China Environmental Law

Today we follow-up on a couple of posts earlier this week.
Biofuels
First up, China biofuels. More cautionary news. Xinhua reports
China has no plan to sacrifice food for fuel, the country’s energy experts said on Thursday amid controversy over biofuel.
Food security comes first in China, more important than fuel,” said Song Yanqin, a co-drafter of China’s national [...]

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Apologies for failing to give a nod to World Environment Day (WED) yesterday. China which rarely lets an International Day pass with out loads of singing school children was hard pressed to report on any WED activities in the Middle Kingdom, but it did note that:
North Korean state media said the government was doing its bit [...]

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The rise of China’s wind industry continues to receive hyperventilating coverage (how many of these projects are actually getting built? See The Green Leap Forward’s Wind Chill Factors for a sobering statistic on this point- “only 55% of wind farm projects awarded since 2004 have been built”), but China’s biofuel industry is in the dumps.
Forbes reports that
The [...]

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Here’s a bit of good news from Shanghai’s environmental authorities:
Despite its rapid population and economic growth, Shanghai’s environment has been improving steadily in recent years, the [environmental protection] bureau said yesterday in a statement.
Last year, almost 90 percent of days were reported as having “good” air quality, the highest number since monitoring began more than [...]

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Business for Social Responsibility (BSR) issued a report in April on ”Water Management in China’s Apparel and Textile Factories.”  The report
summarizes the activities and findings of the first phase of the Water Quality Initiative in China. A joint effort by Business for Social Responsibility and the Center for Water Research at Peking University, the Initiative has two [...]

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I should have added a caveat to my discussion of the Circular yesterday. Although I don’t find this exception in the Circular itself, several media reports  (here and here) noted that:
The regulation does not apply to plastic packaging for the hygiene and safety of products such as food and cooked food.
and
In consideration of food safety and [...]

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Giving the customer what he or she wants is the motto here at CELB, so when a reader suggests a topic we are only too happy to comply.  Andrew Gardner, Legal Consultant at Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer, has asked for our take on China’s new plastic bag policy which went into effect today.  Happy to oblige [...]

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