“It’s time to bail out the people and the planet,” says Van Jones [1], author of The Green Collar Economy: How One Solution Can Fix Our Two Biggest Problems [2]. We agree, and this guide to to sustainability-focused career paths will help retrofit and solar-charge your work life.

The TOP TEN GREEN JOBS FOR THE NEXT DECADE:

Farmer

America has only two million farmers, and their average age is 55. Since sustainable agriculture requires small-scale, local, organic methods rather than petroleum-based machines and fertilizers, there is a huge need for more farmers — up to tens of millions of them, according to food guru Michael Pollan. Modern farmers are small businesspeople who must be as skilled in heirloom genetics as marketing.

Schools: University of Vermont: Center for Sustainable Agriculture; Stone Barns Center For Food & Agriculture in New York State; University of Oklahoma: Kerr Center for Sustainable Agriculture; Evergreen State College: degree in Sustainable Agriculture.

Related careers: urban gardener; farmers market and CSA coordinator; artisanal cheesemakers; and other food producers.

Forester

Modern forestry is a complex combination of international project finance, conservation and development. According to the World Bank, a staggering 1.6 billion people depend on the forest for their livelihoods. Foresters help local people transition from slash-and-burn to silviculture–teaching cultivation of higher-value, faster-growing species for fruit, medicine or timber, for example while carefully documenting the impact on the environment. Deforestation, which causes around a quarter of all global warming, is also likely to be a leading source of carbon credits worth tens of billions of dollars [3].

Schools: Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies; Duke University: Nicholas School of the Environment; University of Michigan: School of Natural Resources & Environment.

Companies/organizations: The Nature Conservancy; New Forests Inc.

Solar Power Installer

Making and installing solar power systems already accounts for some 770,000 jobs globally. Installing solar-thermal water heaters and rooftop photovoltaic cells is a relatively high-paying job–$15 to $35 an hour–for those with construction skills. And opportunities are available all over the United States, wherever the sun shines. Currently over 3,400 companies in the solar energy sector employ 25,000 to 35,000 workers. The Solar Energy Industries Association predicts an increase to over 110,000 jobs by 2016 — even more if anticipated tax credits are accelerated [4].

Companies: Akeena Solar; Sungevity; Sunpower; Full list at SEIA.org.

Energy Efficiency Builder Buildings account for up to 48 percent of US energy use and greenhouse gas emissions. LEED, the major green building certification, has over 43,000 accredited professionals [5]. But the cutting edge in efficient buildings goes far beyond LEED. Buildings constructed according to Passivhaus and MINERGIE-P standards in Germany and Switzerland, respectively, use between 75% and 95% less heat energy than a similar building constructed to the latest codes in the US. Greening the US building stock will take not only skilled architects and engineers, but a workforce of retrofitters who can use spray foam insulation and storm windows to massively improve the R-value (thermal resistance) of the draftiest old houses. A study by the Apollo Alliance recommended an $89.9 billion investment in financing to create 827,260 jobs in green buildings — an initiative supported by the Obama stimulus package, which specifically mentions energy retrofits [6].

Schools: Arizona State University School of Architecture: Energy Performance Climate-Responsive Architecture; University of Michigan: Alfred A. Taubman College of Architecture + Urban Planning; The Earth Institute at Columbia University.

Wind Turbine Fabricator

Wind is the leading and fastest-growing source of alternative energy with over 300,000 jobs worldwide. Turbines are 90% metal by weight, creating an opportunity for autoworkers and other manufacturers to repurpose their skills. According to the American Wind Energy Association [7], the industry currently employs some 50,000 Americans and added 10,000 new jobs in 2007. Their job board [8] is an excellent place to start looking for opportunities.

Companies: Vestas; Siemens; GE Energy.

Conservation Biologist The granddaddy of diversity, E.O. Wilson, famously called conservation biology — a discipline with a deadline. The urgent quest to preserve the integrity of ecosystems around the world — and to quantify the value of — ecosystems services — leads to opportunities in teaching, research and fieldwork for government, nonprofits, and private companies. The forthcoming economic stimulus package from the Obama administration offers the prospect of increased federal support for science and research [9].

Schools: Center for Conservation Biology at the University of Washington and the Center for Conservation Biology at Stanford University. At the small College of the Atlantic [10] every student gets his or her degree in human ecology; it’s been called the most sustainable college or university in the world.

Green MBA and Entrepreneur

The concept of the triple bottom line [11] has migrated from the margins to the mainstream of the business world. A recent report by the U.S. Conference of Mayors, Mayors Climate Protection Center found that business services like legal, research and consulting account for the majority of all green jobs — over 400,000. This includes everything from marketing to the LOHAS (Lifestyles of Health and Sustainability) segment, to serving as a VP of sustainability within a large company, to piloting a green startup like Method or Recyclebank.

Schools: Stanford School of Business; San Francisco’s Presidio School of Management; Leeds School of Business; University of Colorado at Boulder — Deming Center for Entrepreneurship; the Bainbridge Graduate Institute in Wash.

Recycler The total number of recycling jobs in the United States is at more than 1 million, according to recent reports [12] (PDF, right click to save). Although the market for paper and plastic has slowed down recently due to the economic downturn, demand for steel is still strong — 42 percent of output came from scrap in 2006 — and recycling remains the economical alternative to high disposal fees. Worldwide more than 200,000 people work in secondary steel production, and the US is a major center of production. New laws and regulations [13] are also creating a need for specialized companies that can close the loop by recycling and repurposing e-waste, clothing, plastic bags, construction waste, and other materials.

Companies: Rumpke; Greenstar North America.

Sustainability Systems Developer The green economy needs a cadre of specialized software developers and engineers who design, build, and maintain the networks of sensors and stochastic modeling that underpin wind farms, smart energy grids, congestion pricing and other systems substituting intelligence for natural resources. Coders with experience using large scale enterprise resource planning have an edge here, as well as developers familiar with open source and web 2.0 [14] applications.

Companies: IBM, V2Green, WindLogics

Urban Planner Urban and regional planning is a linchpin of the quest to lower America’s carbon footprint. Strengthening mass transit systems, limiting sprawl, encouraging use of bicycles and deemphasizing cars is only part of the job. Equally important is contingency planning, as floods, heat waves and garbage creep become increasingly common problems for metropolises. Employment in this sector is projected to grow 15 percent by 2016, and the jobs are mainly in local governments, which make them a slightly safer bet for the downturn.

[via Fast Company] by Anya Kamenetz

This week I’ll be heading off to Davos, Switzerland with my colleagues from Nike, Inc. for the World Economic Forum’s Annual Meeting. It’s no surprise that the entire meeting will be focused on the global economic crisis. All the big names from business, government and the media will spend the week asking questions on everyone’s mind: Where did we go wrong? What tough calls need to be made? How do we get out of this mess?

The answer to these questions lies in someone unexpected. There is an amazingly powerful force we can unleash to solve the world’s problems if we do the simplest thing: invest in a girl in poverty. With all this talk of the economy, it may seem odd to focus on adolescent girls, but we already spend a ridiculous amount of money and time trying to solve the world’s ills in the same old way. This financial crisis intensifies the need to invest existing resources more effectively, and a new and effective approach is right under your nose. It’s called the girl effect.

The World Economic Forum has made a powerful statement by placingirls on the Forum’s official agenda for the first time. Throughout the week — and culminating at a public session on January 31 — Nike CEO Mark Parker, Gates Foundation Co-Chair Melinda French Gates, World Bank Managing Director Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala and others will urge the world to invest in girls.

You might be asking, “Why now, of all times?”

Each day I’ll be blogging from Davos to reveal how world leaders are answering that question. I’ll also share some of the buzz — people we’ve all heard of who are talking about girls — as well as those who aren’t, but should be.

Until then, here’s some food for thought:

People ask if we can afford to invest in girls right now. I say look at Kenya. Girls who go to secondary school make $2,000 more per year than girls who only attend primary school. Multiply that by 1.6 million out-of-school girls and there’s a potential $3.2 billion increase in national income. The same is true in developing countries throughout the world. So the real question is, “How can we afford not to invest?”

