China’s Electric Vehicle Boom Brings a Wave of Battery Waste

The amount of retired EV (electric vehicle) batteries will grow at an unprecedented rate in China. Recycling them will bring twofold benefits – reducing the consumption of raw materials for producing new batteries and minimizing potential environmental and health hazards caused by the mismanagement of battery waste. – Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (中国工业和信息化部专家) With hundred…

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2018 – The Year of Strategic Sustainability

Happy New Year and welcome to 2018; the year that sustainability goes strategic in China. Yes, we know that this may appear to be an overly optimistic view of 2018, and some of you might be wondering what we at Collective Responsibility were drinking over the holiday. But while we were on break reflecting over the work we have done, the conversations we have had, and the regulations we have see…

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Bike Sharing: The Business Case for Sustainable Mobility

  As millions of China’s growing middle class have become new car owners, China’s private car market has propelled it into being one of the most attractive car markets in the world. For automakers, this has been a boom as ownership oversharing was the norm, but the challenges of car ownership in the form of traffic and air pollution have also grown. To tackle the problems, China has…

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Ownership to Access: China’s New Paradigm?

An autonomous trip to the airport in one of Jaguar’s executive cars. A weekend away in a Land Rover 4x4. A track day in a high-performance sports car. These are all part of Jaguar Land Rover’s vision for a luxury automotive experience as they seek to innovative the future of mobility in China. Consumers around the world now require a diversity of experiences to satisfy their growing wants, e…

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Urban Mobility in China: Air Travel

Air travel is fast becoming the most popular form of international travel, and the industry in China is no exception to this. Commercial flying in the world’s second-largest economy has had an immense amount of investment over the past decade, and it is the fastest growing passenger air market in the world. With the expectation that 300 million more people will move to cities over the next twenty…

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Urban Mobility in China: Cars

China now has as many automotive drivers as the entire population of the United States and it has rapidly become the largest car market in the world. This has been driven by the greater purchasing power of China’s growing middle class, which has been afforded the luxury of private travel for the first time. Less than thirty years ago, Chinese citizens were forbidden to buy cars but in the mid-1980…

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Urban Mobility in China: High Speed Rail

Last week we wrote about how the nature of transportation in China is changing. In this second article of the series, we’ll take a closer look at China’s high-speed rail systems, and how they’re contributing to this shift. Railroad development has, and is, a fundamental part of economic expansion; it allows for the vital transport of people, linking of economic districts and drives regional inv…

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Urban Mobility in China: Transporting China’s 1.3 Billion People

The world’s most populous country continues to develop at a breakneck pace, and even the recent economic slowdown hasn’t hampered the expansion of its extensive transportation infrastructure. Transportation, like much of China, has been completely changed over the past century, especially as China's urban population has exploded. With China's 1st and 2nd tier cities already congested, plagued by e…

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China Moves to Reduce Ship Emissions

China is beginning to take a tougher stance on its environmental issues. Towards the end of last year, COP21 and Chinese urban air pollution dominated the news, but as unilateral agreements were agreed for the first time and pollution levels prompted the highest-level warnings in the Chinese Capital, in the final month of 2015 a far less publicized piece of legislation was passed aimed at stemming…

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Jonathan Woetzle: China’s Urbanization

Jonathan Woetzle and his team and MGI have been doing a lot of work to research, analyze, and promote the way that China should urbanize. It is a report I read last year, and it is one I believe anyone who considers themselves as having a role in sustainability should read as it does a fair job of laying out the largest challendges and opportunities that China will face going forward. Where I th…

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The Future of Connected and Sustainable Cities

With dozens of cities in China urbanizing all at the same time, and at a pace matched at no time by anyone else, making sure cities are planned and built properly is a must. While the term "urban" can mean different things to different people, municipalities of all sizes are and always have been dynamic centers of activity. Cities offer jobs and prosperity, important social interaction, and…

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