Countries like Britain consume more locally produced goods
Britain is among a few countries that are adopting strategies to limit environmental damage by consuming more local produce.
Making this comment, Prof. Ajith de Alwis, Senior Professor, Department of Chemical and Process Engineering University of Moratuwa said that marketing of products and commodities can also affect the environment.
For example countries import goods from faraway places and transport them involving a large amount of fuel where its combustion would add carbon dioxide to the environment leading to disaster, he said speaking at a workshop on ‘Environmental Challenges faced by Industry and Possible Solutions’ held in Colombo last week, organized by the Centre for Technical Excellence in Ceramics (CENTEC).
Making a presentation on the topic ‘International Trends in Changing Environmental Regulations and their effects on Sri Lankan Industry’, he said that people and societal development would face disastrous consequences as the chemical exposure and its pres- sure has now started affecting the IQ (Intelligence Quotient) – human intelligence.
He pointed out that increasing global warming is already showing the impending disaster where lowlying islands would be submerged, ice caps melting to increase the sea-level and famine is afoot due to unprecedented and extended droughts and excessive heat where a large number of human lives were lost in India and Pakistan.
Prof. de Alwis said that there should be different development models to ensure that they achieve the environmental standards to safeguard the planet and discuss climate change as to how to reduce global warming and reduce temperature in the globe. “The increase of carbon dioxide in the northern hemisphere that has never been experienced by humanity before is the warmest climate. Climatic conditions are going to affect humanity adversely and it would become a continuous issue if no corrective measures are taken or continuously ignored.”
Prof. de Alwis pointed out that on the recent ‘Rathupaswala’ incident there were seven reports com- piled by experts and other organizations, but, unfortunately none of them has been made public. He said that in the United States and other countries the moment such reports are out, they would be in the public domain on the following day, enabling others with similar problems to draw corrective inferences on the basis of the findings of those reports.
In many boardrooms in this country, he indicated that the usual way is the development policies first and the environmental policies second. But ideally both should be the same, equal weightage where the end result would be better than decisions made on the development policies alone.
The other speakers were: A.S. Pannila, Additional Director General/ Technical Services, ITI – on ‘Current Environmental Issues Faced by the Sri Lankan Industries’; Heshan De Silva, GM Operations, Laughs Holdings Ltd on Environmental Friendly Energy’ and Ms. Ranpatige Dushanthi, Senior Research Engineer/ Environmental Technology Section, ITI on ‘Beyond the Environmental Protection Licence’.