Cement, Energy & Environment

I \ LATEST CHINA SMOG EMERGENCY SHUTS CITY OF 11 MILLION PEOPLE Beijing: Choking smog all but shut down one of northeastern China's largest cities on Monday, forcing schools to suspended classes, snarling traffic and closing the airport, in the country's first major air pollution crisis of the winter. An index measuring PM2.5, or particulate matter with a diameter of 2.5 micrometers (PM2.5), reached a reading of 1,000 in some parts of Harbin, the gritty capital of northeastern Heilongjiang province and home to some 11 million people. A level above 300 is considered hazardous, while the World Health Organisation recommends a daily level of no more than 20. The smog not only forced all primary and middle schools to suspend classes, but shut the airport and some public bus routes, the official Xinhua news agency reported, blaming the emergency on the first day of the heating being turned on in the city for winter. Visibility was reportedly reduced to 10 metres. The smog is expected to continue for the next 24 hours. Air quality in Chinese cities is of increasing concern to China's stability-obsessed leadership because it plays into popular resentment over political privilege and rising inequality in the world's second-largest economy. Domestic media have run stories describing the expensive air purifiers government officials enjoy in their homes and offices, alongside reports of special organic farms so cadres need not risk suffering from recurring food safety scandals. The government has announced plans over the years to tackle the pollution problem but has made little apparent progress . Users of China's popular Twitter-like Sina Weibo microblogging site reacted with both anger and bitter sarcasm over Harbin's air pollution. "After years of effort, the wise and hard– working people of Harbin have finally managed to skip both the midd le-class society and the communist society stages, and have now entered a fairyland society!" wrote one user. Other parts of northeastern China also experienced severe smog, including Tangshan, two hours east of Beijing, and Changchun, the capital of Jilin province which borders Heilongjiang. Last week, Beijing city released a colour-coded alert system for handling air pollution emergencies, to include the temporary halt of construction, factory production, outdoor barbeques and the setting off of fireworks. Beijing suffered its own smog emergency last winter when the PM2.5 surpassed 900 on one particularly bad day in January. Courtsey: www.ndtv. com Waste to Wealth & Waste Recycling TOWARDS AN INCLUSIVE MODEL FOR WASTE MANAGEMENT If you cross over the DND bridge in Delhi to Atta market in Noida, Uttar Pradesh , you will see the incongruous sight of a well-heeled young man with gold-rimmed shades taking an unusual interest in the sweeping of streets and the collection and dumping of garbage into a truck nearby. If you follow him for the remainder of the day, you will see him hopscotching from one Naida neighbourhood to another, chatting up his workers, monitoring door-to-door collections of trash , the sorting of it in a nearby landfill and finally the transportation of a lucrative haul of recyclables to a warehouse nearby. "This is a 99 per cent operations job," he says with a shrug. "There's no other way to run this business." This is Manik Thapar, 30, already a veteran of the garbage business and one of its most unlikely crusaders. After all , Thapar studied at St Joseph's in Nainital, did a stint at an Australian boarding school, studied automotive marketing during his undergraduate years in Toronto, and spent two years in Michigan doing an MBA. This is where a summer project on the waste management business began to get his cog wheels churning. His return to Delhi in 2005 to start Ecowise, a business in the world of garbage, could seem distinctly deranged to most Indians, who prefer to voyage in the opposite direction and work in industries that require anyth ing but being surrounded by filth for much of the day. Predictably, his mother, who had made Toronto her home, was appalled by his decision. "When he first started off, I remember asking him 'Are you sure you want to get into such a dirty business?"' says Ravi Agarwal , a well-known expert on hazardous waste. "He's doing good work and has taken on a really tough challenge." What was most unusual about Thapar's business was his early decision to not just 23