(These numbers are from a nifty piece of research on which Jad Chaaban of the American University of Beirut, Wendy Cunningham of the World Bank and Navtej Dhillon of Wolfensohn Center at Brookings collaborated to shed some light on what excluding girls is actually costing us — more to come on that.)

To learn more about the girl effect before Davos, check out www.girleffect.org.

[via Huffington Post] by Maria Eitel

What motivates a growing number of virtual-school students to forgo the traditional school structure and take their classes entirely online?

At the Virtual School Symposium hosted in mid-October in Phoenix by the North American Council for Online Learning, virtual-school students explained they like being able to progress at their own pace–and some said they appreciate being able to take classes not offered by their traditional, bricks-and-mortar school.

Roger Sanchez said he left his conventional California school because he wanted to study at his own pace while holding a job outside of school and focusing his attention on out-of-school topics that related to his college interests.

“I was looking for something different to fit my schedule, and the traditional system wasn’t making the cut,” said Sanchez, who is taking multiple Advanced Placement courses and plans to study computer science or graphic design in college.

“You can create your own schedule. … It’s not the same routine I’d have in the traditional system, and I can get more of what I want to do done,” he said.

Sanchez said an online school also lets him choose courses that a traditional school might not offer, such as courses that focus more on computer science and graphics.

“I’m really drawn by technology–that’s one of the main reasons I joined the school,” he said. “In the traditional system, [the] main problem is that classes [move] only as fast as the slowest student … so it doesn’t adapt to your own learning style and learning environment. It really slows you down if you want to get ahead.”

Sanchez is a senior at Insight School of California-Los Angeles, one of a national network of full-time, diploma-granting, public online high schools. The network is run by Insight Schools Inc., a subsidiary of Apollo Group Inc., which also operates the all-online University of Phoenix.

Insight Schools is part of a rapidly expanding market for online education that also includes companies such as Connections Academy, K12 Inc., EdisonLearning (formerly Edison Schools Inc.), and others. A study released during the Virtual School Symposium confirms that the total number of full-time virtual-school students in the United States is on the rise, “along with a continued increase in the number of new full-time programs.” (See “Report assesses K-12 online learning.”)

Education leaders would be wise to listen to what students such as Sanchez had to say, and consider ways they can build opportunities for self-paced learning and more freedom of choice into their own school offerings–or else risk losing a growing number of students to online schools that operate outside their domain.

Enrolling in a virtual school not only frees up time for students to pursue other interests, it also teaches them valuable time-management skills, said Geoffrey Wall, a Tempe, Ariz., senior who has been enrolled in Arizona Connections Academy for five years.

Five years ago, Wall was a competitive figure skater who found himself waking up at 4 a.m. each day to train for his sport and make it to school on time.

“It was becoming something of a problem,” he said. Wall’s mother looked into home-schooling her son but found few resources to help her. The family’s local school district offered no help or advice, either, he said, and finally Wall’s mother stumbled across a local newspaper article about Connections Academy.

Wall is no longer involved in competitive figure skating, but he found he enjoyed his classes with Connections Academy and reasoned that switching not only schools, but also learning styles, in the middle of his high school experience would not have been beneficial.

Now, Wall begins his mornings by logging onto Connections Academy and choosing a handful of lessons to complete.

“Depending on the day, I might have more or I might have less, and once I finish them, I’m free to do whatever I want,” he said. “If I have to take a day off, I might get on and do an extra day of work or fit in an extra lesson.”

Working so independently encourages the same type of time-management skills that college students need to be successful, he said. Managing classes, assignments, and social activities can be daunting, but Wall has a firm grasp on his routine.

“With a normal high school, everything is always scheduled for you,” he said. “With [online learning], you have to keep on top of things.”

Some people might wonder if Wall feels deprived of the typical social aspects of a bricks-and-mortar high school, but he says he does not.

“I’ve got friends from when I was attending traditional school, and friends through karate and [who] I meet from other activities, like camps,” he said.

Wall has even met his virtual classmates through organized field trips. He is able to collaborate with his classmates virtually through his computer, as well as chat with both teachers and peers on a regular basis.

Connections Academy students have access to guidance counselors to help them navigate the college application process. Adding a high school component to the company’s virtual offerings made it necessary to provide a robust guidance-counselor support staff, a company representative said.

Even virtual-school teachers at the symposium said they liked many of the freedoms that come with teaching in an online environment.

Not just students, but teachers, too, can become frustrated in a traditional school setting, because much of their time is devoted to tasks such as asking students for late passes or collecting various assignments, said Mishele Newkirk-Smith, a former classroom teacher in Washington state who is now a science teacher with Insight School of Washington.

“I’m not a disciplinarian now; I’m an educator,” she said, adding: “Online, there is more one-on-one education.”

“I have always looked for … alternative ways for students to learn. All students do not learn the same way–they are totally different,” said Deloris Brown, a former school principal who is currently principal of Insight School of South Carolina.

In a traditional classroom, educators can “try to think outside of the box, but you’re still faced with the one-size-fits-all model,” she said. “If we know that all students are different, then we have to do something different. This is going to be one of the major reform efforts that education will see.”

[via iCoast] by Laura Devaney

]]> http://www.themcompanies.com/blog/why-students-prefer-virtual-schooling/feed/ 0 http://www.themcompanies.com/blog/does-globalization-threaten-or-nurture-local-markets/ http://www.themcompanies.com/blog/does-globalization-threaten-or-nurture-local-markets/#comments Mon, 24 Nov 2008 22:16:07 +0000 Ivan http://www.themcompanies.com/?p=423

In “The World is Flat,” New York Times columnist Thomas L. Friedman argues that computer technology has created a world in which, to a greater extent than ever before, individuals can compete and collaborate globally. Linked by a fiber-optic network, he says, we have all become next-door neighbors (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005).

Much has been made of this so-called flattening of the world. Friedman describes the penetration of global culture into some of the most unlikely places on earth. But as the planet continues to shrink—and as the wildest dreams of Kathmandu turn into the facts of Kew, will individual cultures vanish in the process?

Many observers have noted that, quite aside from creating any cultural homogeneity, globalization is leading to a resurgence of interest in local traditions. In “The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order,” for example, Harvard Professor Samuel P. Huntington argued that modernization promotes confidence in the local social order, but at the same time faith in traditional practices (Simon & Schuster, 1997).

The cultural anthropologist Keith Hart noted a similar polarizing effect in response to economic change. In an essay that appeared in “Trust: Making and Breaking Cooperative Relationships,” he concluded that personal trust may not be the most efficient basis for economic relationships in societies undergoing major economic change. His point was that agreements based on faith (those based on no or little evidence) or confidence (those based on considerable evidence) are subject to stronger sanctions than agreements based on trust (those based on limited evidence) (Basil Blackwell, 1988).

Hart seemed to suggest that faith, trust and confidence lie along a continuous spectrum, rather than existing as isolated islands of social relatedness. In terms of the evolution from kinship to civil society, for example, he says in an interview with BrandChannel, “Faith in a parent often comes from lack of knowledge and perspective. What replaces it? Commonly disillusionment, but just possibly trust and, in the extreme case, confidence. It could hardly be the other way around.”

It is certainly not difficult to find examples of renewed interest in local traditions in transitional societies. Thailand, a country once thought to be culturally homogeneous, has witnessed renewed interest among local ethnic groups in their history, language, literature, and culture. Similarly, the Aleuts of the Pribilof Islands in Alaska recently chose to return to their traditional practices of sealing, hunting and fishing.

But the phenomenon is hardly confined to relatively traditional cultures. In Shopping for Identity: The Marketing of Ethnicity, Boston University’s Marilyn Halter looked at renewed interest in ethnicity in the US (Schocken, 2000). Halter notes, for example, that in their attempt to recapture traditional values, Americans have begun consuming large quantities of ethnic products, such as foods and music. She traces these trends to a reaction against mass consumerism.

