Saturday, September 28, 2013

KL Eco Film Fest highlights

28 September 2013| last updated at 07:44PM

FROM exploring nature’s powerful role in children’s health and development to the resurgence of electric vehicles, Kuala Lumpur’s innovative environmental film festival has something for everyone.

Now in its sixth year, the Kuala Lumpur Eco Film Festival, sponsored by Maybank Foundation and Taiwan-based software company Cyberlink, has become one of the country’s grandest and most influential purveyors of environmental film. Many national premieres are included in the line-up including documentaries, narratives, animations and short films. Films are shown throughout the city at partnering museums, embassies, libraries, universities and local theatres.

With a programme curated to offer fresh views on global environmental issues, most of the screenings are accompanied by discussions with filmmakers, environmental experts and special guests.

This year’s festival, which runs from Oct 11-13, will include 66 films from 13 countries, including 18 national premieres. Some highlights include:

A FIERCE GREEN FIRE: THE BATTLE FOR A LIVING PLANET
The film is an exploration of the environmental movement — grassroots and global activism — spanning 50 years from conservation to climate change. From halting dams in the Grand Canyon to battling 20,000 tonnes of toxic waste at Love Canal; from Greenpeace saving the whales to Chico Mendes and the rubber tappers saving the Amazon; from climate change to the promise of transforming our civilisation, the film tells vivid stories about people fighting — and succeeding — against enormous odds.
Narrated by Robert Redford, Meryl Streep, Ashley Judd, Van Jones, and Isabel Allende Directed by Mark Kitchell
Running time: 114mins
Screening date: Oct 11, 8pm
Segaris Art Centre, Publika

CHASING ICE
Chasing Ice is the story of one man’s mission to change the tide of history by gathering undeniable evidence of our changing planet. Within months of his first trip to Iceland, the photographer conceived the boldest expedition of his life: The Extreme Ice Survey. With a band of young adventurers in tow, Balog began deploying revolutionary time-lapse cameras across the brutal Arctic to capture a multi-year record of the world’s changing glaciers.
Directed by Jeff Orlowski
Running time: 75 minutes
Screening date: Sept 30, 8pm
The Square, Publika

REVENGE OF THE ELECTRIC CAR
Revenge of the Electric Car The film presents the recent resurgence of electric vehicles as seen through the eyes of four pioneers of the EV revolution. As more models of electric cars than ever before start to arrive in showrooms and driveways across the world, Chris Paine’s film offers an inspiring, entertaining and definitive account of this revolutionary moment in human transportation.
Directed by Chris Paine
Running time: 90 minutes
Screening date: 12 Oct, 8.30pm
The Square, Publika.

SURVIVING PROGRESS
But what if progress is actually spiraling us towards collapse? Ronald Wright, whose best-seller, A Short History Of Progress inspired Surviving Progress, shows how past civilisations were destroyed by “progress traps” — alluring technologies and belief systems that serve immediate needs, but ransom the future. As pressure on the world’s resources accelerates and financial elites bankrupt nations, can our globally-entwined civilisation escape a final, catastrophic progress trap?

Directed by Mathieu Roy, Co-Produced by Martin Scorsese
Running time: 86 minutes.
Screening date: Oct 1, 8pm
Table 23 Restaurant

PANDORA’S PROMISE
Impact Partners, in association with Vulcan Productions and CNN Films, presents this groundbreaking new film by Academy-Award-nominated director Robert Stone. The atomic bomb and meltdowns like Fukushima have made nuclear power synonymous with global disaster. But what if we’ve got nuclear power wrong?

An audience favourite at the Sundance Film Festival, Pandora’s Promise asks whether the one technology we fear most could save our planet from a climate catastrophe, while providing the energy needed to lift billions of people in the developing world out of poverty.

