The Strategic Programme to Empower the People and Economy (Pemerkasa) will support the country’s sustainability agendas, especially towards achieving the 2030 Sustainable Development Goals (SDG), said Tan Sri Muhyiddin Yassin.
The Prime Minister said the government, and the United Nations in Malaysia would set up the MySDG Trust Fund as a platform that allows funding from a variety of sources for SDG-compliant projects.
Muhyiddin, in unveiling Pemerkasa, also announced that the government would launch a Sustainable Sukuk, worth at least US$1 billion (RM4.121 billion).
“The proceeds from the sukuk will fund programmes and projects with sustainable elements, in addition to addressing the socio-economic impacts of the Covid-19 outbreak,” he said in his special address today.
The government’s RM20 billion additional economic stimulus package under the Program Strategik Memperkasa Rakyat dan Ekonomi (Pemerkasa) will provide some support to overall consumption spending affected by the pandemic, analysts said.STR/MOHD ADAM ARININ
The MySDG Trust Fund and the Sukuk Lestari are both listed in Focus Three – Strengthening the Country’s Competitiveness under Pemerkasa.
Muhyiddin said the government would increase the Market Development Grant ceiling from RM300,000 to RM500,000 for every company that participated in international exhibition platforms.
He also said to generate new sources of national wealth, a matching grant of RM50 million will be provided to develop the aerospace and medical devices industries.
Meanwhile, the International Trade and Industry Ministry, he added, would continue to explore new export potentials and encourage the use of automisation and mechanisation among industry players.
“As such, among the measures to be implemented include the eBizLink initiative, an online and hybrid digital marketing platform, and the Globepreneur initiative, which aims at enabling more high potential SME companies to access the international market,” he added.
Heineken Malaysia Bhd is reinforcing its sustainability commitment this year, as it gears into the second stage of its Water Stewardship Agenda 2021-2023.
In conjunction with World Water Day 2021, Heineken Malaysia reaffirmed its commitment to become 100 per cent balanced for water used in its production.
“Understanding the value of water, Heineken Malaysia has sharpened its focus on water-related efforts by adopting the “Every Drop Strategy”, a triangular approach that looks at water protection in a more holistic manner.
“Through the Every Drop Strategy, Heineken Malaysia will channel its efforts on Water Stewardship to fully balance the water used for the products, Water Circularity for wastewater treatment, and Water Efficiency to reduce water usage in production,” it said.
Heineken Malaysia managing director Roland Bala believes that access to water is a basic human right.
“Often times, water is taken for granted as it is ever flowing. But it is a crucial shared resource that we need to protect together to ensure people have a continuous supply of clean water because every drop matters, said Bala.
“There is no doubt that water is essential to our business, and in doing our part, we ensure that 100 per cent of our wastewater is treated before returning the clean water back to its source.”
Heineken Malaysia’s Management Team participating in a tree planting activity at the Raja Musa Forest Reserve in 2019.
Bala said its works in the past had been river rehabilitation.
“We have come to realise that there is an even greater need now to look at watershed health protection in a more holistic manner,” he added.
In line with Heineken’s global sustainability strategy, Heineken Malaysia’s water initiatives support the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (UN SDGs).
This includes SDG 6( Clean Water and Sanitation), SDG 14 (Life Below Water), and SDG 15 (Life on Land).
Essentially, the brewer aims to incorporate sustainability as an integral part of its business journey, while striving to be a champion for water protection.
Heineken Malaysia corporate affairs and legal director Renuka Indrarajah said through its CSR arm SPARK Foundation, it had invested nearly RM19.5 million to protect water resources.
“To date, we have rehabilitated five rivers, supported over 6,000 people with alternative water systems in Selangor and Sabah, installed water thimbles in 407 households in Sungai Selangor and Sungai Penchala, and reforested one hectare of degraded peatland and built a 305-metre clay dyke in Raja Musa Forest Reserve to help store up to 140 million litres of water for Sungai Selangor annually,” Indrarajah added.