Halter further suggests that the return to ethnic roots has a soothing effect on Americans who have become lost in the superficiality of daily interactions. She writes, “Once the reality of imagined community is cast into doubt, ethnicity offers tangible markers and potent symbols of ascribed commonality. The preoccupation with exploring ethnic culture and the desire to cling to a more personal identity persists as a response to the fragmentation, ambiguities, and rapid pace of change inherent in the postmodern world.” Paradoxically, however, Halter seems to suggest that the attempt by Americans to distance themselves from modern consumerism has merely led them to new forms of consumption.

Others, like the public policy critic Jeremy Rifkin, have proposed that the renewed interest in local culture is more of a backlash to the global political order than to postmodernism. In a column in the The Guardian in 2001, Rifkin wrote, “We are witnessing the first stirrings of a cultural backlash to globalization whose effects are likely to be as significant and far-reaching as were the revolutionary movements for political democracy and market capitalism at the end of the 18th century.”

The Netherlands’ Marieke de Mooij seems to share Rifkin’s sense that localization is a backlash, but sees it instead as a fundamental response of human nature to change. “Localization is a clear countermovement to globalization,” she tells us. “People’s behavior is stable—basically people don’t like change, and much of consumer behavior is habitual. This implies that people for some time will embrace new things, but in the end they like more what fits, what they are used to.”

In “Global Marketing and Advertising,” de Mooij suggests, along the lines of Marilyn Halter, that the renewed interest in local values around the world may be a reaction to the spread of Western consumption patterns (Sage, 2005). De Mooij attributes the renewed interest in old brands, for example, to the expression of old values in consumption and consumer behavior, coupled with greater consumer buying power. She argues that larger incomes allow people to express themselves in more ways, typically based on national values. “Wealth brings choice,” she writes, seeming to echo Halter’s notion that it might actually be possible to recapture the past through appropriate patterns of consumption. (Another madeleine, Monsieur Proust?)

But Mark Kennedy, chief strategy officer at Landor Associates, views the renewed interest in local traditions more as a complement to globalization than a substitute for it. “In all countries in the world there’s almost a reaction to [globalization] in some of the local products,” he says. “I wouldn’t call it a backlash, but it’s almost like a balancing effect on local products. They start to reassert themselves.” Kennedy notes that this growing interest in local brands is taking place even as the shops in all the world’s airports are becoming increasingly the same, with the same brand names in all of them.
LiAnne Yu, strategic director for branding consultancy Cheskin, recently completed a project on Western fast food culture in China. There she found global brands co-existing with local ones. While such global brands like McDonald’s are still enormously popular, Yu says they are also being challenged by local brands. “Yong He Da Wang (a Chinese-style fast food place) combines the cleanliness and convenience of McDonald’s, but features home-style Chinese cooking like dumplings and noodles…. This combination has been enormously popular in China, as it supposedly combines the best of the West (or globalized culture) with the best of local culture,” she says.
“The whole choice between global and local products/brands/experiences is extremely contingent upon the person’s own identity and intentions,” Yu adds. “Young Chinese hipsters are just as likely to eat at McDonald’s as they are to copy Chinese stars in their fashion styles. So I don’t think the trend is towards either local or global—the trend is towards having more aspects of both in the choices Asian consumers are making in their daily lives.”

Certainly, cultures have been importing ideas and goods of commerce for thousands of years without disappearing or losing their identities in the process. Professor Kalman Applbaum of the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee discounts the notion that world culture has become or is becoming more homogeneous. Says Applbaum, “There is taking place a kind of structuring of diversity in accordance with globalizing patterns of provisioning and consumption.”

According to Cheskin’s Yu, “the central question is how people are defining what it means to be modern in their own terms.” And she adds, “That doesn’t exclude consuming more globalized products.”

Perhaps an appropriate analogy would be the proliferation of museums around the world. These museums celebrate local accomplishments and as such represent an efflorescence of local culture. But the idea of a museum is an historical and a cultural artifact rather than a manifestation of cultures everywhere.

[via BrandChannel] by Randall Frost

First, some numbers. The United Nations estimates that by 2025, two-thirds of the world’s population will face periodic and often severe water shortages. And the problem is not limited to the developing world. Here in the U.S., water managers in 36 states are predicting significant shortfalls within the next decade. Even in regions that do have sufficient supplies, aging infrastructure, inadequate treatment facilities, and contamination pose more problems. No surprise, then, that battles over water rights are becoming commonplace, pitting states and sometimes nations against one another in increasingly bitter conflict.

Analysts estimate that the world will need to invest as much as $1 trillion a year on conservation technologies, infrastructure, and sanitation to meet demand through 2030. As in the past, most of the large capital-intensive projects will be done by the usual multinational corporations and engineering firms. But the extent of the problem and the demand for new technology to address it present — pardon the metaphor — a kind of perfect storm for entrepreneurs. “Small companies with intellectual property, significant know-how, and a product that’s scalable can stake out a niche below the radar of the large companies,” says Laura Shenkar, a water expert and consultant in San Francisco. “This is an opportunity that will generate Googles.”

In the pages that follow, Inc. examines the emerging water economy and takes a trip along the water trail, from source to sewer. Our guides on this journey: 11 extraordinary entrepreneurs who are creating radical change at every step of the way. Some of their innovations are striking in their simplicity. Mark Sanders’s AQUS System uses water from bathroom sinks to fill toilet bowls. Others push at the limits of science and technology. Fatemeh Shirazi, for example, is “training” microorganisms to kill pollutants in water. What they share is a vision, a drive, and an address — the sweet spot at which blue meets green.

Increasing the Supply

Born in Swaziland, raised in Zimbabwe, and educated in South Africa, Amanda Brock knows what water scarcity looks like. “I have seen and lived through waterborne diseases, childhood mortality, cholera, typhoid,” she says. “I have lived the poverty that comes from inadequate access to a fundamental resource like water. And with global warming, it’s getting worse.”

The desire to do something about it is what led the former Enron executive and water-industry consultant to take the CEO spot at Water Standard, a start-up founded by Florida entrepreneur Andrew Gordon. Water Standard plans to bring water to dry regions in a new way: by installing state-of-the-art desalination plants inside retrofitted tankers and delivering freshwater, via pipeline or by ship, to thirsty cities on the shore.

The ships, which Brock says can be outfitted in less than a year at a cost of about $150 million, will be anchored from one to five miles offshore and will be capable of producing up to 75 million gallons of freshwater a day — enough to meet the basic residential water needs of a small city. And because they will operate in deep water rather than close to shore, the ship-based plants should promise to virtually eliminate the negative environmental side effects often cited by critics of desalination.

Specially designed intakes will draw seawater from a greater depth and at a slower speed than typical desalination facilities, thus reducing injury to aquatic life, and the concentrated brine produced in the desalination process will be thoroughly and rapidly diluted before it is returned to the sea, far from the more ecologically sensitive zone close to shore. While the ship-based plants will have a carbon footprint — initially, they will run on marine-gas turbines or new emissions-compliant diesel generators — Brock hopes eventually to generate energy using ocean-current or wave-action turbines.

Freshwater already is exported via tankers between France and Algeria and Turkey and Israel. And smaller-scale barge-based desalination systems operate in the Middle East and India. Tom Pankratz, a desalination consultant and the editor of Water Desalination Report, expects mobile barge- and ship-mounted systems to play an important role in increasing the supply of freshwater — whether by addressing site-specific environmental concerns or space limitations, getting facilities up and running faster than the two to seven years it takes to construct a land-based plant, or responding to emergency or temporary needs.

Investors seem to like the idea. In March, Water Standard secured $250 million in venture funding, one of the largest investments to date for a water start-up. The company’s first vessel — a tanker that’s currently used to transport vegetable oil — should be ready to sail sometime in 2009. And thanks to recent regulations requiring that oil tankers be double hulled, there is an abundance of older single-hulled ships that are perfectly suited to join the fleet. Brock has spent much of the past year meeting with investors and potential customers in the Middle East, Chile, Cyprus, India, and China.

