deposed interior minister has returned to barcelona to chance of traitor by unionists protesters. working for the rest of the catalan cabinet were fired by the central government after the region declared independence last week spain's top criminal court has summoned them for questioning security forces have opened fire on protesters in eritrea as capital are smaller the violence centered on the predominantly muslim i could be a neighborhood where religious court has been ordered by the government to abandon the jam and end the sliming education. iraq is working to take control from the kurdish regional government of a key border crossing with turkey the hub or border gate is located within the official boundaries of the semi autonomous kurdish region of northern iraq people crossing the border are passing through turkish iraqi and kurdish czechs the e.u. commissioner for humanitarian aid and crisis management is visiting bangladesh to

assess their anger crisis the trip by christie are still on a disk comes a week after the e.u. and member states pledged two hundred twenty eight million dollars to help bring the refugees. now. in india women as old as seventy or define their range and having me views when i want to use meets these elderly mother. how old is too old to do at this time on al-jazeera. people new to the city because that's where the jobs are the money and other of

what you thought. but the planet's metropolises been stretched to that limits. more than half the world's population density by twenty fifth this figure will rise to two thirds that's more than six billion people. over the next forty years cities who gobble up natural habitats but the added cost by them to triple. the people means more transport no buildings more waste more pollution and. many of those moving to cities and rural poor they join the one point six billion people living without adequate shelter. it's vital that we find sustainable ways to deal with this rapid itemization i'm julia shopping be aware plastic waste is for instructing new homes for the fourth of all and i'm most abused in singapore where one metropolis is striving for environmental sustainability in the face of rapid urbanization. does that yes

because we get. over three hundred million tonnes of plastic is produced each year with only a fraction of it being with michael much of it ends up in landfills polluting urban living environment waterways and ocean. in colombia on the month equate is being diverted into. the building blocks of a new environmental pollution. capital city of bogota is home to meet million people and it is estimated that six hundred fifty tonnes of plastic is thrown away every single day i have come to me as an architect and founder of a new enterprise for environmental change called. has brought me. on the. first hand the problems faced here and across latin america.

seventy five percent of. when you see. on the ground potential yes a lot of. farm all dispersed in order for us to succeed he's going to need a lot of plastic. recycling has been a longstanding trade with forty thousand trucks on the streets collecting conventional reuse for waste metal plastic bottles so we're in a right now where the recyclers come to bring their plastics and other recyclable products and they weigh them here so that they can be paid. for looking for you know he's. organized all of the area and over recent years government support has allowed people like the opportunity to upscale and legitimize the industry creating recycling centers like this one all over the city. on video of

the arm motion machine corners of the last stand we're going to. be losing ground the bottom of the gravity. of the plan the ongoing challenge for paulino and his team is getting the word out. thank you. now when one of the ministers see you going on was your mind wandering around when the did so given to you know the one but mostly reckon. on when you are there will be easier. for you just the way of knowing people and so they respect. to me the only time when you are going to be the most to see then you must concede

your home is a must also. be getting what you had on me and be in. the middle that is a god it is like in this world if you're. seated on the things that are good without you in the garment. then the material is almost like on the one i'm going to display. because it's also mendez which is making good use of its waste plastic head to the company headquarters again. welcome to our factory was a plastic thank you this is where we take all the plastic from paulino. made in the formation over the past few years oscar and his team have been refining this waste to make durable building blocks different types of plastic or first ground separately household plastic waste battery packaging and electrical ways such as old computers and t.v.'s you can feel like the same from that the factory like

these. haven't even been you it's like a giant blender what would happen to this packaging if you weren't recycling it sold it back edgy. or sure is going to learn now we've got all the ingredients now the chef will go to war dan put it together he's the chair oh he has oh sorry i'm not here this is the chef. they will show us exactly the proportions has a secret recipe the ground of plastics are mixed together heated and then compressed into a brick shaped molds tell me a little bit about the temperature what how hot are the five things you just get them as you point to depends on the music until the last two years it became too long to do on your forty degrees it is very important that the temperature is kept at melting point so as not to burn the plastic and release toxic gases. so let's check this out let's look at it. it looks like

a man. not as heavy but it thirteen i wonder what that was for that or that companies were still born numbers we have a war on not a fire. so now that we have all of these bricks what kind of uses do you have for them. you can make the same thing with this kind of printer and where in these going this breaks i'm going to cali and you will see what we're going to do with. globally as the world's capital salsa dancing the city of. is one of the great. six percent of the land area. and then maybe. you can add on to that. i want to look at. this the most talked about what you plan on when you're not going to go out on me and make my day to day we've come to invite

a neighborhood in the east of one of the city's most deprived areas it's going to be you know over yes it took us and we were down the. steps to catch up with oscar and his friends while my goodness the bricks we just saw in the back three. they're actually constructing into a house for someone who lives here in the community. as well as i'm sure you were at the plant we are. now are here and building it's amazing tell me a little bit about what's right now we are in the kitchen i have many males will be correct i'm sure. this is the bathroom. this house cost five thousand dollars and has been micro financed by the community for whose son lives in the apartment below where. and when i. see. because it's fussy always. say go.