Australian scientists have achieved a new breakthrough in carbon capture and storage. Their novel electrochemical process can store carbon dioxide in water with the power of solar or wind, while also producing by-products such as green hydrogen and calcium carbonate – perhaps the key to decarbonizing the cement industry.
Researchers from the Queensland University of Technology have made a remarkable breakthrough with the development of an electrochemical process in which carbon dioxide is captured from the air and stored in water as a non-toxic calcium carbonate (chalk) in a renewably powered process that could also produce green hydrogen and decarbonize the cement industry.
PhD researcher Olawale Oloye and Professor Anthony O’Mullane from the QUT Centre for Clean Energy Technologies and Practices developed the process of capturing and converting carbon dioxide through a mineralization approach that seems to produce a host of serendipitous by-products.
According to O’Mullane, the “process involves the capture of CO2 by its reaction with an alkaline solution produced on demand, to form solid carbonate products which can be used, for example, as construction materials, thereby keeping carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere. This can be done using a simple calcium source in water.”
It is also important to note that the QUT researchers used seawater instead of potable water, as potable water is too precious a resource for large-scale carbon capture, especially in Australia.
“We found we could use seawater once it had been treated to remove sulphates. To do this we first precipitated calcium sulphate or gypsum, another building material, and then carried out the same process to successfully turn CO2 into calcium carbonate, thus providing proof of concept of a circular carbon economy,” O’Mullane said. “Next, the hydrogen evolution reaction during electrolysis ensured that the electrode was continually renewed to keep the electrochemical reaction going while also generating another valuable product, green hydrogen. This means if this electrolysis process is powered by renewable electricity, we are producing green hydrogen alongside the calcium carbonate (CaCO3).”
The process captures and stores carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, while also generating a green fuel source capable of decarbonizing pesky industrial sectors such as heavy transport, manufacturing, and the entire energy sector of export partners like Japan.
O’Mullane said the use of renewable energy to capture CO2 and create calcium carbonate may be needed in the cement industry, which is one of the tougher industries to decarbonize.
“We envision this technology would benefit emission-intensive industries such as the cement industry whose CO2 footprint is 7-10% of anthropogenic CO2 emissions,” said O’Mullane. “By coupling the mineralization process to produce CaCO3 from the emitted CO2 during the clinking step we could create a closed loop system and reduce a significant percentage of the CO2 involved in cement production.”
WASHINGTON (AP) — The Biden administration is moving to sharply increase offshore wind energy along the East Coast, saying Monday it is taking initial steps toward approving a huge wind farm off the New Jersey coast as part of an effort to generate electricity for more than 10 million homes nationwide by 2030.
Meeting the target could mean jobs for more than 44,000 workers and for 33,000 others in related employment, the White House said. The effort also would help avoid 78 million metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions per year, a key step in the administration’s fight to slow global warming.
President Joe Biden “believes we have an enormous opportunity in front of us to not only address the threats of climate change, but use it as a chance to create millions of good-paying, union jobs that will fuel America’s economic recovery,” said White House climate adviser Gina McCarthy. “Nowhere is the scale of that opportunity clearer than for offshore wind.”
The administration’s commitment to the still untapped industry “will create pathways to the middle class for people from all backgrounds and communities,” she added. “We are ready to rock-and-roll.”
The administration said it intends to prepare a formal environmental analysis for the Ocean Wind project off New Jersey. That would move Ocean Wind toward becoming the third commercial-scale offshore wind project in the U.S.
The Interior Department’s Bureau of Ocean Energy Management said it is targeting offshore wind projects in shallow waters between Long Island and the New Jersey coast. A recent study shows the area can support up to 25,000 development and construction jobs by 2030, Interior said.
The ocean energy bureau said it will push to sell commercial leases in the area in late 2021 or early 2022.
The administration also pledged to invest $230 million to upgrade U.S. ports and provide up to $3 billion in loan guarantees for offshore wind projects through the Energy Department’s recently revived clean-energy loan program.