Whether based on land or at sea, almost all desalination plants built after 2000 use a technology called reverse osmosis, or RO, to get the salt out. Water is pushed at high pressure through a membrane that lets freshwater pass through but blocks salt and contaminants. RO technology is generally more efficient than other desalination methods that use heat to evaporate and distill water, but it still requires a lot of energy — at seawater plants, almost half the costs are for the electricity required to push water through the membranes. This makes desalination one of the most expensive ways to produce freshwater: The cost of producing 1 cubic meter (264 gallons) of desalinated water ranges from about $1 to $1.50, compared with 10 cents to 20 cents to obtain water from a reservoir or well. (Average U.S. daily household use is about 350 gallons.)

The Los Angeles-based start-up NanoH2O is working on a way to make the process a lot more efficient. The company was founded in late 2005 by Robert Burk, an engineer with extensive experience on water and wastewater projects, and current CEO Jeff Green. It is now ramping up for mass production of a nanocomposite membrane based on technology developed by researchers at UCLA led by Eric Hoek, a professor of civil and environmental engineering. In pilot studies, it has proved nearly twice as productive as existing membranes — meaning you can get almost twice as much water with the same energy input or the same amount of water for half the energy — and has the potential to reduce the total expense of desalinated water as much as 25 percent. That would make it a far more attractive proposition for communities looking to diversify their water portfolio.

Unlike traditional RO membranes, which are just filters made of a dense polymer, NanoH2O’s polymers interact with “thirsty” nanoparticles to draw in water and repel salt and contaminants as well as the organic materials and bacteria that tend to adhere to conventional membranes and decrease efficiency over time. The technology was an academic research project when Burk and Green, a serial entrepreneur who previously founded the software start-ups Stamps.com and Archive Inc., came across it in their search for a water-related technology to build a company around.

Why water? It’s where the action is, Green says. Software, he believes, has largely become commoditized. With water, on the other hand, “core technology and intellectual property are still differentiators,” he says. “As an entrepreneur, when you see the scarcity issues, and you see that technology can make a difference and that it’s still a little early on the curve, all those factors led to a decision that it would be a good time to start to look into this.”

Green and Burk moved quickly to secure the intellectual property through UCLA’s tech transfer program and closed a seed round to speed up work. In 2007, the company received $5 million from Khosla Ventures, the clean-tech investment group led by Sun Microsystems co-founder Vinod Khosla. In August, it got $15 million more from Khosla and Oak Investment Partners. Now, with 11 employees and several prototypes being tested in the field, NanoH2O is in the process of shifting from a research and development venture to an operating company, with the goal of bringing a product to market by the end of next year. The market for RO membranes is dominated by big players — including Dow, General Electric, Koch Industries, and the Japanese companies Nitto Denko and Toray. But Green is unfazed. “As big as Dow or GE are, they don’t apply all their energies to reverse osmosis — if you have the resources to stay independent, you can compete for that segment,” he says. “For me as an entrepreneur, it’s an exciting place to be.”

Desalination, of course, is well and good for communities that are close to the ocean and that can afford relatively expensive water. In the villages of sub-Saharan Africa, that’s not the case. Forty-two percent of the region’s population lacks access to a safe water supply, and the impact of waterborne diseases on public health is staggering: Of the 396 million cases of malaria every year, the majority are in sub-Saharan Africa; 90 percent of those who die from the disease are children under 5. About 100 million Africans are infected with the parasitic disease schistosomiasis, which kills tens of thousands annually, also mostly children. The death toll from diarrheal diseases is probably much higher. What’s more, a lack of reliable, clean water precludes meaningful economic development. By one estimate, some 40 billion hours a year are spent collecting water in sub-Saharan Africa — or roughly a year’s labor for the entire work force of France. The work usually falls to women and children, who are left with little time for things like growing food or going to school.

Moving Water Industries, an 82-year-old, family-owned manufacturer of water pumps based in Deerfield Beach, Florida, has been selling portable pumps for irrigation and flood protection in Nigeria for more than 30 years. But its mission in Africa has taken on a new focus: addressing the problem of safe drinking water in rural villages. The company’s solution is the SolarPedalFlo, a solar- and pedal-powered pump that can provide filtered and chlorinated water for thousands of people a day — three to four times the amount that can be produced from a borehole equipped with a hand pump. Each unit costs about $15,000.

Working with local governments, nongovernmental organizations, and the U.S. Agency for International Development, MWI has been able to install hundreds of the pumps in 12 African countries. The company is just introducing the technology in Central and South America and has one unit installed in the Philippines. With the hopes of speeding adaptation in Africa, it is in discussions with Green WiFi, a U.S.-based volunteer group that is working to install solar-powered Wi-Fi networks in the developing world. Together, the companies would be able to offer a compelling infrastructure two-for-one: clean water and Internet access powered by the same set of solar panels. William Bucknam, MWI’s vice president and point man in Africa, hopes that pressure to meet the U.N.’s Millennium Development Goals — decreasing the number of people without access to safe drinking water by half by 2015 — will encourage more of the public-private partnerships that will be needed for the technology to spread. “It’s a huge problem,” he says, “and we believe we have the answer.”

Treating It

In spring 2007, the Department of Homeland Security issued an alert about a new terrorist threat: chlorine truck bombs. At least five had been exploded in Iraq, killing scores of people and injuring many more who inhaled toxic fumes. The insurgents who carried out the attacks probably stole the chlorine from water-purification and sewage treatment plants, which use the chemical for disinfection. Authorities here worried about the 2,000 or so U.S. water systems that store Environmental Protection Agency — regulated quantities of chlorine. More than 100 treatment facilities are in densely populated areas, where an explosion could expose more than a million people to toxic gases.

Some say the threat was overrated. But the underlying facts were real — and for at least one company, the heightened awareness was good news. MIOX, an Albuquerque-based outfit founded in 1994, makes compact generators that allow water treatment facilities to produce a liquid chlorine — based solution on-site, using only water, salt, and electricity, eliminating the need to store or transport hazardous chemicals. (The company also makes a hand-held battery-powered version of its generator, used by backpackers and military personnel.)

The gold standard of disinfection for more than 100 years, chlorine kills bacteria, viruses, and other pathogens, and it has played a key role in eliminating diseases such as typhoid and cholera in the U.S. And chlorine’s benefits in water are twofold: it not only disinfects but also remains at a residual level in the water, preventing reinfection by viruses or bacteria during transport, storage, and distribution. For that reason, the EPA and state regulators require that all municipal drinking water contain a measurable chlorine residual. So even as new disinfection methods, such as using ozone and UV light, gain popularity, they continue to be used with some kind of chlorine-based treatment.

Safety and security alone might have been sufficient drivers to propel MIOX’s technology. But since joining the company as CEO in 2005, Carlos Perea, a veteran of the semiconductor and telecom industries, has been highlighting other benefits. Water quality is one: Using freshly generated chemicals helps avoid the development of undesirable chlorine byproducts. And because the MIOX generator can produce a “mixed oxidant” (hence the company name) that disinfects water with less chlorine, treated water has less chemical taste and odor, and there is less buildup of biofilm and algae in the treatment system. But cost and carbon savings are an even bigger selling point. “It doesn’t make sense to transport chemicals when you can generate them yourself at a fraction of the cost and a fraction of the impact,” Perea says.

In August, the 77-employee company received $19 million in Series C funding from several venture capital firms, including DCM, Sierra Ventures, and Flywheel Ventures. Water utilities in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and other cities now use MIOX generators. The U.S. Navy also uses them on some of its ships. For some large beverage makers, MIOX equipment is the first disinfection step in their bottling processes. Other industrial and commercial customers are looking to use the system as a component in self-contained water recycling systems to disinfect water before it is reused for, say, landscape maintenance or cooling. “Moving water is so power intensive, such a huge energy user, that it doesn’t make sense to continue to treat it one place, pump it, live with losses and degradation, and move it someplace else to dispose of it,” says Perea. “If you have a swimming pool, you don’t fill it up and dump it out every time that you use it; it just wouldn’t make sense.”