Stone tells the intensely personal stories of environmentalists and energy experts who have undergone a radical conversion from being fiercely anti to strongly pro-nuclear energy, risking their careers and reputations in the process. He also exposes this controversy within the environmental movement head-on with stories of defection by heavy weights including Stewart Brand, Richard Rhodes, Gwyneth Cravens, Mark Lynas and Michael Shellenberger.
Running time: 77 mins
Screening date: Oct 13, 8.30pm
The Square, Publika

Other partners include MAP Publika, UEM Sunrise, Tanamera Tropical Spa Products, Go International, Palate Palette, the Ford Environmental and Conservation Grants Foundation, with IACT College as the official University Partner, and the Tinai Eco Film Festival as its international film festival partner.

For more info visit www.ecofilmfest.my

Friday, September 20, 2013

Gas beracun: 500 penduduk diarah pindah

Source : Utusan Malaysia, 20/9/13
url : http://www.utusan.com.my/utusan/Jenayah/20130920/je_05/Gas-beracun:-500-penduduk-diarah-pindah

Oleh MALINDA ABDUL MALIK

utusanpenang@utusan.com.my

Keadaan Kampung Pisang menjadi kabus akibat gas hidrogen sulfurik.

PULAU PINANG 19 Sept. - Lebih 500 penduduk Kampung Pisang, Air Itam di sini terpaksa mengosongkan kediaman masing-masing ekoran bau yang dihasilkan oleh gas toksik akibat kebakaran sebuah stor penyimpanan bahan kimia malam tadi.

Dalam kejadian kira-kira pukul 9.30 malam itu, stor simpanan hidrogen sulfurik yang berada di kawasan kampung tersebut terbakar dan menghasilkan bau kuat sehingga membuatkan penduduk panik serta sesak nafas.

Pengarah Bomba dan Penyelamat negeri, Azmi Tamat berkata, pihaknya menerima panggilan pada pukul 9.35 malam mengenai kejadian berkenaan.

Pasukan Unit Bahan Berbahaya (Hazmat) menggunakan dry powder untuk memadamkan api yang berpunca daripada bahan kimia di Kampung Pisang, Air Itam, Pulau Pinang, malam kelmarin.

Menurutnya, sebaik sahaja tiba di kampung itu, anggotanya terhidu bau toksik yang dikesan datang dari stor bahan kimia tersebut.

“Gas toksik itu boleh mengundang bahaya kepada penduduk tetapi kita berjaya mengawal keadaan.

“Setakat ini, tiada kejadian tidak diingini berlaku dan kita berjaya memindahkan dan menghapuskan sisa toksik yang menyebabkan penduduk tidak selesa kerana terhidu gas beracun," katanya ketika ditemui di tempat kejadian malam tadi.

Beliau memberitahu, penduduk dibenarkan pulang ke kediaman masing-masing pada pukul 3 pagi selepas didapati tiada lagi bau gas beracun tersebut.

Artikel Penuh: http://www.utusan.com.my/utusan/Jenayah/20130920/je_05/Gas-beracun:-500-penduduk-diarah-pindah#ixzz2tTot1MPe
© Utusan Melayu (M) Bhd

Time to rethink our throw-away culture

Source : NST 20/9/13

http://www.nst.com.my/opinion/columnist/time-to-rethink-our-throw-away-culture-1.359619?localLinksEnabled=false

ENVIRONMENTAL COST: Manufacturers should take back roducts for proper recycling and processing as part of their corporate social responsibility

EVERYTHING comes with a use-by-date these days. It's not just food items. Handphones, laptops and other electrical items, even cars, also come with limited lifespan. All this is done by corporations to encourage consumerism and spending, and as such to ensure repeat purchases.

We got a new electric rice cooker some years back. Because the current rice cooker was still working, we continued to use it. When we took out the new electric rice cooker to use several months later, the LCD panel was not working. We brought it to the repair shop only to be told it was not worth repairing. For RM100 more, we could get a new one.

The implication was that you throw away a perfectly new rice cooker that needed only a part replaced because it was not worth repairing.

I don't think it is worth throwing away just to end up in the landfill. Consumers, retailers -- even repairmen -- think only about the cost of convenience. Why is it that no one thinks about the environmental cost?

Rather than throwing away an item where one part is faulty or the model is a bit outdated, manufacturers should have a policy of replacing the part at a reasonable cost. More often than not, replacing the part costs half the price of a new model!

