Restaurants in China to pay the price for diners’ leftovers
Restaurants in southern China are to be punished with heavy fines if they allow diners to order too much food or fail to suggest packing up leftovers for customers to take with them. The new rules, proposed by the Municipal Civilisation Office of Zhuhai city, are aimed at reducing the amount of food that goes to waste. A consumer culture of “irrational ordering” has left China throwing away enough food to feed 200 million people a year. Although the Zhuhai authorities are yet to explain how the rules will be policed, the scheme is intended to change China’s restaurant etiquette, under which customers over order to impress their guests. Zhuhai authorities, which regards the obligation to recommend packaging up leftovers as the most important pillar of the new rules, is also hoping that restaurateurs will start to display signs that read: “Civilised dining; morality is cultivated with thrift.” (The Times*)
Just one complaint to Irish Sun over dropping topless models
The UK and Ireland newspaper The Sun has said it has received just one consumer complaint after dropping topless Page Three models in Ireland. The Irish edition of the newspaper has opted to cover up its models following the No More Page Three consumer campaign which began in 2012, amassing over 113,000 signatures on its petition. However the editor of the UK edition, David Dinsmore, said that the UK practice would stay because it is a “good way of selling newspapers.” 138 MPs sent an open letter to Mr Dinsmore that called for an end to Page Three, arguing that the images were unacceptable. Stephanie Davies-Arai from the campaign said this was “a big development and a big step in the right direction, which we would hope will lead the UK Sun into making the same decision." (The Independent)
Responsible Investment
Norway’s oil fund urged to boost ethical credentials
Norway’s $760 billion oil fund, which owns an average 1.25 percent of every listed company in the world, has been criticised for its approach to human rights. The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) has criticised the fund for lacking a strategy for identifying and dealing with human rights violations at the companies in which it invests, citing its stake in the South Korean steelmaker POSCO. It emerged earlier this year that POSCO forcibly evicted local farming communities and committed severe human rights violations so its steel project in India could go ahead. The fund says the OECD guidelines should not apply to it as a minority investor, but Philip Jennings, the general secretary of the global union federation the UNI Global Union said that the fund had “a responsibility to be a responsible investor” and that the incident reflected the fund’s narrow focus on human rights. (Financial Times*; The Hindu)
Banks need to reconnect with society
The governor of the Bank of England, Mark Carney, has warned the UK’s high street banks that they risk becoming “socially useless” unless they help businesses invest and create jobs. He said “there has to be a change in the culture of these institutions…finance can absolutely play a socially useful and an economically useful function but the focus of the people working in the banking system has to be on the real economy, what it does for businesses making investment, what ultimately it means for jobs in the economy." Mr Carney also said that mis-selling products to customers to turn a profit undermines the effectiveness of banks and that the Bank of England and the Financial Conduct Authority are working together to “snuff out” those doing so. (The Guardian)
Environment
We need to frack more, says Cameron
Amid the continuing environmental protests against fracking at the UK energy company Cuadrilla Resources’ West Sussex site, the UK Prime Minister David Cameron said that the UK was “missing out big time” on lower energy bills and new jobs because of concerns about the environmental impact of fracking. He expressed frustration that the US was further ahead in the search for gas and yesterday said to residents in Lancashire that “nothing’s going to happen in this country unless it’s environmentally safe, so there’s no question of having earthquakes and fire coming out of taps and all the rest of it.” However, gas companies in the US have had to compensate residents where fracking practices have damaged the environment. The Prime Minister’s comments follow a recent report by the Department forCommunities and Local Government, which cited 16 risks associated with fracking, including flooding, subsidence, land and groundwater contamination and air pollution. (The Times*; The Guardian)
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