In a developing country like India, the ability to treat one’s own water at home can be a matter of life and death. According to a 2002 World Health Organization study, 782,000 deaths, or 7.5 percent of all deaths in India that year, were caused by diseases related to unclean water. Even in places where municipal tap water is available, quality is unreliable, and the water runs for only part of the day. Much of the population gets drinking water from vendors who sell it from tanker trucks.

Those with limited means often purify water by boiling it or mixing it with iodine tablets. Those who can afford it use home water-purification systems. One of the companies capitalizing on demand for such systems is Eureka Forbes, India’s largest manufacturer of home water-purification systems. And since 2006, a Bothell, Washington, company, HaloSource, has played an integral part in Eureka Forbes’s effort to make such systems much more affordable.

HaloSource manufactures a sort of turbocharged version of the cartridge that goes in your Brita pitcher at home. But whereas the Brita cartridge merely filters water, thus improving appearance and taste and removing some contaminants, the HaloPure biocidal cartridge — packed with tiny polystyrene beads that have bromine ions chemically bonded to their surface — disinfects it, eliminating viruses and bacteria.

Eureka Forbes is using HaloPure cartridges in gravity-fed countertop water purifiers that let a family treat and store up to 6.5 gallons of water at a time. Unlike ultraviolet purifiers, countertop water purifiers don’t require electricity to work, and their lower cost — $40 to $60, versus $200 to $300 — puts them within reach of India’s burgeoning middle class.

HaloSource also manufactures products used for recreational water treatment and storm-water management, as well as antimicrobial coatings for textiles. But the company, which has annual revenue of more than $10 million, sees its biggest opportunities in water purification. HaloSource has partnered with the Brazilian consumer-device maker Everest, which will use HaloPure cartridges in countertop water purifiers, and the Chinese manufacturer Chanitex, which uses them as a component in reverse-osmosis purifiers for homes and businesses. HaloSource now has manufacturing facilities in Bangalore and Shanghai, as well as in Washington State.

In 2007, the company secured $15 million in funding from the Abu Dhabi-based Masdar Clean Tech Fund. “In China and India combined, you’ve got close to three billion people who will be looking for consumer-product solutions to problems they’ve dealt with for generations,” says Andrew Clews, HaloSource’s vice president of marketing and business development. “Access to clean, safe drinking water is certainly one of those issues.”

Storing It

It’s nice to imagine that water flows magically from a pristine reservoir or spring to your home faucet, but that’s simply not the case. As we have seen, it is disinfected and pumped along through a sprawling network of water mains and pipes. The U.S. water network, much of it built in the 1950s and ’60s, will require some $277 billion worth of construction, upgrades, and replacement in the next 20 years, according to EPA estimates. With scarcity driving water agencies to fix leaks — by some estimates, about six billion gallons per day in the U.S. are lost through literal cracks in the system — companies making high-tech metering and leak-detection technologies are doing well for themselves.

San Rafael, California-based PAX Water Technologies, founded in 2006, is focusing elsewhere, on a relatively overlooked niche in the distribution chain: water storage tanks. Though the numbers are hard to tally, there may be as many as 400,000 storage tanks in use in the U.S. today, according to PAX Water’s vice president of marketing, Jason Oppenheimer, who came to the company after nearly a decade of working on water infrastructure projects as a civil engineer.

After being treated, drinking water can spend as long as 100 days in the distribution system before reaching an end user. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, but when water sits in a tank too long, it begins to stagnate and settle into layers of different temperatures, as in a lake. In warmer layers at the top, the disinfectants used in treatment are burned off, which increases the potential for contamination. Even when the water is being used, poor tank design can create an uneven distribution of disinfectant and encourage uneven aging, allowing water at the bottom of a tank to be replenished more quickly than water at the top.

The traditional solution is to dump more disinfecting chemicals into the holding system, which has environmental and economic costs and can lead to the formation of chemical byproducts. Water agencies also use energy-intensive “operational cycling” — basically pumping moving water around from tank to tank — or even dump some water at the end of the line to allow fresher water to flow into a stagnating system.

The energy-efficient, inexpensive, and elegant solution proposed by PAX Water is called the Lily impeller. Featured in a 2008 design exhibit at New York City’s Museum of Modern Art, the Lily — a spiral propeller whose shape calls to mind a calla lily — is not just pretty but powerful. When installed on the bottom of a storage tank, the impeller, which weighs less than 70 pounds, can mix up to seven million gallons of water while drawing the same amount of energy as three 100-watt bulbs. Mimicking natural convection currents, the mixer evenly circulates water in the tank, thus reducing or eliminating the need to add disinfectant. Several states require new and retrofitted storage tanks to include some of kind of mixing system — a potential boon for PAX Water.

The water mixer came to market in 2007 and won the People’s Choice Award in the New Product Technology Showcase at the American Water Works Association convention. The same year, PAX Water launched a beta program in California. That helped open up the market, and by mid-2008, the company had about 25 of the $30,000 units installed in municipal storage tanks. Dan Heimel, a water quality specialist in Redwood City, California, which participated in the pilot study and subsequently purchased a mixer for a troublesome water tank, says the system solved the city’s thermal stratification problem.

But for Oppenheimer, storage tanks are just the beginning. A floating solar-powered impeller, for example, could improve surface water to be treated for drinking or even provide basic wastewater remediation in an off-grid environment. “We think that our technology has huge potential to help natural remediation of water bodies and all sorts of applications around the world,” he says.

Conserving It

As a kid, Mark Sanders hated brushing his teeth with cold water. But watching all that clean, drinkable water run down the drain as it warmed up bugged him. So at the age of 9, he began thinking about ways to capture it and save it for some other purpose — say, flushing the toilet. Three decades later, during a visit with his wife’s family in drought-stricken Oklahoma in 2000, he took up the problem again with a newfound sense of urgency.

On the plane ride home to Louisville, he made a sketch of a water recycling system that would take used water from the bathroom sink, disinfect it, and reroute it to the toilet tank for flushing. Back home, he took the drawing to a friend who did home remodeling, and two weeks later — with a hot glue gun, some PVC pipe, and a Tupperware container — the friend had a prototype working in his own home. Sanders, a CPA by trade and at the time the CEO of a large medical practice, patented the system, built a basic website, and began touting the system to anyone he thought might be interested. The result: thousands of hits for the site and affirmation that the interest was out there.

In 2003, Sanders left the medical practice and founded WaterSaver Technologies; he picked up a partner, Tom Reynolds, along the way. After the two spent a couple of years raising money and testing prototypes, the system, dubbed AQUS, made its big-time debut at a water-industry trade show in 2006. Sanders describes the response as “incredible,” especially from water companies in the increasingly parched South and Southwest, excited at the prospect of adding another water-saving device to the arsenal of products for which customers already receive rebates.

Indeed, utilities have found that offering customers rebates for things such as low-flow showerheads and toilets and efficient front-loading clothes washers has been a reliable and cost-effective way to curb water use — and the related cost of energy to supply and treat water and wastewater. (In California in 2005, for example, about 19 percent of electricity use, 30 percent of natural gas consumption, and 88 million gallons of diesel fuel were used to move and treat water.) Thanks to such efforts, total U.S. per capita water use has declined from a high of 1,950 gallons per day in 1977 to 1,480 gallons per day in 2000, according to the Pacific Institute, a nonprofit research group.

The AQUS System — named one of the 100 best innovations of 2007 by Popular Science magazine — uses standard plumbing parts and can be installed by a professional plumber in about two hours. Priced at $395 (before rebates), it can save up to 6,000 gallons of water a year in a two-person household. Cutting-edge green architects use AQUS in their home designs, and Sloan Valve — the world’s leading manufacturer of water-efficient plumbing devices — recently agreed to distribute the product. “People are just now beginning to be aware of the value of water and the dollar savings they can achieve,” says Jim Allen, head of Sloan’s water-efficiency division. Sanders and Reynolds — who remain the company’s only employees for now — aim to sell 5,000 to 10,000 units in the first year of the Sloan deal, ramping up to as many as 300,000 after five years. Allen expects the market to swell as more states mandate water-efficient technologies.