“It is going to be a full-force gale of good-paying, union jobs that lift people up,” said Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm.
Ocean Wind, 15 miles off the coast of southern New Jersey, is projected to produce about 1,100 megawatts a year, enough to power 500,000 homes, once it becomes operational in 2024.
The Interior Department has previously announced environmental reviews for Vineyard Wind in Massachusetts and South Fork wind farm about 35 miles east of Montauk Point in Long Island, N.Y. Vineyard Wind is expected to produce about 800 megawatts of power and South Fork about 132 megawatts.
Biden has vowed to double offshore wind production by 2030 as part of his effort to slow climate change. The likely approval of the Atlantic Coast projects — the leading edge of at least 16 offshore wind projects along the East Coast — marks a sharp turnaround from the Trump administration, which stymied wind power both onshore and in the ocean.
As president, Donald Trump frequently derided wind power as an expensive, bird-slaughtering way to make electricity, and his administration resisted or opposed wind projects nationwide, including Vineyard Wind. The developer of the Massachusetts project temporarily withdrew its application late last year in a bid to stave off possible rejection by the Trump administration. Biden provided a fresh opening for the project after taking office in January.
“For generations, we’ve put off the transition to clean energy and now we’re facing a climate crisis,” said Interior Secretary Deb Haaland, whose department oversees offshore wind.
“As our country faces the interlocking challenges of a global pandemic, economic downturn, racial injustice and the climate crisis, we have to transition to a brighter future for everyone,” Haaland said.
Vineyard Wind is slated to become operational in 2023, with Ocean Wind following a year later.
Despite the enthusiasm, offshore wind development is still in its infancy in the U.S., far behind progress made in Europe. A small wind farm operates near Block Island in waters controlled by the state of Rhode Island, and another small wind farm operates off the coast of Virginia.
The three major projects under development are all owned by European companies or subsidiaries. Vineyard Wind is a joint project of a Danish company and a U.S. subsidiary of the Spanish energy giant, Iberdrola. Ocean Wind and South Fork are led by the Danish company, Orsted.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said Monday it is signing an agreement with Orsted to share data about U.S. waters where the company holds leases. The data should aid NOAA’s ocean-mapping efforts and help it advance climate adaptation and mitigation efforts, the agency said. NOAA also will spend $1 million to study the impacts of offshore wind operations on fishing operators and coastal communities.
Wind developers are poised to create tens of thousands of jobs and generate more than $100 billion in new investment by 2030, “but the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management must first open the door to new leasing,″ said Erik Milito, president of the National Ocean Industries Association.
Not everyone is cheering the rise of offshore wind. Fishing groups from Maine to Florida have expressed fear that large offshore wind projects could render huge swaths of the ocean off-limits to their catch.
Copyright 2021 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
Tonnes of food scraps collected from restaurants and supermarkets are being converted into electricity under a green energy initiative powering thousands of homes in Perth.
The City of Cockburn has made the waste to energy service a permanent fixture of its general duties, collecting rotting food waste from local businesses and feeding it to a mechanical ‘stomach’ at a nearby fertiliser plant.
The anaerobic digester heats the food, traps its methane gas and feeds the energy into the electricity grid, powering up to 3,000 homes.
Key points:
A giant mechanical stomach is turning tonnes of food waste to energy
The electricity is being fed into the grid, powering 3,000 homes
The City of Cockburn has made the initiative part of its general duties
“Food waste really shouldn’t be thought of as a waste, it should be thought of as a resource,” said the city’s waste education officer, Clare Courtauld.
“It’s really important to take food waste out of landfill because it produces harmful greenhouse gases.
“If global food waste was a country, it would actually be the third-highest greenhouse gas emitter in the world.”
Food scraps are fed to the mechanical stomach around the clock.(Flickr: Taz, CC BY 2.0)
Ms Courtauld said the City had so far recycled 43 tonnes of food waste and saved 81,000 kilograms of CO2 equivalent gasses that would have otherwise entered the atmosphere rotting in landfill.
