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Follow India's example on recycling plastics By Quintus
Perera The reports
came from four of the 17 sectoral committees or task forces appointed
by the government. The members of these committees came from the
private sector while government representatives co-ordinated these
committees. Peiris said
USAID was very much involved in these activities and they were now
looking at productivity and competitiveness of these industries. Global competition
imposed a corresponding need for Sri Lanka to look critically at
its position in each of its key industries and hence these reports
should essentially find strategies linking ideas with products and
services aimed at sustaining long-term growth on a global basis,
he said. When the issue
of plastics pollution was discussed even the minister was taken
aback, when T.L. Chandraratne, a member of the audience, said that
Sri Lankan authorities were only 'beating about the bush' in the
matter of pollution by plastics. He said that in India plastic waste
is recycled and used for road tarring as a mixture. He said that
plastics were 100 percent recyclable and in India 60 percent of
the plastic waste was recycled. Minister Peiris inquired from Sarath
Wijesinghe, Chairman, Task Force for Plastics, details of how India
was processing the waste plastics. Another major
issue is saw dust pollution being heaped near rivers and waterways,
Major Douglas Wijesinha, Chairman, Task Force for Wood-based industry
said that they were working on a plan to produce 2.5 megawatt electricity
power from the saw dust collected from southern Moratuwa alone. Another important
issue was raised by another member of the audience who said that
while the wood-based industry was making ambitious five-year plans,
there was a severe scarcity of timber. He pointed out that a huge
factory was set up in Horana and all the timber in the area was
channelled to this factory leaving the others in the industry around
the area without any timber to work with. Chanaka Ellawala,
Chairman, Gem and Jewellery Task Force, presenting his sector's
five year plan said the industry was an important source of foreign
exchange, but was least developed, and outlined the strategy: (1)
manufacturing to increase the value in a two step process; (2) branding
and repositioning to differentiate the products and services from
Sri Lanka to move the industry 'up-market' by increasing Sri Lanka's
share of high value products developing the market; and (3) to make
Sri Lanka the hub to support the other two strategies by providing
the necessary infrastructure, support services, policy and business
environment. Ellawala said
that in five years he expects the industry to grow up to $ 370 million
which has been $ 80 million in 2001. Presenting
the report on Packaging, Chairman Task force Dharmatilake Ratnayake
and co-chairman J.D. Amarasooriya noted that their plans have been
focused to capture an overall market share of 80 percent of the
total packaging demand in Sri Lanka. They are looking at specific
options like productivity, competitiveness, employee development,
technological leadership and public responsibility involving both
micro and macro perspectives, though the current status of the industry
was inadequate to improve on the above specific options. Sarath Wijesinghe,
Chairman, Plastics Task Force said that Sri Lankan policymakers
paid little attention to local industry, even though it was one
of the fastest growing industries in the world and rapid changes
in technology and materials in developed countries have led to relocation
of their plastics processing industries to countries with the ability
to manage technology. He said newly industrialized countries like
Singapore, Taiwan, and Korea were first to benefit but in turn were
losing these plants to Vietnam, Indonesia and China. He said the size of the local processing industry is presently around 120,000 metric tons per year with an annual average growth rate of around 10 percent. The industry processes all commodity plastics and many engineering plastics using a range of technologies with products manufactured for both the local and international markets. Interblocks' iPay solution on IBM eServer iSeries Interblocks
Ltd's Internet payment solution, iPay, is now available on the IBM
eServer iSeries. Interblocks is a Banking and Financial Services
Solutions Company specializing in secure payment processing, and
management of delivery channels and customer touch-points. Engineers from
Interblocks' Payment Technology group recently worked with the IBM
iSeries team at their PartnerWorld for Developers (PWD) lab in Bangalore
, India and successfully optimized their solution on the iSeries,