That kind of regulation — coupled with compelling economics — has already helped Falcon Waterfree Technologies, another pioneer in restroom efficiency. If you are male, and you have recently heeded nature’s call at Dodger Stadium, the Hollywood Bowl, the “Bird’s Nest” at the Beijing Olympics, or the Taj Mahal, you may be familiar with its product. Falcon, founded in 2000, claims about 90 percent of the worldwide market for water-free urinals and revenue of more than $15 million a year.

Like WaterSaver, Falcon, headquartered in Los Angeles and Grand Rapids, Michigan, piggybacks on the existing sales and distribution networks of established partners in the sanitary equipment industry (it, too, has a partnership with Sloan in the U.S.). “In many respects — on a significantly smaller scale — we’re really not unlike Intel,” says James Krug, Falcon’s CEO. “We are the technology that powers the urinals.”

Here’s how it works: Urinal manufacturers create the “bowl with a hole” — a porcelain or metal unit designed with a smooth, easy-to-clean surface. A stainless-steel housing provides a perfect seal between the opening and a patented cartridge containing a biodegradable liquid with a specific gravity lighter than water. As soon as urine passes through the cartridge, this lighter liquid covers it and creates an airtight seal, blocking any escaping odor of urine and sewer gases. Unlike with conventional urinals, there is no “flush plume” to spread bacteria and no moving parts that require maintenance; cartridges just need to be replaced every 7,000 uses or so. “Pound for pound, our system is probably the most effective water-conservation device out there,” Krug likes to brag. “It doesn’t reduce water use by 10, 20, or 30 percent — it’s a 100 percent reduction. Each urinal saves about 40,000 gallons of water a year.”

Falcon is backed by some very heavy hitters. Its founder and lead investor is Marc Nathanson, a cable entrepreneur and chairman of Voice of America in the Clinton administration. In 2006, Capricorn Management, an investment group founded by Jeff Skoll, eBay’s first president, bought 25 percent of Falcon. And its board of advisers includes Al Gore, Richard Gephardt, and former Los Angeles mayor Richard Riordan.

Acceptance of a waterless urinal was once the challenge. Now the challenge is competition, including new rivals such as Kohler and Zurn. Still, Krug believes that by continuing to invest heavily in R&D, he is keeping ahead of the curve. And competition has its advantages, too. “When everyone else joins in,” he says, “you know you’ve gone from fringe to mainstream.”

Here’s a fact: According to the American Water Works Association, 58 percent of urban water goes to landscape irrigation. And as much as half of that is lost or wasted because of evaporation, wind, or improper irrigation design, installation, maintenance, and scheduling.

Chris Spain, co-founder and chairman of Petaluma, California-based HydroPoint Data Systems, saw an opportunity in those lost 3.5 billion gallons. After selling a software start-up in 2000, Spain and two partners began plotting their next move. Water was especially attractive. “One, it seemed to be a huge issue that a variety of macro trends were driving to a crisis point,” says Spain. “And two, there seemed to be a huge absence of focus, investment, and innovation.”

They came across a company in Petaluma that had patented a compelling technology — a system that used live weather data, rather than preset timers, to tell sprinklers when and how much to water crops, lawns, and commercial landscapes. They acquired the company, raised funds from angel investors, and went to work upgrading the technology. Now known as WeatherTRAK, the system uses data retrieved from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration satellites that gather information from 40,000 weather stations across the country. WeatherTRAK’s database and servers can accurately map weather conditions — wind, humidity, and temperature — for any given square kilometer in the U.S. Subscribers to the system (commercial users pay $225 per year) need only set a sprinkler controller with some information about the plants and topography of their site, and the system takes over, sending weather updates via satellite to automatically adjust watering needs to real conditions on the ground.

There are some 45 million irrigation controllers nationwide, and according to a survey by the American Water Works Association, most still have the same settings they had when they left the factory. The result: overwatering, often accompanied by runoff into neighboring surface waters. By watering landscapes just enough, the WeatherTRAK system cuts water use up to 59 percent.

Agriculture would seem to be an obvious market. But long-term contracts for purchasing water give farmers extremely low prices, so they generally have little incentive to invest in conservation. So HydroPoint has focused on commercial and institutional clients. Among its 15,000 subscribers: Wal-Mart, Coca-Cola, Google, Lowe’s, and the cities of Newport Beach, California, and Charleston, South Carolina. In 2007, those 15,000 customers saved a combined 6.7 billion gallons of water. Lockheed Martin estimates it saves $1 million a year using WeatherTRAK at its two Silicon Valley campuses.

Keeping It Clean

Though drought is one of the more obvious consequences of climate change, water experts are equally worried about the problems caused by extreme storms and flooding that many, if not most, scientists believe are another consequence of global warming. Long underregulated and undermanaged, storm-water runoff has become a concern for its effect on surface and ground water, as well as the additional burden that it puts on already creaky wastewater treatment facilities when it is treated.

Glenn Rink, founder and CEO of Scottsdale, Arizona-based AbTech Industries, first used his Smart Sponges — made from a synthetic polymer — in 1997 to clean up oil spills from tankers at sea. In 1999, when he turned his attention to storm water, most regulation was focused on runoff from new construction. “No one was really doing anything about dealing with the billions of gallons of rain that come down on the roads and go into our flood-control devices and are contaminated on the way through,” he says. So Rink figured out how to mold the sponge material into different shapes that would fit into street-level storm drains and catch basins, soaking up oil and debris and letting clean water pass through. Later, he developed a way to coat the sponges with an antimicrobial agent so they would disinfect water as well. The next iteration will add the ability to capture heavy metals, herbicides, and pesticides.

Long Beach, California, installed 2,000 AbTech filters in June 2004. Tom Leary, the city’s storm-water compliance officer, was primarily concerned with cutting bacterial pollution at beaches. Tests showed the Smart Sponges effectively eliminated bacteria. And in the unusually rainy year following the sponges’ installation, they also caught almost 92,000 pounds of trash and debris and 3,600 gallons of waste oil. Leary likes the technology, because unlike UV treatment or mechanical debris catchers, “it’s not outrageously expensive, and it’s easy to move around. You don’t smell them, hear them, or see them.”

Today, AbTech has 13,000 installations in 36 states and seven countries, and its 2008 revenue is expected to be 2,000 percent higher than last year’s. Seventy percent of its business is with municipal customers. But private developers and commercial entities are increasingly part of the mix. British grocery giant Tesco recently installed an AbTech system to treat runoff at a new 88-acre facility in Riverside, California. Smaller operators are employing the technology to solve niche problems — in bus depots and fast-food drive-throughs, to cite two examples. Airports, too: The ones in Newark, New Jersey, and New York’s Westchester County are among those that have installed AbTech sponges, which typically need to be replaced every two to four years; used sponges are sent to waste-energy plants and burned as fuel.

Road runoff is one problem. But pollutants from other sources are even more insidious. Hundreds of U.S. water utilities, for example, are dealing with high levels of the chemical perchlorate, a rocket-fuel ingredient that has been found in the lower Colorado River, which provides water for more than 15 million people in the Southwest, and in dozens of ground-water wells throughout California. Though the EPA has yet to set a drinking-water standard for perchlorate, Massachusetts and California have, citing health risks to developing fetuses. The gasoline additive MTBE is another troublesome ground-water pollutant, as is nitrate, a common agricultural contaminant, which at high enough levels in water causes serious illness or death in infants.

A new technology being commercialized by a company called Microvi Biotech literally eats these pollutants up.

Eliminating challenging pollutants from water has traditionally involved using mechanical filters or chemicals. Recently, researchers have experimented with using genetically modified organisms to degrade water pollutants. But until now, all these methods have had at least one major drawback: the production of a secondary waste stream of concentrated pollutants or sludge that must be incinerated or otherwise disposed of. In eliminating one kind of pollution, they create another.

