china

Chinese farmers are discovering that resurrecting the old tradition of keeping ducks in their rice fields allows them to cut down on the amount of pesticides and artificial fertilisers they need to use to grow their crops.

Company scores plummeted in the previous edition of Greenpeace's Guide to Greener Electronics, when new criteria on climate change were introduced. However, leading brands like Nokia and Samsung are now making significant progress in greening their electronics products, with improved environmental policies responding not only to these new energy criteria, but also to the more stringent chemical and e-waste criteria.

With expanded and tougher criteria on toxic chemicals, electronic waste and new criteria on climate change only Sony and Sony Ericsson score more than 5/10 in our latest Guide to Greener Electronics. Nintendo and Microsoft remain rooted to the bottom of the Guide.

The Greener Electronics Guide is our way of getting the electronics industry to face up to the problem of e-waste. We want manufacturers to get rid of harmful chemicals in their products. We want to see an end to the stories of unprotected child labourers scavenging mountains of cast-off gadgets created by society's gizmo-loving ways.

Those pesky biotech companies never give up. After recently spinning the line that GM crops can be used to safeguard food production from the ravages of climate change, their latest wheeze is to try and convince us that GM technology can help reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

I had one of those meetings this morning where I was doodling on my notebook rather than listening as attentively as perhaps I should have been, but the words 'China', 'light' and 'bulbs' caught my attention. I started paying even more attention when I realised it related to the news that China will be phasing out incandescent bulbs in the next 10 years.

One of the most serious consequences of the dramatic floods which swamped parts of England in recent weeks was the loss of clean drinking water. Even now that the citizens of Tewkesbury have running water once again, it will be a few more days before they can safely start drinking their tap water.

With Blair's recent departure, recollections of 1997 in the media have been dominated by two things: his ascension to power and the Spice Girls. On the other side of the world in China, that same year was important for a couple of other reasons. Most famously, the lease ran out on a small but strategic piece of land called Hong Kong and the British Empire lost one of its last outposts as ownership return to the People's Republic of China.

But on that same piece of land, about the same time Chris Patten was bidding a teary farewell, something else significant happened (at least, we like to think it was) - Greenpeace China opened its doors. The importance of this particular office to the organisation can't be underestimated and, as this video shows, many of our campaigns can't help but take China's astonishing economic and social development into account. And with China now possibly the world's biggest emitter of carbon dioxide, the next ten years are going to be even busier over there.