according to an IBM statement. Suren Kohombange, Director Software, Interblocks said, "The availability of iPay on the iSeries is a milestone for the application. The iPay implementation in Sri Lanka enabled the island nation to accept online payments and fuel the growth of business on the Internet. The solution was later picked up by global financial solutions provider SchlumbergerSema to complement its suite of banking applications". K.N. Sivakumar, Manager, Enterprise Systems Group, IBM Sri Lanka said, "The IBM eServer iSeries is all about integration and flexibility. The iSeries supports a variety of operating systems such as Windows 2000, Linux and OS/400, as well as applications written for various environments like Domino and WebSphere. We are confident that the availability of iPay on the iSeries will catalyse the growth of banking and financial business on the Internet across Sri Lanka". New organization for oil exploration activity The government
has formed a new organisation to take over oil exploration activity
and deal with foreign firms keen on resuming the search for oil
offshore. The exploration
unit of the Ceylon Petroleum Corporation would be transferred to
the new entity, which is called the Petroleum Resources Development
Committee and which is to work under a Director General of Petroleum
Resources, CPC chairman Daham Wimalasena said. It would consist
of the secretaries of relevant ministries such as Power, Finance,
Environment, Fisheries and Aquatic Resources. New laws to
cover oil exploration and drilling are being drafted by the Legal
Draftsman's Department and are to be presented to parliament soon. The CPC is
to have a road show before the end of the year and invite applications
from oil companies to bid for offshore blocks north and south of
Mannar, Wimalasena said. "We're
confident that there's something to be found," he said, noting
that India has struck oil on its side of the maritime boundary in
the Gulf of Mannar. "There's
a belief that north of Mannar, where the water is shallow, exploration
would be less costly and less risky but that the finds would be
small," he said. "India has done exploration on its side
of the maritime boundary but not made big finds." South of Mannar,
in deep water, it is believed that there could be big finds although
the risk and costs would be higher. The CPC will
shed its oil exploration activities as part of the effort to restructure
the organisation under which it intends to retain its refinery but
spin off other infrastructure such as oil tanks, pipelines and bulk
depots. The latter would be formed into a separate terminal company in which each of the three players in the liberalised petroleum market would have a one-third stake. The government
has decided to limit competition to three players because of the
small size of the market. The restructuring
would get underway once the valuation of CPC infrastructure is completed.
Retail outlets to be valued by April and terminals by June. The CPC has sold its bunkering subsidiary, Lanka Marine Services, to John Keells and leased its oil tank farm in China Bay, Trincomalee and 100 petrol stations to Indian Oil Corporation, India's largest state-run refiner and marketer. Dispute between SLT, TRC continues By Akhry
Ameer The TRCSL in
a statement however avoided a direct response to the issue, saying
instead that "it may be necessary for the TRCSL to consider
the adoption in the future of the Regulatory practice of calling
for public comments on future tariff proposals from dominant operators." SLT's proposals to lower charges for top users were greeted with mixed views. Professor Rohan
Samarajiva, a former TRCSL Director General and now a Team Leader,
Public Interest Program Unit, Ministry of Economic Reform, Science
and Technology, said the higher rates for low-end users were "unusual
and definitely not the practice in other parts of the world". He said SLT
did not understood network economies, and was banking on a significant
proportion of originating revenue in an interconnection regime,
where every call crossing networks earns inter-connection revenue
for operators. "The SLT chairman has been given very bad advice
by officials," he added. Samarajiva
noted that low users play a very useful function and their staying
away from the network promotes better call completion. "If
the infrastructure is to be utilized optimally; low users should
be encouraged to use off-peak, migrating from the peak usage, in
turn achieving a better call completion rate. Network economics
are based on peak hour usage that cause costs, off peak is by-product,"
he said. "I believe if the government has made an agreement
to increase call charges, it should be honoured, but with the understanding
of the consumer. Discounts are fine; if SLT wishes to give discounts
it should be borne from shareholder funds and not recovered from
low users," he said. Jagath Perera,
Head of Research, DFCC Stockbrokers (Pvt) Ltd, took a different
view. He said, "The telephone is not a basic necessity but
still a luxury in Sri Lanka. If people are not using their phones,
then the other users cannot be burdened. There are others who are
waiting for phones." His believes telecommunication is still expensive, and companies need all possible ways to bring down costs to survive. "Telecommunications should be used to promote information transfer and for transactions to take place, and bring average costs down. To do this - increase capacity and improve infrastructure -, operators also need profits. The authorities should also be fair by the operator," he added.
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