away. it's literally like life size lego oscars hope is that there's a project will generate interest in the community and encourage future collaboration. is that most. it's that. they're all looks like rock to them. is one of my government moves where we don't want to crack your story. about i mean i mean you're in a dilemma didn't you know about. this i just can't get over the holes for the. the plumbing where the cable got in the electricity. so i get out it's actually a room now it's a kitchen. else he's telling me this is where the closet is going to be here. with the television on top if you can imagine at all we've got left is the roof and

some doors so we're pretty close how much plastic is in this house and this house we five tells. us who was in one of the one you want to know the one in focus. in just under two days the house is almost complete the plan is that a family of four will be able to put together their own home in less than five days so i'm looking up as i look on his daughter's room to them isn't all this is that we're going to the most enjoy the most i mean comes up dysplastic was already helped to house forty two families displaced by conflict in the town of recycling one hundred twenty tons of plastic in the process tell me a little bit about the magnitude of impact that this project can have if we use just two percent of the west plus to the war we can change the life of millions of

people we can finish their house and show this unit in america in just ten years. that's an enormous number and a huge impact we have to start we have to start step by step. of sustainable building materials being developed globally. is being treated and used to construction in countries including ethiopia in tunisia and here in the poem. with many strains ten times stronger than steel and a rapid growth cycle of four to five years bamboo is one of most eco friendly building materials on the planet. and the middle east to engineering graduates in gaza have created an environmentally friendly break called green cake this uses coal and wood ashes a fill it instead of sand making use of waste that would otherwise be buried in the ground. and and guatemala one nonprofit has built

a school using natural resources and rubbish that would normally pile in landfills the organizations made a system out of all tiles capable of holding thousands of gallons of rainwater materials like these and many paving the way for greener probe are redefining the spaces we inhabit. singapore is a low lying island city state eighty percent of its population live in high rise public housing resulting in one of the highest population densities in the world challenges for rapid urbanization sea level rise and an increasingly chaotic climate is forcing planners and architects posy makers to respond to the to the questions about how cities of the future will cope with growing demand despite the growing pressure on space singapore's been dubbed asia's greenest city so i've come here to meet some of the people who are hoping it and the title my first stop is

a park royal hotel which boasts fifteen thousand square metres of greenery and was completed in twenty third. by award winning architect richard hassel the now in almost every wise thing formed by human activity. takes we feel like it's something within our control to suggest why is that building projects can also play a much stronger role in this ship of the earth when you look at like google earth for images from space it is a really deserts you know you see a very bright white shiny area surrounded by dark vegetation buildings like this you would no longer see that you would see the vegetation liar covering the city as well. as singaporean government awarded park loyalists coveted green mark the nation's highest environmental situation is part of a wider scheme to promote environmentally friendly buildings and investment into green city solutions to understand more about why the city's the greenest in asia i

want to see what's happening at the grassroots. heard about a nonprofit providing financial education and supporting the growing into community i've come to be the funder nighthawk. i came here trying to get people to go back to basics and as a result of that we. overnight asian globalization and digitize asian we become disconnected so i was trying to create using our space to connect back people and to bring about a spirit of community and it's very strange for a country lasting one because we're so top down and that's why my name is called ground up initiating the ground up initiative started in two thousand and nine and secured a piece of land to provide environmental education for people of all ages in the run several workshops and seminars building a community if i mentally gauge citizen thank you for it if you just for a moment that we're in the middle of so we're. just knocking them your door and if

i be allowed to build on this land that. i told the government to give me a chance to prove that i think singapore needs a different kind of space fifty percent of the world's population now leave in cities and with seventy percent will leave out of my point three billion on my point five billion you know thirty years time. what you being will become where support coming from who wants to work on the land who will clean the rubbish for you all the time by malaysia. in the ground up initiative gardens i mean choice famine cow phone tears have come along to get their hands dirty why do you continue doing farming in a way. connected with what we are actually doing every day because where we eat food we know what exactly where they come from and in singapore real life also people don't appreciate food because maybe to the kids they have never seen this how the fruit is growing maybe they thought it's just from the supermarket places

like this is very good because it makes us go back to the basics what keeps us surviving what makes us try and it's not really about having money it's not really about heavy all the tech stuff but really been able to to understand that you know just be a part of ecosystem seeing how things are grown for example it makes me start to are a lot of other questions like how where things come from so if i use a paper i stop to think so is it from and if i try it always it going. turn who is committed to reducing your waste to almost zero we go back to a flood this year she's gone this is the last place that you would expect to see a little poem a coach a garden going on in somebody's front room i just thought it this journey barely a year ago so a lot of things to me a experiment you're here on your new experiment with all this how do you are you kind of creating

