“As a good corporate citizen, TNT is working together with customers, suppliers and subcontracts to continuously improve our overall CO2 efficiency to fight against climate change,” said TNT China express chief Peter Langley. “We are proud to play a leading role in spearheading electric vehicles in Hong Kong.”

TNT’s current project is being supported by the Pilot Green Transport Fund under the Hong Kong Government’s Environmental Protection Department (EPD).
“We applaud the Hong Kong Government’s Environmental Protection Department (EPD) for providing support to TNT to trial electric vehicles in the territory,” added Edward Lau, managing director of TNT Express Hong Kong.

“The transport sector can make a significant difference by adopting new technology to reduce carbon emissions and roadside air pollution. We hope that TNT’s innovative initiative will inspire other companies to follow suit to do their part to improve Hong Kong’s air quality,” said an EPD statement.

The school will work with Tianjin University and Antai College of Economics & Management of Shanghai Jiaotong University, focusing on theories, concepts and challenges faced in supply chain management.

Charles Cheung, managing director of Dell China and executive director of its global supply chain operation, told China Daily that the new institute will generalise the company’s supply chain management cases into theories and provide supply chain management cases for research.

Dell’s supply chain school will focus on supply chain management, corporate strategies, application of information system models, partnership on the whole supply chain, change management and risk control.

“The cooperation between Tianjin University and Dell marks a good example of the combination of theory and practice in China’s supply chain field, and will actively promote the improvement of supply chain management in China,” Zhao Daozhi, director of the Institute of Modern Manufacturing and Logistics at Tianjin University, told China Daily.

In a statement by China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, the government aims to make full use of its rare earth resources to create new materials from rare earth and boost output of the country’s new material industry to 2 trillion yuan (S$398 billion).

The government will aim to develop functional materials and increase efforts to improve them, which promotes its application in high-end manufacturing and adds value to the product, China Daily reported.

Part of the plan to boost the industry involves developing manufacturing centres in Beijing and in the autonomous region of Inner Mongolia.

The plan also includes efforts to protect energy resources and promote integrated utilisation. In the fourth quarter of 2010, China had implemented stringent rules governing rare earth exports to meet environmental protection laws and international strandards.

This news will cause further concern of users of rare earth globally as the rare earth industry in China accounts for almost 90% of total global sales.

Unveiling the names of the 156 companies of the company’s supply chain was an unusual move for Apple, which is known to be notoriously secretive.

Its recent supply chain audit also revealed that only 38% of the company’s suppliers adhered to its internal standard of a 60-hour, 6-day work week.

Ishan Palit, CEO of the product services division at TÜV SÜD, a provider of testing, inspection and certification services, shared that this revelation demonstrated the “severity and prevalence of inhumane working conditions within the global supply chains and the drastic requirement for immediate action”.

Yet, this move by Apple also placed the spotlight on the challenges of securing supply chain integrity, recognising that there’s a need to take control.

So what are some lessons that the supply chain industry can learn from this unprecedented move by Apple?

According to Palit “Standards such as SA8000® and BSCI have developed into effective tools to address these issues in a balanced and human manner, allowing organisations to educate the young workers and re-integrate them into society,” he said.

Palit also added that putting in place such a standard to conduct on-site audits to ensure compliance from factories is necessary. Improvements and corrections can then be identified and put into practice, which brings social, branding, productivity and risk management benefits.

“For example, it ensures workers’ health and safety, which helps boosts production efficiency, facilitates further penetration into international markets, and protects brands against the often irreparable consequences of a scandal,” he said.

Singapore’s Maritime and Port Authority reported a 5.3 per cent increase in container movement in 2011, having handled 29.9 million TEU compared to 28.4 million TEU in 2010. December container volumes are expected to increase 11 per cent to 2.6 million TEU year on year making the island state the 2nd busiest port in the world after Shanghai.

The city aims to become an influential financing and shipping hub by 2020 and has rolled out a number of financial products to help exporters and shipping companies manage growing volatility in freight rates.

The Shanghai Shipping Exchange for example,  plans to expand its shipping derivatives market over the next few years after it launched derivatives based on container freight this year.

