Chris Milton : Independent Journalist & Writer

Plain text version (online version unavailable):

An ambitious plan has been launched by the Dutch company Atlantis Zeilende Handelsvaart (Atlantis Merchant Sailing Company) to introduce fair transportation as a fair trade alternative to shipping.

The company hopes to be able to provide a fully sustainable means of transporting freight around the world, including ship construction, chartering, management, crewing and financing.

The vision would be brought about through a fleet of Ecoliners, sailing ships which have been specially built or modified to carry commonly used freight containers.

The company is currently in negotiations to buy the first of these, a 3000MT Reefer vessel.  However it already has a sixty year old brigantine, Tres Hombres, which is completing a pilot voyage.

This vessel was donated to the project by a navel museum in Den Helder, the Netherlands, and restored to full working capacity by a team of fifty volunteers from twelve countries.

It recently completed an aid mission to Haiti and is returning to Europe with a cargo of locally produced rum.  All energy on the ship comes from onboard wind turbines and recycled vegetable oil.

The venture is part of a growing green logistics trend to ship goods by sail in order to reduce the emissions and costs of international freight.

Plain text version (no online copy available):

In a world first the Supreme Court of the Philippines has issued groundbreaking rules on how environmental cases should be handled which will come into force later this week.

The procedures have rebalanced the legal process between campaigners and corporate or government bodies and made quick and accessible legal mechanisms available to those who wish to protect limit needless environmental damage.

The procedures include the following provisions:

Access to the law by any citizen
A cheap civil law mechanism allows any citizen to bring a complaint against a company or government body with many of the usual legal fees waived.

The complaint must be answered within 15 days and certain defences are barred in order to ensure the matter is resolved within a year. (more…)

Following on from the examination of supermarkets published last week, this time I turn my attention to the Banks.

This quick survey is different from the previous one in two ways: first of all I’m not basing the criteria on an existing survey, and secondly I’ve gone for a simpler method of calculating and displaying the results of the survey.

As before, this is based on a quick examination of the websites and reports of the banks in question: this is designed for guidance purposes, not to be empirically accurate. (more…)