Category Archives: Green Education

China will concentrate on Green and Equitable growth

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Chinese Premeir Wen Jiabao pledged for environmental and equitable growth in the future for the Chinese Economy.

As the Australian reports:

Launching the annual session of the National People’s Congress, Mr Wen said future economic growth would hinge on “environmentally friendly industries”.

Projects would be assessed for “energy consumption and environmental impact”. Those that failed to meet such standards would be stopped. Mr Wen said China would close “backward” iron foundries with a production capacity of less than 30 million tonnes and “backward” steel mills that could produce 35million tonnes.

Mr Wen said “key energy-saving projects” would be introduced in industries including steel, other metals, coal, chemicals, building materials and construction.

Mr Wen also signalled the Government would control the scale of urban development and instead direct resources towards water conservation projects, energy production bases and trunk rail lines and highways.

The Guardian tackles the emphasis on Education and the rural poor:

`We must put people first, promote faster progress in social programs, work energetically to solve the most practical problems that are of greatest concern to the people … and ensure that all of the people share in the fruits of reform and development,” Wen said in a speech to China’s legislature, the National People’s Congress.

Tuition and other fees for all rural students will be eliminated, easing financial burdens on 150 million rural households, the premier said. The education program and an expansion of a subsidized rural health insurance system would complete in two years projects originally scheduled to be fazed in over five years.

“Education is the bedrock of China’s development, and fairness in education is an important form of social fairness,” Wen said in a 2 hour and 15 minute speech at the cavernous Great Hall of the People in central Beijing

In the countryside, where most Chinese live, spending on agriculture, schools, medical clinics and other programs will rise 15 percent to $51 billion, Wen announced.

With growing concern over China’s role in climate change and the increasing un-sustainable nature of its growth, the Chinese Premier’s speech comes at the right moment.

It remains to be seen what specific programs and policies will be announced and how it will be implemented.

RecycleBank

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Nick Aster at TriplePundit connects to a story on Recyclebank by Forbes.

Remembering the environmentalist mantra for waste – “Reduce, Reuse, Repair, Recycle, Refuse” recying is the 4th best alternative. Closed-loop manufacturing is far better in this scenario and changing people’s habits is the best.

RecycleBank works in the area of recylcing. It provides incentives to residents in Philadelphia, US to recycle their plastics, glass and other recyclables. It uses RFID tags to collect information.

RecycleBank tracks each household’s contribution by providing containers embedded with radio frequency identification tags that correspond to each household address. Scanners on sanitation trucks record the weights of each pickup in RecycleBank’s database. Each household gets an account number and can track their recycling points a la airline miles.

By providing a incentive it helps to encourage the idea of recycling. However, there is a problem.

The first one revolves around the idea of education. In the longer run, it makes sense to encourage recycling as a natural habit rather than incentivize it.

Second, Recycling only postpones the inevitable decline of products to waste. Recycling in that sense is not always the best option. In Cradle to Cradle, the authors provide an idea called “downcycling” where products, materials or flow of energy that is not useful in one process is transferred to another process which helps in reducing primary metals extraction, resource efficiency and sometimes energy efficiency.  These refer to the “reuse” and sometimes “repair” in the waste mantra.

Incentives to increase recycling is good to a limit – at sometime we need to create a closed-loop cycle. More recycling means, more waste. Also, there are debates around the efficiency (in terms of energy use etc) of recycling for all products.

The bigger goal should be to change the design of products in such a way that products and its materials are re-used. The infrastructure and systems which are being developed by RecycleBank have the possibility to mature into a system which can help manufactures to reclaim their products in their goal towards close-loop systems.

Poor parents and quality

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The Business-Standard reports the following:

Poor parents too prefer private schools (emphasis added)

The paper reports on a survey which concludes that poor people prefer to pay higher fees in private schools rather than sending their children to government schools for a bad education. Even if the government provided vouchers subsidsing half the cost of schooling that would be fine. The conclusion is not a least bit startling but the headline is.

My friend, Atanu Dey has been writing about liberalizing the education sector and vouchers for a long time now. Please read him to understand this issue better. I want to concentrate on a different one.

What startled me was the headline which contained the word “too” implying that like rich people, poor people would prefer quality too. Like the headline writer a lot of people in the communities around the world believe that poor people somehow will be content with inferior quality.

Everybody would want their children to have the best education regardless of econmic status. With 500 million Indians below 25 yrs of age India has a golden once-in-a-lifetime chance to provide a quality education to their children.

Businesses which want to serve the “base of the pyramid” need to understand this in order to succeed in this market.