The $8 million mechanical stomach sits at the Jandakot headquarters of fertiliser company RichGro.
It was the first bio-waste plant of its kind to operate in the southern hemisphere when it opened in 2016.
“Their trucks come in … they tip off the food waste.
“It then goes through a piece of machinery which removes any packaging that might be in with the food waste and any contamination.
“It pulps the food waste up into like a porridge consistency and doses it into a big tank.
The food waste is pulped into a rich slurry and pumped into the digester.(ABC News: Gian De Poloni)
“This tank then feeds the two digesters … they’re getting fed 24 hours a day.
“As it breaks down, it generates methane gas. We’re capturing that gas and we’re running large generators that combined can produce up to 2.4 megawatts of electricity.”
The plant powers the company’s entire operations and up to 3,000 neighbouring homes, all from food waste.
What goes in, must come out
“Out the back end comes a liquid that is actually certified organic as a liquid fertilizer,” Mr Richards said.
“We sell a percentage of that to farmers and the remaining percentage of it we add into our compost piles.”
The bioenergy plant converts the methane gas from food waste into electricity to feed into the local power grid.(ABC News: Gian De Poloni)
Some foods are better than others.
“Certainly, you can overdo a good thing — you wouldn’t want too much fats, oils and greases.
“A lot of fruit and vege, starchy, sugary products are good. They produce a lot of energy.”
The City’s waste manager, Lyall Davieson, said there was community appetite for these sorts of initiatives.
“I’ve been in waste for about 25 years,” he said.
“Not so long ago, all we could really do was just recycle a few cans and a bit of steel.
“But now we really have at our disposal lots of options to divert waste from landfill and to recycle.”
The energy created from food waste is fed into the existing electricity grid, powering up to 3,000 homes.(ABC News: Gian De Poloni)
Frank Scarvaci, who owns a longstanding independent supermarket in Hamilton Hill, was one of the first businesses to sign up for the service.
He said it was a natural progression for his grocery store after embracing a plastic bag ban and installing solar power.
“I’ve been surprised [at] how the community has accepted the change,” he said.
“I thought [there] was going to be much more resistance in regards to when they scrapped plastic bags, for example — but there was virtually no resistance at all.”
Contamination causes indigestion
While common in Europe, the plant is just one of a few of its kind to be built in Australia.
People living close to the plant in Perth’s southern suburbs wouldn’t even know their homes are being powered by food waste.(ABC News: Gian De Poloni)
The City of Cockburn said it was not a waste service it would expand to households, because the risk of contamination disrupting the process was too high.
“We do have a machine that does have a certain ability to remove a level of the contamination,” Mr Richards said.
“Can it remove everything? No, it can’t.
“We’ve even had bowling balls come through — you can’t process things like that, in a system like this. It does damage our machinery.”
Bio-energy has a bright future
The bio-energy technology is growing in Australia, with the next logical step in the process to convert the bio-waste into biomethane, which could be fed into the gas grid.
The Federal Government is co-funding a biomethane production facility at a wastewater treatment plant in Sydney’s southern suburbs.
Once online in 2022, the $14 million plant is expected to pump biomethane derived from biogas created by a similar ‘mechanical stomach’ that would meet the gas needs of more than 13,000 homes.
After committing to becoming a net-zero business by 2030, Sky has unveiled a new competition to encourage firms across the media sector to accelerate their own sustainability initiatives and engage audiences with environmental issues.
Called the ‘Sky Zero Footprint Fund’, the scheme was announced today (30 March). It totals £2m, directly from the Sky Media budget, which will be allocated on a competitive basis and split five ways. Media agencies, creative agencies and the sustainable brands they work with are eligible to apply.
Applicants will have to prove a strong and credible commitment to a zero-carbon future – either through the actions they are taking in-house or their impact on wider society. On the former, judges will look for changes to product and service designs and business models, as well as a science-based approach. On the latter, entrants will be required to prove how they are inspiring and normalising positive behavioural change amongst their customers – which can be either businesses or members of the general public.
