Adidas on the spot, Chinese pollution and nappy recycling in Scotland

Adidas sweatshop protest

Through its own research and supporting reports, WOW points to reoccurring cases of worker abuse, victimisation of employees participating in unions, and below-living-wage pay.

Consequently, WOW organised protests around the Olympic games, attaching “34p” tags to Adidas products throughout its UK stores to symbolise the minimal hourly wage rate for its Indonesian workers. The non-profit group also projected a billboard-sized video onto a building near the Olympic park following the men’s 100m final, where the Adidas name was replaced with the message “Exploitation: not OK anywhere.”

“Adidas fails to act while the London Organising Committee [of the Olympic and Paralympic Games] imposes no sanctions, despite London 2012 organisers’ claims that these would prove the most ethical games ever,” says Paul Collins from WOW. “This failure – and further Olympic sponsors’ human and environmental abuse – explains why our charity will continue to press for change, and also demands the British government establish a human rights commission that would enable people overseas to seek redress in UK courts.”

William Anderson, Adidas’s head of social and environmental affairs for the Asia-Pacific region, responded with a blog post on the complexity of setting wages, saying the company has done its research on the topic and subsequently developed pay guidelines and training programmes for its suppliers, and piloted a Fair Wage Assessment tool to help its factories improve the wage-setting process.

“We can say with complete candour that pay remains a complex and not-so-easy-to-address topic for our contract factories; especially where the overall cost of doing business has been steadily climbing, due to fuel and commodity price increases, and consumers have been equally sensitive – in these times of austerity – to higher prices,” Anderson writes.

He did, however, concede that, “theoretically, yes, if a worker were deprived of any opportunity for overtime, allowances or bonuses s/he could receive such a meagre sum in one of the lowest wage cost countries”.

New website illustrates pollution in China

Non-profit group Asia Society has launched a multimedia site called China Air Daily, which documents in photos China’s daily pollution, and shines a spotlight on the country’s growing pollution problem.

The website tells a visual story by comparing the blue skies of three US cities – New York, Chicago and Phoenix – with Hong Kong, Shanghai and Beijing in China, which are often smoggy and grey.

The site’s founder, Michael Zhao, uses pollution data gathered from the Chinese environmental protection bureaux in their respective cities, plus data from the US embassies and consulates in those Chinese cities (apart from Hong Kong).

Thus far the site has gained some good traction with the Chinese population, with thousands of page views since its launch just over a month ago.

Down the line, Zhao hopes to add more features and cities to the site, and is working on a video to further animate the Chinese air quality picture – though he remains humble about his venture. “I hope that this project will prompt more effective air pollution control, but I never would expect too much from this site alone,” Zhao says. “There are so many great NGO folks working on this issue in China, and their involvement and push will be a lot more important.”

Scotland puts old nappies to new use

As part of the Scottish government’s vision for a zero waste society, non-profit organisation Zero Waste Scotland (ZWS) is piloting an innovative programme to recycle nappy waste and turn it into usable goods such as decking and benching.

About 160m nappies end up in landfill each year in Scotland, which presents a tremendous untapped area for recycling. According to Jon Molyneux at ZWS, the organisation worked alongside Canadian firm Knowaste, which developed a unique process to recycle disposable nappies, and with local Scottish authorities that wanted to trial the nappy recycling programme to pilot the initiative in four councils.

Depending on the neighbourhood, nappies can either be picked up kerbside, or taken to recycling centres. Molyneux says ZWS is trying multiple collection methods in various regions with diverse demographics, so it can assess which methods work best and are most cost effective.

“Ultimately it is for councils to decide if they want to take this further, but it does present an attractive opportunity to drive more material out of landfill and support Scotland’s zero waste targets,” says Molyneux.