GREENFIELD PROJECT MANAGEMENT, a Ballsbridgeheadquartered company headed by chairwoman Ann McClain, last week announced a 190m partnership with the government of Belarus to build two distillieries to make biofuels, one of which would become one of Europe's biggest ethanol plants. The plants are expected to yield up to 700m litres of bioethanol per year for sale in the EU. The bigger of the two plants will be at Mozyr, another at Bobruisk; both are in the Gomel region of the country.

The trick is, where would they get huge expanses of fields that could be used for the cultivation of biomass to be used for ethanol?

Why, the millions of hectares that are currently unusable for anything else due to radioactive contamination from the Chernobyl nuclear disaster 21 years ago.

In the company's press release, the foreign minister of the former Soviet republic, Sergei Martynov, said: "Belarus is probably the only country in Europe with vast territories which can be used for biomass production, the lands affected by the Chernobyl catastrophe. . ."

Greenfield also said they intend to pursue "an even more ambitious programme", "to remediate and decontaminate lands affected by radioactive particles" from Chernobyl "and return them to full use".

SMART METERING TO COME TO EUROPE

UK technology analysts Datamonitor, says in a report that the portion of households in Europe using smart metering will rise from 6% today to 41% in 2012. "Smart" metering allows electricity use to be communicated between the house or of"ce and the utility in real time. It allows greater "exibility in pricing for electricity in peak usage. It is also a prerequisite for surplus electricity generated at the point of use, to be sold back to the grid . . . effectively letting meters move backwards.

European utilities, with the exception of Nordic countries, have been slow to adopt smart metering. Datamonitor predicts that 89% of households in North America, by comparison, will have "smart metering" by 2012.

ABBOTT GOES GREEN

ITS deal to be bought by GE may have bottomed out this week, but back at its Illinois headquarters, the health care giant is converting more than 6,000 of its vehicles to become carbon neutral. The fleet represents 11% of the company's total carbon emissions.

The company claims it is the first Fortune 500 company to render it sales vehicle fleet carbon neutral. The company will offer its sales representatives the lease of hybrid vehicles when their current leases expire. The balance will be made up by carbon offsetting schemes, the company said.

Because sales vehicles are driven roughly twice as much as personal vehicles, the company reckons it is taking the equivalent of 12,000 cars off the road.