Recycling firm battles Jakarta’s plastic waste emergency

Kurniawati’s company receives plastic from recycling centres across the greater Jakarta area – which has 30 million people – at its factory in Banten province outside the city. Then the company exports recycled plastic to European countries and also distributes it locally to be processed and used as packaging orContinue Reading

The dark side of Facebook, Google, TikTok ‘dark ads’

Once upon a time, most advertisements were public. If we wanted to see what advertisers were doing, we could easily find it – on TV, in newspapers and magazines, and on billboards around the city. This meant governments, civil society and citizens could keep advertisers in check, especially when they advertised products that might be […]

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The ghosts of Gorbachev’s energy legacy

Mikhail Gorbachev, the former Soviet leader who died last month at 91, was famous in the West for perestroika and glasnost. But three other Russian words also familiar in English were even more consequential for his reign and the resulting Soviet downfall: gaz, neft (oil), and atom. Gorbachev’s approach to these pillars of the Soviet economy […]

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Mongolia squandering its mining boom riches

Mongolia’s dependence on mining has intensified in recent decades. Following the discovery of major coal deposits and gold-copper ore in the early 2000s, mining’s economic significance surpassed that of the traditional livestock sector. In 2022, mining accounts for nearly a quarter of gross domestic product (GDP), up from a tenth in 2000. Since the advent […]

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