Microvi’s founder, Fatemeh Shirazi, has developed what she and others believe is a safer, more efficient, and cleaner method — using so-called biological reactors that house colonies of natural microorganisms “trained” to feed off particular pollutants in water. Inside the reactor, Shirazi explains, microorganisms are “packaged” in materials and configurations that protect them from the die-off common in other treatment methods. Most remarkably, the system is self-cleaning — when the microbe population reaches a critical stage, it stops growing and cleans house, with living organisms feeding off dead ones. As a result, there is no fouling and buildup inside the reactor and no waste to dispose of — all that comes out is clean water.

“It’s unique,” says Michael Dimitriou, president of the consulting firm WaterInnovations. He discovered Shirazi’s work when he was asked to review it for a multinational water company. “It does something that’s been tried before but no one could do.” Shirazi has developed reactors that target about eight specific pollutants, including PCE, a chemical used in dry-cleaning and other industries, MTBE, perchlorate, and nitrates. The novelty of her technology was recognized with a first prize in the water category at the 2007 California Clean Tech Open competition.

Shirazi earned her Ph.D. in environmental engineering from Oklahoma State University, got her first U.S. patent in 2002, and incorporated Microvi in 2004 in Overland Park, Kansas. With $1.8 million in grants from agencies including the National Institutes of Health, she worked to troubleshoot issues with the technology. Now headquartered in Union City, California, the company has 11 employees and is beginning its first large-scale implementations. In addition to working with public water and wastewater facilities to treat emerging pollutants, Shirazi anticipates a market in treating water discharged by various industries — including the paper industry, which produces wastewater high in toxic chlorinated phenols, and the food and beverage industry, which discharges water high in organic pollutants and nitrate.

“We are in such a big mess today partly because we never thought about the consequences of discharging water that was full of pollutants,” says Shirazi. “It never made sense to me that in the name of cleaning up those pollutants, we’ve kept coming up with solutions that also have a negative impact on the environment. The idea of using biotechnology — using concepts from nature — to do this is very appealing.”

[via Fast Company] by Adam Bluestein

China is in a constant state of flux, and the legal environment is certainly not immune to this reality. As a foreigner your behavior is often scrutinized more than a local so you need to constantly be aware of the legal bounds under which you and your business operate. This article attempts to provide an overview of typical legal set-up options for a sourcing company in China, including RO (Representative Office), WFOE (Wholly Foreign Owned Enterprise) and FICE (Foreign Invested Commercial Enterprise).

Choosing the proper set-up

The overall objectives of your operation are the most significant aspect to consider when establishing an entity in China. What are your short and long term goals? What types of products do you want to source? Do you want to distribute, assemble, or manufacture products domestically? Do you plan on employing local staff? The answers to these and other questions will help define your objectives so that you can formulate a legal strategy that best serves them.

It is important to note, that no one legal solution exists to accommodate all of your unique conditions. Therefore, the more detailed your understanding of your objectives, the better equipped you are to make good decisions. Further supplementing your understanding with proper due diligence is always important when making decisions of such lasting consequence. Let us now take a look at typical legal set-ups for trading companies.

Representative Office (RO)

This formation is popular because (1) the registration process is shorter in duration and usually easier to complete, and (2) there is no minimum level of capital investment required. An RO will be suitable if its planned functions are simply liaison, market promotion or research. For sourcing companies, it will mean you have to give up a significant amount of control over your operations. All transactions must originate from abroad, and you are required by Chinese laws to heavily rely on 3rd party services providers, such as an Import/Export agent, Logistics provider, and HR outsourcing agent.

International Trading Wholly Foreign-Owned Enterprise (WFOE)

With official minimum registered capital of RMB 100,000 for a single shareholder company (but closer to USD 60,000 to 70,000 in practice), an International Trading WFOE allows added control over your business operations. However, the enterprise must be located in a Free Trade Zone (FTZ) and it is usually limited to export activities. Those that wish to distribute within China must either use a 3rd party distributor or apply for a separate import/export license (which essentially qualifies them as a FICE in a FTZ).

Foreign-Invested Commercial Enterprise (FICE)

Unlike the Trading WFOE, a FICE has the ability to import and locally distribute on top of export activities and may also qualify for retail activities. Both have the same level of required minimum investment, but in practice the FICE necessitates substantially higher levels (about USD140,000). The registration process is also more complex compared to that of a trading WFOE. A major issue to consider when evaluating the advantages of a FICE is location. Specifically, operating inside or outside of a Free Trade Zone significantly alters the investors options.

FICE inside a Free Trade Zone

A FICE operating inside a FTZ enjoys freedom in its business scope, but at a price. The FICE is unlimited in terms of what can be traded so long as it does not belong to a prohibited trade category according to the Chinese laws. A major drawback from operating inside the FTZ is that VAT invoices can only be issued through the relevant governing authority, creating a fair bit of logistical hassle. Additionally, you will undoubtedly pay a premium to exist in the FTZ – costs of services, talent, office space, etc tend to be higher. Finally, it will be more difficult to establish branch offices in other locations.

FICE outside a Free Trade Zone

Outside a FTZ, a FICE’s trade activities are limited to those relevant to its stated business scope. But it also enjoys some advantages. Unlike operating in a FTZ, the FICE is able to issue its own VAT invoices, operational costs may be significantly less, and branch offices can be set up more flexibly.

Manufacturing + FICE

Enterprises looking to incorporate manufacturing activities with its trading business can explore setting up a Manufacturing entity with an extended FICE status. However, such entities must maintain an above-50% revenue stream through its manufacturing activities. Historically, this requirement acts as a measure to prevent enterprises from abusing such entity status to access preferential tax policies granted to manufacturing enterprises. Even though the new corporate tax law has scrapped most of such preferential treatment, the authorities may still scrutinize enterprises enjoying tax incentives due to their encouraged status (eg. High and New Tech Enterprises).

Business registration is a complex process that involves navigating China’s far-reaching bureaucracy. While it is not compulsory, using a specialist service that understands not only the legal environment, but also the objectives of your business is highly recommended. Selecting the optimal legal entity from the beginning is crucial to your success in China. Don’t proceed without a thorough understanding of the legal implications of your actions.

[via SourceJuice]

WIRED Magazine put together a great comparative of Obama and McCain’s policies that are important to their readers – here’s the wrap-up.

Topic Covered:

1. Broadband
2. H1B issues
3. Investment in green tech
4. Net neutrality
5. Spectrum

Broadband

The Issue: The United States is becoming a tortoise in a world of hares. One of the world’s most Wired nations a decade ago, we now lag behind most of our peers. In France, broadband access is half the price and four times as fast. The main cause for the debacle is a lack of competition in telecommunications. Most communities have, at best, one cable choice and one DSL choice. This situation came about through the mass consolidation of the industry, and through the non-enforcement and then repudiation of the 1996 Telecommunications Act, which mandated that entrenched telecom companies lease their lines into people’s homes to smaller companies.

McCain’s Position: As argued here and here, McCain has consistently been on the wrong side of this issue. As Senate Commerce Chair, he supported the mass consolidation in the industry. He also consistently voted the wrong way on whether entrenched competitors should be forced to lease their lines. The one point in his favor is his support of the Community Broadband Bill which would help cities offer wireless Internet, even when the local companies try to crush them.

Obama’s Position: Obama wasn’t around for the major votes on this issue. And while he is advised by all the right people, he hasn’t come out with a specific plan to open up the industry. His big proposal is to take money currently used to subsidize rural phone use and, instead, use it to subsidize rural broadband use. This could be helpful. But if the markets aren’t made competitive beforehand, it could also end up as little more than another subsidy to the same giant companies that have served us so poorly.

Grades:
McCain: D
Obama: B

H1B Visas

The Issue: Many people skilled in technology around the world want to work in the United States, but it’s tough to get in if you don’t have a family member already living here. One good way to increase American productivity would be to increase the quota of skilled workers allowed under our H1B visa program. Opponents counter with mostly bogus concerns about spies and job loss for Americans.

