Sustainable Manufacturing in China

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Although not related to green-technologies, this post at least relates to China:

Last week we finished our 5 weeks Mandarin course (I took part in the ‘intermediate‘ course, which in fact is more like a beginners #2 course) offered by the University to its members of staff  (4d/w, 2h/d).

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Yesterday Spiegel.de wrote about the 2009 State of the future report which will be made available to the public soon. The report is published by the Millennium Project. People involved in this project try to name and describe the biggest challenges that humanity is facing in the upcoming decades.

Ban Ki-moon, Secretary-General, United Nations states that the report gives “Invaluable insights into the future for the United Nations, its Member States, and civil society.“

The first and probably last time that a driver in China was deservedly told that he drives too slow…not too fast

One thing that I think is very different from the UK in China is the way the traffic works…and yes it works… (though it includes or at least I see many more accidents…). Drivers, taxi drivers in particular, seem to be very competitive and have probably not heard about fuel efficient ways of driving a car…

Anyway, after a long day in Shanghai our driver decided on several occasions, for no apparent reason, to slow down to about 80 km/h – on the motorway. At one occasion he even used the breaks to go down to 50 km/h (he seemed a little tired) – at this point my colleague decided to let him know he is going to slow and that he should speed up… to give you a comparison, I have used taxis that went over 100km/h crossing a number of red traffic lights (just announcing themselves by excessively using the horn) in the city of Ningbo- 30km/h allowed.

The photo above is taken from www.helloningbo.com “Ningbo’s leading English magazine and website for visitors and expatriates“. Clicking on it brings you to a very useful page that contains a manual for using Taxis in Ningbo.

There will be a lot of updates about things that happpened during this semester… I hope I can provide them in the beginning of June.

“These products are consumed by other countries… This share of emissions should be taken by the consumers but not the producers” (Li Gao, China’s climate change negotiator)

This quote comes from this BBC news atricle dealing with talks held in Washington ahead of a major conference in Copenhagen, which was attended by Mr Li and envoys from Japan and the EU. That meeting in Denmark, planned for December, aims at starting negotiations regarding a new international treaty on climate change. Read the rest of this entry »

I just read an article on the cleaner greener china blog stating that 17 out 100 of the world’s wealthiest entrepreneurs venturing in green technologies are from China.

The Green Rich List - a special survey of how the world’s wealthiest people are turning into eco-pioneers is published by the Times Online:

“The global rich are going green as never before. This first Sunday Times Green Rich List shows that the enthusiasm among the world’s wealthiest for investments in areas as diverse as electric cars, solar power and geothermal energy is unaffected by the recession.” Read the rest of this entry »

Welcome to University of Nottingham Ningbo Weblogs.

Due to technical reasons the Sustainable Manufacturing in China – blog has been moved from its original address to here.

All posts have been transferred successfully using the wordpress export/import function. Just some minor casualties, like lost tags…also, I have to reinstall the original widgets (the ClustrMaps widget for example starts from zero, hence the empty map) and upload some of the pictures manually. The old page will not be maintained anymore.

If you are interested in news, reviews, interviews and other articles related to sustainable product design, green manufacturing, and other related clean technologies not only focussed on China then please do visit this site in the future.

Comments, ideas, any kind of feedback are more than welcome.

A friend of mine recommended Feedjit as a tool to increase blog traffic. This was backed up by an article I read about Feedjit: “Webmasters report an increase of time spend, number of visited pages per visitor, number of repeat visitors.”

Personally I like the Feedjit Life Traffic Feed feature (right column, at the bottom of this page) because it gives an indication on location and time of the blog’s visitors. On the other hand, I can understand that some people might feel a bit like being part of a “Brave New World”…

Anyway, after -admittedly- not so careful consideration I decided to test the tool on this blog. I am looking forward to learning about your thoughts or reservations.

Good friends from Nottingham, UK, Ronaldo and Ann, were visiting us here in Ningbo whilst on their holiday in Shanghai. Ronaldo and I used to work together for the Precision Manufacturing Centre at the University of Nottingham (http://www.precisionmanufacturing.co.uk) whereas Ann is working on fuel cells in the Chemical Engineering Division in Nottingham.

Tianyi Pavilion Library

They arrived yesterday afternoon and I brought them along to say hello to some familiar faces from the UK now working here at UNNC. In addition, we visited the Engineering department and talked about old and new research ideas. Then we went out for a nice Szechuan style restaurant (i.e. very hot food- even for Chinese, as I learned on a few occasions by now), before finishing the evening with some more catching up at home. Today we headed to town for sightseeing, the oldest private library in China, Tianyi square, little street markets and similar, before saying goodbye later in the afternoon.