Applications will be open from 6 April to 14 May. Sky will then shortlist ten entrants who will deliver a live pitch to the judging panel – who will select five winners. The first-place winner will be granted £1m and the four other winners will take a £250,000 share of the pot.
Judges include Sir John Hegarty, the Media Trust’s chief executive Su-Mei Thompson and Good Energy chief executive Juliet Davenport. AdGreen, the Advertising Associations standard-setting and collaboration body for sustainability, is also supporting. Its founder Jo Combs is on the judging panel and all advertisements put forward will need to adhere to AdGreen standards.
“Using the power of TV we truly believe we can help transform attitudes and inspire real change,” Sky Media’s managing director Tim Pearson said.
“The Sky Zero Footprint Fund is designed to support businesses that want to foster positive change and protect our environment. We believe there is no better way to demonstrate this than through the scale, reach and storytelling capability of TV/Video advertising.”
Net-zero journey
Sky announced its own 2020 net-zero target in early 2020 and chief executive Jeremy Darroch has told edie that the business will need to make “significant changes” to meet the ambition.
A small town in East Sussex and an ex-coal mining community in Derbyshire have become some of the first places in the world to back an international climate campaign to end fossil fuel extraction.
On Wednesday, Amber Valley Borough Council voted to support plans for a new “fossil fuel non-proliferation treaty”, which would phase out the supply of coal, oil and gas and help the world transition to cleaner energy.
It followed Lewes Town Council, which unanimously endorsed the idea earlier in the month.
The campaign, launched in September, aims to get all countries to commit to end the extraction of fossil fuels, which are the single biggest human source of greenhouse gases. Those behind it see the threat of climate change as just as serious – if not more so – as nuclear war and want a proportionate response.
Tzeporah Berman, chair of the fossil fuel non-proliferation treaty steering group and international programme director of climate campaign Stand.earth, said most international discussion on the climate crisis has been focused on reducing emissions, with less thought given to their main cause, which is fossil fuels.
“There are very few mechanisms to constrain the expansion of fossil fuels within the Paris Agreement, and the words ‘oil’, ‘gas’, ‘coal’ and ‘fossil fuels’ don’t even exist in it. There’s this collective delusion that somehow we can get off fossil fuels while continuing to produce them.”
Artist’s impression of the new Woodhouse Colliery near Whitehaven (West Cumbria Mining)
Experts agree that the vast majority of fossil fuel supplies need to be left in the ground to meet the Paris Agreement’s target of keeping global warming to “well below” 2C.
Vancouver in Canada was the first place in the world to endorse the treaty campaign followed by Barcelona in Spain. New York and Los Angeles are now vying to be next in line.
Next to those bustling cities, Amber Valley is a modestly sized borough of about 130,000 people with a landscape shaped by both coal and hydropower. In 2019, it became one of hundreds of councils across the UK to declare a climate emergency and established itself as a “frack-free zone”.
So when the council’s environment deputy Emma Monkman was contacted by the team behind the treaty campaign last year, she said it “felt like a natural fit”.
Councillor Dr Wendy Marples, who submitted the motion to Lewes Town Council, said her own council had also already declared a climate emergency but still had some way to go to being truly sustainable.
With three-quarters of the UK’s councils having now declared a climate emergency, more are expected to back the treaty campaign over the next year.
Their endorsements will shine a spotlight on Westminster’s mixed record on stemming the flow of fossil fuels in the run-up to the COP26 climate talks in Glasgow.
On Wednesday, the government refused to rule out new oil and gas exploration licences in the North Sea and has attracted huge controversy over plans to open a new coal mine in Cumbria.
The UK has promised to end investment in overseas fossil fuel projects by the end of the month, having already spent billions subsidising the industry abroad. However, it also faces legal action from Friends of the Earth for spending around $1bn in financial support on a huge liquified natural gas development in Mozambique.
