destroyed in many places to develop tourism and, for example, shrimp farms. The opposite shows as well: islands that are surrounded by healthy coral reeves suffered relatively minor damages and losses.
Peet Osta takes you beyond the first impressions of the Tsunami Impact.
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Sustainability pays, according to WBCSD report
That firms engaging in sustainable development show a better performance in all market segments than the respective benchmark indices with a few exceptions has already been established. Interestingly, however, the study reveals that the lead role observed in companies with sustainable orientation seems to become more pronounced over time.
Download the report!
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Stop the dominance of economics on political advice, scientists pledge
"In a knowledge-based economy, leaders and governments increasingly need science advisors to make effective use of emerging technologies", says Calestous Juma of Harvard University. "Science advisors will soon be a necessary part of every presidential and executive office, including the office of the UN Secretary-General".
Read about the report 'Innovation: Applying Knowledge in Development'.
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European Union started CO2 trading
The 25-member EU, with headquarters in Brussels, Belgium, kicks off its pioneering trading scheme after months of political wrangling as governments and the EU juggled the demands of industry and environmental concerns.
Find out more about the sentiments at a big moment for environment.