The Hindu Business Line : Clean up with technology

Clean-up drive: Sarah Brown (wife of British Prime Minister Gordon Brown), Maria Barroso (wife of the European Commission President, Jose Barroso), Kiyoko Fukuda (wife of Japanese Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda) and Lawreen Harper (wife of Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper) pose at the international media centre with a clean diesel vehicle at the G-8 Summit.

K. Venugopal

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Just about everything that you need to do can be done with a dollop of technology. At least that is what the Japanese seem to think. Take the hotel room in Sapporo, Japan, for instance. The toilet seat is special: it makes that daily job of cleaning up awfully easy. First, the difference is obvious as you sit down. Sensors activate the flush to cleanse the bowl and disinfect it for use. As Japan can get very cold in winter, the seat has been warmed already to between 30-40 degrees Celsius for comfort even on the coldest day. After you have relieved yourself there is no need to reach for the toilet paper or to turn the health faucet tap to get a spray of water. Just press a button. You have actually a choice of two, a bidet-like spray or a jet. Then wait for a whir of motors and a jet of water, warmed by microprocessor controls to just the right temperature, streams out to clean you up.

The convenience, of course, indents on energy: the device is rated for 1,274 watts of electricity, and therefore consumes up to 30 units a day, energy that perhaps was supplied by a power station burning natural gas or oil — petroleum fuels generate one third of Japan’s electricity.

Outside on the streets of this city that hosted earlier this month the summit of leaders from eight of the world’s leading industrialised nations, the G-8, the rhetoric was ironically different. The theme at the summit was global warming and climate change, and the slogan: “Reduce, reuse and recycle”. On display at the summit venues were cutting-edge Japanese technologies that claimed to reduce energy use and carbon emissions.

The international media centre, for instance, was air-conditioned by blowing air through snow stored in the basement of the complex. Sapporo is cold for most of the year and does get a lot of snow; it was once the venue for the winter Olympics. Yet the organisers had done their homework and prepared well in advance, saving up and storing about 7,000 tonnes of snow from the winter in the basement. Now with the July summer sun at its peak, requiring rooms to be cooled, they blew air through holes drilled in the snow pile. The air chilled to 2 degrees Celsius was then mixed with ambient air to provide a comfortable working temperature for journalists.

There were other technology demonstrators too: Solar panels picked up the sun’s energy for electricity; hybrid fuel cars ferried dignitaries across the summit venues, while fuel cell driven buses carried the lesser folks across. Saving energy seemed a fetish. Even the Summit’s official Web site announced that the image files on the pages were “controlled to limit energy consumption”. The authorities also promised a number of carbon dioxide reduction projects to offset the emissions caused by the summit itself.

Perhaps, they realised there would be considerable atonement to do. For there were leaders and their large official delegations from over 20 countries and some 4,000 media representatives who had flown in from across the globe. Most leaders came in their personal jets, the Indian Prime Minister, Manmohan Singh, in a Boeing 747 chartered from Air India, burning thousands of tonnes of aviation fuel and spewing a commensurate volume of the greenhouse gases, emissions of which the leaders then solemnly declared they would reduce by half by 2050. Environmentalists were not entirely convinced they meant to do what they said, but at least Japanese companies are confident they have the technology to help the world do so.

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Clean up with technology