DyStar details 2018 sustainability progress

Several nautical miles offshore, a special diving boat is a mere speck in Port Phillip Bay.  Key points: Marine scientists are rebuilding reefs using recycled scallop and oyster shells from restaurants.  The project has built 12 hectares of artificial reefs in Port Phillip Bay out of a planned 100 hectares.  A crucial part of the restoration project has been producing the angasi or native oyster.  The bay, comprising almost 2,000 square kilometres, fans southwards from Melbourne, Australia’s second-biggest city.  Two divers carrying live shellfish are descending on an artificial reef, taking another small step in an ambitious reef restoration project — the largest yet undertaken in Australia.  Known as Reef Builder, it is backed by federal and state governments and overseen by The Nature Conservancy.  “Our Commonwealth investment has produced 40 hectares of shellfish reefs, and it’s a truly fantastic program,” Environment Minister Sussan Ley said.

On a dusty side street in Auki, a seaside market town on the island of Malaita, Arania Enterprises is bustling. Cocoa dryers come and go, bringing plenty of cocoa beans for sale, and its unassuming wood-framed warehouse is stocked full of giant bags ready for export.

The production-linked incentive (PLI) scheme for solar PV modules is a positive for domestic original equipment manufacturers and it would help improve cost competitiveness for the domestic industry, rating agency ICRA said on Monday. ‘The benefits available under the PLI scheme along with the imposition of basic customs duty (BCD) on imported solar PV cells and imported solar PV modules are likely to improve the cost competitiveness of domestic PV module manufacturers against imported modules by more than 10 per cent at the prevailing imported module prices, under assumption of backward integration up to cells,” it said in a statement.