A key aim of the fossil fuel non-proliferation treaty campaign is to transition from fossil fuels to cleaner energy in a fair way.
That’s why the first step is to build a comprehensive global database of fossil fuel production, said Ms Berman. “Just like nuclear weapons, we have to know who’s producing what.”
That’s a lesson Amber Valley knows well. Alfreton, a town in the borough, was one of many in the UK hit hard by the coal industry’s decline, said Ms Monkman, which led to high levels of unemployment.
“One of the areas we’re looking at a solar farm is Alfreton and the reason is we want to work with the university to offer green tech jobs and degrees,” said Ms Monkman.
Ms Monkman hopes the endorsement will attract more funding for green measures within Amber Valley.
“It’s only part of the tapestry of things we need to do to get to a steady state economy,” said John Beardmore, co-founder of renewable energy firm T4 Sustainability who campaigned vociferously against a new opencast mine in the area in the 2000s.
Ms Berman said the response from cities around the world has been positive. “By banding together they can use their political and communications power, similar to what happened in nuclear non-proliferation.”
The initiative is getting strong interest from indigenous and youth groups, as well as from the burgeoning divestment movement, although Ms Berman said some people see the idea as unrealistic. “Even proposing the fossil fuel non-proliferation treaty is creating the conversation we need.”
Endorsing the treaty has certainly linked a corner of Derbyshire with like-minded communities. “We’ve been connected with the different people that have endorsed, like Barcelona,” said Ms Monkman. “You become part of the club of people sharing ideas.”
Cloud technology in Asia Pacific is projected to grow dramatically in the next few years, and plays a crucial role in modernising and empowering communities across the region. But it is not without challenges to ensure its benefits are broadly felt.
Cloud technology plays a crucial role in modernising and empowering communities across Southeast Asia, from boosting financial inclusion to streamlining access to formal markets for smallholder farmers, according to a report by Eco-Business Research launched on Friday (19 March).Butmultiple stakeholders must collaborate to ensure that there is true democratisation of cloud technology across the region.
Cloud technology – the delivery of on-demand computing services through a network of remote servers – is projected to grow by 117 per cent in Asia Pacific between 2019 and 2024, according to GlobalData with more businesses allotting bigger budgets towards it.
Cloud needs minimal infrastructure and investment while it has the ability for companies to operate at scale quickly making it particularly appealing for emerging economies.
Nevertheless, the development and adoption of cloud technology vary considerably across the five focus countries studied in the Eco-Buisness report.
Singapore is a leader in cloud adoption and growth potential, which is underpinned by its robust infrastructure and enabling policies. It is ranked top in the Eco-Business Cloud Opportunity Matrix. Its ‘Smart City, Smart Nation’ initiative places heavy focus on cloud technology to enable a more efficient provision of services and to streamline government systems.
Parking, tax and government platforms allowing you to register births and businesses are powered by cloud technology. “We now have the ability to use data to manage transport systems like never before,” Jamie Leather, chief of Transport Sector Group, Asian Development Bank said in the report.
Source: Eco Business
Thailand and Malaysia are ranked next in the matrix, with conducive regulatory environments and relatively high digital penetration at around 80 per cent of the populations in both countries.
Indonesia, the most populous country in Southeast Asia,and the Philippines still have some way to go, the report noted, with both countries lacking the bedrock digital infrastructure needed to propel cloud technology.
Nevertheless, Indonesia is one to watch as it is one of the fastest growing markets for cloud computing, with a thriving digital start-up industry boasting companies such as multi-service platform and digital payment group, Gojek and e-commerce company, Tokopedia.
Growing pains are to be expected as digital infrastructure, awareness and enabling policiesdevelop alongside the uptake of cloud technology.
“Everyone is still on this journey, no-one has a solution for best practice,” said Calum Handforthduring a panel discussion launching the paper, and who advises on smart cities and digitalisation for the United Nations Development Programme.