So, consumers are forced to buy new items while paying more than the repair charges. This just leads to more goods ending up in our landfills and, ultimately, proposed projects like incinerators with the potential to belch toxic elements into the air despite the latest technology to reduce such hazards.

Why is the cause of our consumptive lifestyles not addressed at the onset? If the manufacturer doesn't have a recycling programme, then ethical consumers are left high and dry.

So, I was angry after watching The Lightbulb Conspiracy (http://ecofilmfest.my/community-screenings/film-listing.html). This documentary about the negative effects of consumerism and planned obsolescence argues that the leading manufacturers of incandescent light bulbs conspired in the 1920s to keep the lifetime of their bulbs far below their real technological capabilities to ensure the continuous demand for more bulbs and, hence, long-term profit for themselves. So, the first worldwide cartel was set up to reduce the lifespan of the incandescent light bulb.

In the 1950s, with the birth of the consumer society, the concept took on a whole new meaning as the desire to own something "a little newer, a little better, a little sooner than is necessary..." Sound familiar?

Today, planned obsolescence is pervasive. Cutting-edge electronics are also made with deliberate shortening of product lifespan to guarantee consumer demand. This is very much a sign of our modern society with throw-away lifestyles.

Hence, millions of electrical items are shipped around the world to be dumped in countries like Ghana and China for dismantling rather than being repaired or recycled.

The onus then is for manufacturers to take back their products for proper recycling and processing as part of their corporate social responsibility.

More importantly, future models should be designed to be more re-useable in models introduced to the market.

Melbourne Institute of Applied Economic and Social Research Associate Professor Chris Ryan suggests that companies follow guidelines set by the United Nations Environment Programme in their "design for environment" guide.

Attention to the design of a product could reduce its environmental impact by as much as 60 to 80 per cent, notes Ryan.

"With toxic waste and pollution increasing on a global scale, the focus in the next two decades will be on the recovery of materials and components," he adds.

Although e-waste in Malaysia is regulated under the Environmental Quality (Scheduled Wastes) Regulations 2005, local manufacturers, importers and retailers need to go through a paradigm shift to acknowledge that our planet has a finite amount of resources that will run out one day and make or procure products with extended lifespan.

Thankfully, there is a growing spirit of resistance amongst ordinary consumers in the age of the Internet. For example, two artists from New York managed to extend the lives of millions of iPods by raising awareness on the 18-month lifespan of its battery, which resulted in a class action suit against Apple.

The manufacturing giant set up a replacement service for the batteries and extending the warranty of the batteries to two years.

Thursday, September 19, 2013

Stor bahan kimia terbakar, 500 penduduk diarah pindah

Sumber : Utusan Online, 19/9/13

Oleh MALINDA ABDUL MALIK

Dalam kejadian kira-kira pukul 9.30 malam, stor simpanan hidrogen sulfurik yang berada di kawasan kampung tersebut terbakar dan menghasilkan bau kuat sehingga membuatkan penduduk panik serta sesak nafas.

Ketua Pengarah Bomba dan Penyelamat negeri, Azmi Tammat berkata, pihaknya menerima panggilan pada pukul 9.35 malam mengenai kejadian berkenaan.

Menurutnya, sebaik sahaja tiba di kampung itu, anggotanya terhidu bau toksik yang dikesan datang dari stor bahan kimia tersebut.

"Gas toksik itu boleh mengundang bahaya kepada penduduk tetapi kita berjaya mengawal keadaan.

"Setakat ini tiada kejadian tidak diingini berlaku dan kita berjaya memindahkan dan menghapuskan sisa toksik yang menyebabkan penduduk tidak selesa kerana terhidu gas beracun," katanya ketika ditemui di tempat kejadian.

Beliau memberitahu, penduduk dibenarkan pulang ke kediaman masing-masing pada pukul 3 pagi selepas didapati tiada lagi bau gas beracun tersebut. - UTUSAN ONLINE

Artikel Penuh: http://www.utusan.com.my/utusan/Jenayah/20130919/je_09/Stor-bahan-kimia-terbakar,-500-penduduk-diarah-pindah#ixzz2tTpQ9wgD
© Utusan Melayu (M) Bhd