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Loading ...Minas & São Paulo Adopt a Green Purchasing Program
Sunday, September 28th, 2008Two of Brazil’s biggest markets — the states of Minas Gerais (MG) and São Paulo (SP) — each created in August a state program for sustainable public purchasing and contracting that, if done properly, can have a major impact on Brazilian markets — even more so if other states and the federal government follow their […]
Trinidad & Tobago Opts for Systematic Recycling
Wednesday, September 24th, 2008In the 2009 Budget Statement presented Monday by Finance Minister Karen Nunez-Tesheria to the parliament of Trinidad and Tobago, the government announced that (surprise! surprise!) it is finally abandoning the Environment Management Authority’s (EMA) ten year-old proposal for a law creating a beverage container deposit-return system, and will instead is opting for a comprehensive waste […]
Greenhouse Gas Emissions in the Valley of Mexico
Monday, September 22nd, 2008Earlier this year the City of Mexico released an inventory of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions in 2006 in the Metropolitan Area of the Valley of Mexico (Zona Metropolitana del Valle de México – ZMVM) to accompany its new plan of action on climate change (something I’ll cover separately in a forthcoming blog entry). I found […]
Amapá Adopts a Recycling Policy
Friday, August 1st, 2008In early July Governor Waldez Góes signed a law creating a State Materials Recycling Policy. The new Law is based on similar measures adopted by several other Brazilian states, including Minas Gerais, Mato Grosso, Mato Grosso do Sul and Rondônia. It seeks to promote and provide incentives to the commercialization and industrial utilization of used […]
A New Way to Tackle C&D Waste
Tuesday, June 10th, 2008Brazilian researchers have developed a new cost-saving and energy-saving way to recycle construction and demolition (C&D) waste that they claim is so innovative that they are filing to patent the process. However, the essential idea behind it is so simple that many city planners and waste engineers will probably slap their foreheads and exclaim, “Why […]
Bahia to Adopt Paraná’s Zero Waste Program Model
Saturday, October 13th, 2007I’ve mentioned here several times the innovative Zero Waste Program (Programa Desperdício Zero) of the southern Brazilian state Paraná, such as how it applies to glass recycling, pesticide packaging, aseptic packaging and finding new ways to reuse/recycle plastic (PET) bottles (such as building solar water heaters). At some point I should do a comprehensive post […]
Software to Calculate Gains from Recycling / Software para calcular los beneficios de reciclar
Thursday, September 20th, 2007Municipalities have been known to spend thousands of dollars to consultants to provide them with an assessment of the economic and environmental viability of creating and implementing a municipal recycling program. Now several Brazilian professors have created a software package that they claim will do all that with just a few clicks of a computer […]
Tetra-Pak Chooses to Deal
Thursday, July 26th, 2007Synopsis in English: In May the environment officials of the southern Brazilian state of Paraná called in Tetra Pak officials and told them to come up with a proposal to solve the post-consumer waste problem in that state associated with their long-life (aseptic) packaging — or face drastic action by the government, such as banning […]
Poll on Brazilian Attitudes Regarding Sustainable Consumption
Friday, March 30th, 2007The Foundation for the Defense of the Consumer of São Paulo State (Fundação de Proteção e Defesa do Consumidor – “PROCON-SP“) has just released the results of a recent survey it conducted on the attitudes of Brazilian consumers regarding “sustainable consumption and living.” PROCON is the state consumer protection agency created in 1976, a full […]
It Does Indeed Add Up…
Monday, March 12th, 2007Sometimes you have step back from all the “big” and sensational stories out there and spotlight the modest successes that, if duplicated elsewhere and all such efforts were added together, would be a major story indeed. I just ran across this press release from a mid-sized city (pop. 102,000) in the southern Brazilian state of […]