An investigation by Greenpeace International has revealed the dumping of industrial wastewater containing a cocktail of toxic chemicals and caustic water, directly into the Citarum River, West Java. International fashion brands, including Gap, Banana Republic and Old Navy are linked to this pollution through their direct business relations with PT Gistex Group; the company behind the polluting facility. In its report, Toxic Threads: Polluting Paradise, the NGO details how the PT Gistex facility has taken advantage of a system that requires little transparency about its activities and where inadequate laws are failing to prevent the release of hazardous chemicals.

And now for something completely different: A Thai-Chinese “Red Bull” billionaire has teamed up with US aerospace and arms manufacturer Lockheed Martin to pilot a potentially revolutionary system that exploits the temperature difference between the deep sea and the surface to generate electricity. The Reignwood Group – which produces Red Bull in China and is owned by Chanchai Ruayrungruang (also known as Yan Bin) – plans to use a 10-MW Ocean Thermal Energy Conversion (OTEC) off-shore power plant to provide electricity for a new “green resort community” it is developing somewhere on the coast of Southern China.

An APL container ship has been awarded the inaugural Green Ship of the Year award at the 2013 International Maritime Awards, organized by the Maritime and Port Authority of Singapore. Some shipping industry executives congregating in Singapore last week for the Sea Asia conference, however, had strong reservations about the whole concept of eco-ships. The APL Yangshan, a 10,700-TEU vessel built in 2012, is part of the company’s fleet renewal program that aims to develop a smarter and more eco-efficient global container fleet. The vessel has an Energy Efficiency Design Index (EEDI) that is 33 percent better than the International Maritime Organization’s EEDI reference line for this type and size of ship.

Chinese fishing boats catch about USD11.5 billion worth of fish from beyond their country's own waters each year – and most of it goes unreported – according to a new study led by fisheries scientists at the University of British Columbia (UBC). The paper, recently published in the journal Fish and Fisheries, estimates that China's foreign catch is 12 times larger than the catch it reports to the United Nation's Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), an international agency that keeps track of global fisheries catches.

India could be on the verge of departing from its long-held negotiating position on climate change and preparing to adopt binding emission reduction commitments. A report in the Times of India says that as part of the preparation, the government is likely to commission four studies including one assessing by when the country’s emissions will peak in absolute terms. “The year when India’s emissions trajectory peaks before it starts to dip is expected to influence the date from when the government will be ready to take on a cap in absolute terms on greenhouse gases under the new global climate compact to be signed in 2015,” the newspaper said.

Temperatures in South-East Asia's Lower Mekong Basin are set to rise by up to three times the global average temperature increase, according to a USAID-funded study. Previous reports by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change predicted that the basin would see increases in line with the global average of around two degrees Celsius. But according to a preliminary report by the Mekong Adaptation and Resilience to Climate Change Project (Mekong ARCC), parts of the basin could see annual temperatures increase by as much as six degrees Celsius by 2050.

The Japanese cabinet is moving ahead with a proposal to revamp the country’s electricity industry and foster competition by obliging utilities to split power generation and distribution into separate businesses. The plan, which requires parliamentary approval, is aimed at encouraging innovation and grid modernization as  Japan grapples with its energy policy after the shutting down of almost all its nuclear power plants in the wake of the crisis at the Fukushima Daiichi plant. The idea of liberalizing Japan’s electricity market has been around for years and was included in a series of economic overhauls, intended to improve the country’s competitiveness, being discussed by Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s administration.

The Environment and Planning Institute of China's Ministry of Environmental Protection (MEP) has announced the 2010 Green National Accounting results (also called Green GDP Accounting). These show that the country's ecological and environmental degradation costs reached CNY1.53895 trillion (USD248 billion), accounting for about 3.5 percent of the GDP for 2010. This compares to a cost to the economy of nearly CNY1.4 trillion (USD222 billion), equivalent to 3.8 percent of GDP, in 2009. An estimate of the environmental degradation cost for 2008 was CNY1.27 trillion (USD200 billion), equivalent to 3.9 percent of GDP, although the true figure could be even higher as the authors acknowledge their data is incomplete.

China’s top five power companies are facing a hefty bill and a potential loss of capacity in order to fit in with the country’s plan to cap total water consumption by 2030, according to a new report. The implication is that, despite plans to build hundreds of new coal-fired power plants, there is simply not enough water to accommodate them in the China’s most populated and economically developed regions. According to a new report from Bloomberg New Energy Finance (BNEF), Huaneng, Datang, Huadian, Guodian, and China Power Investment are heavily exposed to water supply disruptions due to the concentration of their portfolios in moderately to severely water-scarce regions, in particular the dry and industrial northeast.