What is interesting about this service is that DHL will be using 12 foot instead of the standard 20 and 40 foot containers that are in use globally today. Aside from the special equipment that may be needed to handle these multi-modal shipments, repositionong of empty containers back to China or Japan due to imbalance of demand between these two countries would be an added costs to overcome.

The multimodal service comprises the use of ferries, rail and trucks. Goods are picked up from any location in China, mainly Shanghai, Ningbo, Hangzhou, Suzhou, Nantong, Wuxi, Nanjing, Hefei and Wuhan, and brought to Shanghai by truck, taken across to Hakata in Japan by ferry and then transported across Japan via Japan Rail.

In Japan, pick-up and delivery is done through Japan Rail and taken across to Shanghai by ferry, with final delivery to destinations in China completed by truck.

“We are not experiencing the most dramatic climate change in recent history,” said Liu Yu, the academy’s Institute of Earth Environment deputy director. “In northern China, the warmest period occurred from 401-413 AD, which had an annual mean temperature 0.16 degrees Celsius higher than today’s.”

Global air, sea and land transport sectors have been faced with huge expenses to meet rising regulatory compliance costs, some of which are set in ways to drive smaller operators out of business.

The timing of China’s statement, based on a study of Tibetan tree rings, is also significant because of the current international climate change talks in Durban, South Africa and China’s opposition to carbon taxes imposed by the European Union on aircraft flying in and out of EU territory.

Continuing, Prof Liu said: “Popular belief is that industrialisation has led to the fastest rate of warming witnessed by humans, that we are at the warmest time of the modern era and that we are causing global warming by emitting carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. None of that fits the records in tree rings.

“The climate change debate has more political significance than scientific. Diplomats can sit at negotiating tables talking about carbon caps while scientists have not reached an agreement on the role of carbon dioxide in global warming,” he said.

“Political decisions must be based on sound scientific foundation, or they will be useless, if not dangerous,” he told the SCMP in an extended interview.

Prof Liu has studied untouched forests dating back thousands of years along the remote Tibetan Plateau to assess current weather patterns and said that tree rings are key to understanding and predicting climate change.

For more than a decade, he has run simulations on computers to determine annual temperatures in the region over the past 2,485 years.

Prof Liu said the sun, and not man-made factors. cause climate changes. “We believe that the sun and atmospheric circulations play a vital, if not decisive, role,” he said.

Armed patrols from China will be coming from a special armed force established under the Yunnan Provincial Border Control Corps comprising nearly 1,000 police officers along with five patrol vessels adapted from merchant ships.

The area had been void of all shipping activities after the sailors were murdered on 5 October, with commercial traffic expected to resume by the end of this month, according to secretary-general of the Lancang River Shipowners’ Association, Fang Youguo.

The patrol force will be tasked with escorting all ships, according to a Mr. Yang Xi, press officer from Yunnan Provincial Border Control Corps.

He added that China and the other three partners are still in talks regarding the details of their plans and will be divulging more information in the near future, China Daily reported.

The other partners in this armed force are Laos, Myanmar and Thailand, where the four countries agreed to exchange intelligence to completely eradicate criminal gangs along the river.

The latest figures from the China Federation of Logistics and Purchasing (CFLP) showed that China’s Social Logistics Costs , which are the cost of all logistics activities in the country, increased 18.7 per cent to CNY5.8 trillion (US$912 billion).  This is up 0.2 percent faster than the growth in the first half of year and 3.8 percent higher year on year.

The ratio of the cost to the country’s GDP was 18 per cent, up 0.1 percent year on year, meaning that logistics costs are still high in China, said the report.

Transport costs increased 15.4 per cent to CNY3 trillion because of surging fuel prices and labour costs. Fuel costs soared four fold since January.

Storage costs increased 23.8 per cent to CNY2.1 trillion, one per cent higher than the increase in the first half, and 10.5 per cent more year on year.

Management costs climbed 19 per cent to CNY710.7 billion, up 19 per cent year on year. The growth is 0.8 per cent slower than that in the early half of year, but 1.9 per cent higher year on year.