Breaches in data privacy are a headache for both public and private sector entities and could undermine the adoption of cloud technology, despite most providers having robust security systems in place, the report said. Singapore’s digital success story is marred by serious data breaches including one in 2018 when hackers accessed 1.5 million medical records, including those of Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong.
“Governments are upskilling their ability to understand the discussions around privacy and security,” May Ann Lim, executive director of Asia Cloud Computing Association, said in the report.
Cloud technology is in a strong position to be a “force for good” the report said, enabling collaborative cross-border efforts to cohesively deal with cybercrime. However, borders must stay open to allow cloudtech to maximise on trade and economic opportunities. The report suggests the creation of a “common set of principles governing cross-border data flows” will boost economic competitiveness collectively as a region.
The report said that thedigital divide is a major impediment to cloud technology. Some in Southeast Asia are being left behind in the race to digitise with stuttering power supply and unstable internet provision in developing markets including thePhilippines and Indonesia.
Even in markets with high internet provision, “policymakersand digital service providers need to address the disparity between different segments of society,” the report charged. Meanwhile, improving computer literacy is instrumental in ensuring cloud technology is inclusive of all.
The report showcases several examples of best-practice in the region. Indonesia has rising potential in using cloud technology to help support and modernise agribusiness. “The farm-to-customer model has also helped the industry address the ongoing problem of multiple middlemen who typically take a 10 to 15 per cent margin each,” according to the report.
There is potential for smallholders to tap into the e-commerce market using cloud-powered apps as the country’s growing middle class opts for online shopping over the traditional open-air ‘wet’ market, Purnama Adil Marata, an expert in agribusiness in Indonesia told the panel. Meanwhile, cloud-powered innovations can “make modern farming more inclusive for the smallholder farmer,” Marata added.
Cloud has also played a part in facilitating access to finance for smallholder farmers in Southeast Asia, home to one of the world’s largest unbanked populations. By leapfrogging bricks-and-mortar banking, Indonesia’s farmers, one of the poorest groups in the region that would be ordinarily regarded as high-risk borrowers by traditional financers, can tap into micro-loans as well as agricultural cooperatives where farmers can pool their resources.
“These cloud-enabled lending platforms have also provided farmers with legitimate and safer alternatives to predatory loan sharks,” said the report.
More collaboration is needed in the region to maximise cloud potential. “For this to work, it requires more than just technology…you need to combine it with leadership,” Jane Treadwell from Amazon Web Services said during the panel discussion, whose backlog of experience also includes the digital transformation of governments for the World Bank.
Greater collaboration is needed between government, the private sector, academia and customers to ensure democratisation of the cloud, and that the benefits of this technology can help the most vulnerable peoplein the region. “Without partnerships, collaborations, we have nothing,” Akanksha Bilani, regional alliance head at Intel told panellists.
Nearly a quarter of the UK’s electricity came from wind turbines in 2020 – making the country the leader among the G20 for share of power sourced from the renewable energy, a new analysis finds.
The UK also moved away from coal power at a faster rate than any other G20 country from 2015 to 2020, according to the results.
And it ranked second in the G20, behind Germany, for the proportion of electricity sourced from both wind and solar in 2020.
However, Britain is still lagging behind when it comes to fossil gas, according to analysis by the climate and energy think tank Ember.
The country sourced 37 per cent of its electricity from fossil gas in 2020, placing it ninth in the G20 and above the global average of 23 per cent.
“It’s crazy how much wind has grown in the UK and how much it has offset coal, and how it’s starting to eat at gas,” Dave Jones, Ember’s global lead analyst, told The Independent.
But it is important to bear in mind that “we’re only doing a great job by the standards of the rest of the world”, he added.
UK is second behind Germany in G20 for share of electricity sourced from wind and solar (Ember)
Ember’s Global Electricity Review notes that the world’s power sector emissions were two per cent higher in 2020 than in 2015 – the year that countries agreed to slash their greenhouse gas pollution as part of the Paris Agreement.
