DINNER PARTY INTEL...

The topics you have to be able to discuss this week

1. Digging up dirt

Mining giant Glencore was this week subpoenaed by the US justice department for documents relating to possible money laundering and corruption, sending its share price diving by as much as 13%. The documents that US authorities want relate to the company’s business in Nigeria, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Venezuela from 2007 to the present.

The company is also facing a possible bribery investigation by UK prosecutors over its work with Dan Gertler, an Israeli billionaire and close friend of Congo president Joseph Kabila, Bloomberg reports.

2. India’s plastic roads

A state in India is pulling plastic from the oceans to build roads, the World Economic Forum says. The state of Kerala is training fishermen to collect plastic and bring it back to shore. In 10 months, 25 t of plastic has been removed from the Arabian Sea. From there it is shredded and converted into material that is used for road surfacing.

India already has 34,000 km of plastic road, popular for its resilience to India’s heat. The melting point for plastic road is around 66°C, compared with 50°C for conventional roads. It is also cheaper. Each kilometre costs 8% less than a conventional road and will use the equivalent of 1m plastic bags.

3. Germany powers up

Germany produced enough renewable energy in the first half of 2018 to power all its households for an entire year. The country’s combined wind, solar, biomass and hydroelectric power output hit a record 104bn kwh between January and the end of June, energy firm E.ON says. This is almost 10% more than the same period in 2017 and a third more than three years ago. More than half of the power is generated by wind turbines.