McCain’s Position: Though his immigration policies shifted during the Republican primary, he has been a long proponent of allowing in more high-skilled technology workers. Here’s his plan: “John McCain will expand the number of H-1B visas to allow our companies to keep top-notch talent –- often trained in our graduate schools -– in the United States. The Department of Labor should be allowed to set visa levels appropriate for market conditions. Hiring skilled foreign workers to fill critical shortages benefits not only innovative companies, but also our economy. For every foreign worker hired, corporations generally hire five to ten additional American workers.”

Obama’s Position: Obama supports a temporary increase in skilled immigrants allowed here under H1B visas. But he doesn’t mention the issue in his technology plan. And, in interviews, he has hemmed and hawed about highly skilled immigrants taking jobs from Americans. In an interview with Michael Arrington, he said, that the country can “go a long way toward meeting industry’s need for skilled workers with Americans. Until we have achieved that, I will support a temporary increase in the H-1B visa program as a stopgap measure until we can reform our immigration system comprehensively.

Grades:
McCain: B+
Obama: C

Green Tech

The Issue: Technology is the best, and only way, to get us out of our environmental mess. Government’s best bet at solving this problem isn’t to pick and fund specific winners. Instead, it should try to create as fertile a marketplace as possible, while ending subsidies to dirty technologies. Five-dollar gas, after all, is good for clean tech.

McCain’s Position: McCain talks loudly about green technology, but he carries a small stick. He wants to invest $2 billion annually for research into clean coal, and he wants to offer a $300 million prize for developing an advanced battery technology. Like Wired, he does strongly support nuclear power.

Obama’s Position: Obama’s stick is bigger. He calls for an investment of $150 billion over the next decade in clean energy. He wants to extend tax credits for clean energy producers, and he has proposed an annual 410 billion investment in a Clean Techhnology Venture Capital Fund. Like McCain, he favors a cap-and-trade system for carbon emissions. Unlike McCain, his supporters don’t chant “drill, baby drill” at his rallies — suggesting that he’ll be less likely to extend the subsidies to oil companies that have played such a big role in limiting green tech. It no surprise that the green guys love him.

Grades:
McCain: B
Obama: A

Net Neutrality

The Issue: The question here is whether the telecom companies can pick and choose what they send over their pipes. Without a regulation mandating that the pipes remain open, Verizon, for example, could decide to start messing with your Vonage or your Bittorrent.

McCain’s Position: According to his technology plan “John McCain does not believe in prescriptive regulation like ‘net neutrality.’” He does however support the notion that technology companies should voluntarily proclaim their support for “freedom of access to content.”

Obama’s Position: Here’s the first specific point in his technology plan: “A key reason the Internet has been such a success is because it is the most open network in history. It needs to stay that way. Barack Obama strongly supports the principle of network neutrality to preserve the benefits of open competition on the Internet.”

Grades:
McCain: D
Obama: A

Spectrum

The Issue: Spectrum is the technological equivalent of the roads over which our technology travels. Right now, clunky companies that use oxcarts own many of the widest highways. Meanwhile, tiny alleys—like the 802.11 band—are used for rampant innovation, like everything that uses WiFi. Soon the government is going to have a choice over whether (and how) to auction off extremely valuable, and fast, spectrum: the unused bits in between broadcast TV channels one and 52. Google and other most other tech companies believe that the spectrum could be the basis for a future of super-fast wireless communication. The broadcast companies naturally want to keep it in their top drawer. Joel Osteen is terrified that his sermons won’t come through cleanly if the spectrum is auctioned off.

McCain’s Position: McCain has, sensibly, long opposed giving away the airwaves. “They used to rob trains in the Old West. Now we rob spectrum,” he once said. He initially helped push through the last big spectrum auction, and he takes a strong, positive stand in his platform: declaring that we should “auction off inefficiently-used wireless spectrum to companies that will instead use the spectrum to provide high-speed Internet service options to millions of Americans.” The bad news is that he hasn’t said anything good on spectrum since the beginning of the primaries. He didn’t push for rules that would mandate competition over the last batch of spectrum auctioned off. He is also worryingly close to (and almost always sides with) the telecom industry, which is packed with spectrum offenders.

Obama’s Position: Obama has stated vaguely that we should review our spectrum policies and look for opportunities to open more up. But he has been reluctant to take a stand on the white spaces, perhaps because he fears a fight with the National Association of Broadcasters. He did, however, take a very good position in his interview with Arrington, declaring his support for all the right goals and then specifically criticizing the most recent auction. “We must make sure the nation’s airwaves are licensed to maximize their public benefit. Auctions have most recently been conducted without sufficient incentives to encourage full use and competition.” Perhaps partly because of this — and partly because he seems generally more tech savvy — employees of the companies that want to open up and use the white spaces massively favor him.

Grades:
McCain: B
Obama: B

[via WIRED] by Nicholas Thompson

Author Richard Watson examines emerging patterns and developments and society, politics, science and technology, media and entertainment, and other industries in his book Future Files: A History of the Next 50 Years — and makes educated, and witty speculations as to where they might take us.

He listed the top 5 trends that will change society over the next 50 years: GLOBALIZATION, LOCALIZATION, POLARIZATION, ANXIETY, MEANING.

Globalization Globalization used to mean Americanization, but these days it means exposure to people, products, and ideas from everywhere. Globalization impacts on the sourcing of products and services, and on market-expansion opportunities. It also means connectedness and mobility. Everything from countries and computers to gadgets and global banking will be hyper-linked together. In the future, this trend will accelerate even faster, thanks to devices such as GPS, RFIDs, sensor motes, and smart dust (all essentially tiny wireless transmitters and/or receivers of some kind). Hence privacy will all but disappear, but transparency and risk may increase.

Localization Localization (or re-localization) is a perfect example of a trend creating a counter-trend. Localization will occur because people don’t like globalization or homogenization. The European Union will therefore splinter and ultimately collapse. This new tribalism will drive city states, locally tailored products, economic protectionism, and the sale of flags.

Polarization The future is an either/or kind of place with most things polarizing in some form or another. First there will be multiple futures, some of them speeding up and others slowing down. Some people with embrace technology, while others will reject it. Industrial markets will split between luxury and low-cost options, with access to services like health and education, transport, and security similarly polarizing, depending on your ability to pay. The middle class will eventually disappear in most developed countries, with people either moving upwards into a new global managerial elite or downwards into a new enslaved working (or not working) class.

Anxiety If ‘they’ don’t get you, a global pandemic probably will. At least that’s how many people will feel in the future. Trust in institutions will all but evaporate, and the speed of change will leave people longing for the past. This insecurity is to some extent generational, but whether you are eighteen or eighty there will be a growing feeling of powerlessness and a continual state of anxiety that will fuel everything from an interest in nostalgia and escapism to a growth in narcissism, localization, and tribalism.

Meaning One of the most fascinating questions about the future is whether religion will be a victim or a beneficiary of change. Some people predict that faith will decline because the spread of information will undermine the mindset necessary to support belief. Physics will produce a unified theory of everything and this will destroy old-fashioned superstitions such as religion. In other words, science will become our new religion. I’m not so sure. If science, technology, and complexity become key ingredients of the future, this will drive change and uncertainty. And the more this happens, the more people will seek out safety, comfort, and guidance from religion. This could just lead to an increase in individual spirituality, but I suspect that globalization, mixed with a general feeling of powerlessness and anxiety, will drive group actions and beliefs. Hence we will witness an increase in tribalism, nationalism, and xenophobia, which at the extreme will fuel Islamic fanaticism and muscular Christianity.

This article is the first chapter from Future Files: A History of the Next 50 Years by Richard Watson, who advises organizations on the future, focusing on innovation and scenario planning. He is the author and publisher of What’s Next, a quarterly report on global trends, and is a columnist for a number of magazines, including FastCompany.com.