Power generated from coal fell by a record amount from 2019 to 2020, the analysis finds. However, this decline was greatly facilitated by lockdowns introduced to stop the spread of Covid-19, which stifled electricity demand, the analysts say.
Coal is the most polluting of the fossil fuels. The UK government hopes to convince all countries to stop building new coal-fired power stations at Cop26, a climate conference that is to be held in Glasgow later this year.
UN chief Antonio Guterres has also called for all countries to end their “deadly addiction to coal”.
At a summit held earlier this month, he described ending the use of coal in electricity generation as the “single most important step” to meeting the Paris Agreement’s goal of limiting global warming to well below 2C above pre-industrial levels by 2100.
“There is definitely a concern that, in the pandemic year of 2020, coal hasn’t fallen as fast as it needed to,” said Mr Jones.
“There is concern that, once electricity demand returns, we won’t be seeing that decline in coal anymore.”
SINGAPORE – A new battery recycling facility capable of recycling 14 tonnes of lithium-ion batteries – or the equivalent of 280,000 smartphone batteries – per day officially opened in Tuas on Wednesday (March 24).
The TES B facility, set up by home-grown electronic waste (e-waste) recycler TES, is able to recover more than 90 per cent of precious metals from lithium-ion batteries for reuse in battery production, said TES.
Speaking at the opening ceremony on Wednesday, TES chief executive Gary Steele said that the battery space is potentially facing raw material shortages due to the widespread use of smart devices, electric vehicles and mobility devices. According to the company, the volume of lithium-ion batteries sold annually by 2025 is expected to balloon fivefold to almost five million tonnes a year.
“For the last 100 years, we have all lived in a ‘take-make-waste’ linear economic model, where materials are extracted from the earth, used and then thrown away. That model is clearly not sustainable,” said Mr Steele.
He said the TES B facility is able to extract precious metals from spent batteries, such as lithium and cobalt with a purity level of almost 99 per cent, which is then reused for fresh battery production.
“There really is no other lithium-ion battery recycler in Singapore today. The hydrometallurgical process we developed, we believe is unique not just in Singapore or South-east Asia; in our view it’s quite unique in the rest of the world,” said Mr Steele.
Besides reducing the need for mining new precious metals, the battery recycling facility also reduces energy consumption in the battery production process.
“Recycled metals – much of which are from smartphones and laptops – can be reused at a level that is five to 10 times more energy-efficient than metals smelted from virgin ore,” said Mr Steele.
Speaking at the ceremony, Ms Grace Fu, Minister for Sustainability and the Environment, noted: “By closing the loop on lithium-ion batteries, TES B has brought Singapore a step closer to realising a circular economy.”
The launch of the TES B facility comes at a pivotal moment as the extended producer responsibility (EPR) scheme kicks into gear on July 1 this year.
Under the EPR scheme, producers – defined by the National Environmental Agency (NEA) as companies which manufacture or import electrical or electronic products into Singapore – will have to finance the collection and proper treatment of e-waste.
The EPR scheme, announced in 2018, will help deal with the 60,000 tonnes of e-waste generated by Singapore annually, which is set to grow with the increasing use of consumer electronics, electronic equipment for businesses and electric vehicles (EVs).
“With the EPR scheme that’s just been awarded in the last few weeks, we anticipate collaborating with the Government to ensure that batteries are all taken care of while working with the partner that has been chosen to lead the EPR,” said Mr Steele.
NEA chief executive Luke Goh said that facilities like TES B support Singapore’s move towards phasing out internal combustion engine vehicles in favour of cleaner vehicles, such as EVs, for better public health and to mitigate climate change.
Currently, members of the public can drop off their e-waste at designated e-waste recycling bins in public areas such as schools, malls and offices.
Examples of e-waste that can be recycled at these bins include laptops, mobile phones, keyboards, chargers and cables.
“The success of our efforts will bring about both environmental and economic benefits as we strengthen our resource resilience, develop our local recycling capabilities and turn trash into treasure,” said Ms Fu.