a network here because you can't be the only person in singapore yeah when i was suddenly groups on facebook it was sometimes frustrating because i seem to be the only person posting but now i think it's at least three thousand five hundred and it's quite surprising i think when we see in the regional taking just a small action to me is very encouraging. because they start to take. care of we in the journey to zero waste community still have a long way to go last year singapore's five point five million population over seven point five million tons of waste that's one half tons per person but momentum is building and similar grassroots projects are sprouting up throughout the city. and she's invited us to come across town and have a look at her own community garden how are you. oh so this is your projects yes my neighbors will come and spend time here in the garden i should be doing that

. direct. you know yes it's a it's a it's a story oh never seen soybeans group before i feel that a lot of the us open spaces and sing up should not be a big. issue before school and how can we truly make singapore maybe a city in the foot why does it need to just be a small one you know that it's only sosa a few people in a community why not the larger community. over eighty percent of the food consumed in singapore is imported from the ministry of national development is investing heavily boosting food production on the island of a range to meet jack and engineer turn food producer who's taking commercial scale urban farming to the next level. but i can say i've never seen a farm like this before. best in the world.

for something that's never heard of a vertical farm how do you describe something. up oil landscape so we don't have as much of the land so when he was the best of us singaporeans we stay in a has that effect is a spectacle so look at why best favor because i can. i think that the. system is using using what make it miss power law dating so you can go out and get a. car now get a new transcend what the so and the what the sim what the make it look they thing is a sim what also give a dog a run and what will be good one. day you'll see so far we need to change the weather at all so far you've not changed it at all that's quite something given that this forms been operating for three years these rotating shows effectively increase the land surface area by a factor of ten meaning this vertical farm can produce two tons of vegetables in

a single day. king of the veggies it's a beauty isn't a look as a weed it's the first weed i've seen in the entire place. this is to attract a pet and then they're stunned on these bars and then there's none in there i mean . the past many very good and even a passing of the we catch him we are picked off fish. this is really where actually this is floating this is from this is yes companies put a completely full jack why do you create a pool in reno in a pond we need a pond to keep water far west they were so i do if you look at the last area of our system so can we build upon a time we had a plan so why is acim in here we have one harvest of fish for every six harvest of vegetables. the fish are feeding the vegetables and the vegetables.

fish yeah so the trimmings from the vegetables are actually going to feed the fish and using is the sim size of the lion. being located within the city these high density aquaponics set ups are also saving energy on transportation and storage so it's little wonder this guy the greens are granted widespread interest wrote asia as well as with the singaporean government continue to support the development of the technology. and come back to the world offices to learn more about their living building and what lies ahead for instance greenest city. this project for instance when it's fully grown will have eleven times the size area as green area so why go to all this extra effort to to swaddle your buildings in plants a huge one in a hot climate like singapore is the plants are the only thing that when the sunlight falls on that they don't heat up they're actually take that energy and use

it for the chemical processes of building carbohydrates and things so the calculation for singapore for instance is of before the city was built singapore was five degrees cooler. and all that heat ends up being converted into fossil fuel use as people use a conditioners to cool the space and throw even more heat out into the city if substantial plant cover even reduced singapore by two or three degrees celsius the energy saving for the entire country would be you know in the billions of dollars over the years a lot of the argument you have there or so much of the cities built you know it doesn't matter one or two buildings what difference can they make but if one building can. compensate for ten other sites not having any grain you can see that just by doing selective. injection of these kind of buildings through the city can already create a statistically significant amount of green in the city can you see the tension in the future where you could. actually see some of this providing food sort of

because we know the singing for example reliant on food imports. we've sort of done generation one which is providing a lot of planting and achieving these plot ratios i think generation two is ok now we have this what can we do with it and that's why i think there's anything you do on land on the ground you can start thinking doesn't make sense to do that on of buildings of you know food we're also very interested in. you know can we make it not just decorative but can we make a very biologically productive we can like in a lifetime how many buildings can we build this is something that needs lots of people doing it and it needs rethinking at the. planning level and the whole city visioning. so we've come up to the sky bill at dawson which is one of richard's public housing projects and it does feel great i mean the planting design in this

shady canopy of solar panels he was lovely but i mean looking out at the view it's pretty terrifying it's not just the density but it's the number of housing in and building development projects and it's this kind of a model of oil tankers and shipping containers that stretches to the horizon in almost every direction. but when you start to look at that horizon through richard's eyes and you see the potential for a rooftop aquaponics vertical forest you know you start to have hope but for us to make that future a reality then it means getting the grass roots in gage's it means the joy of fair . those guys get things going from the ground up and it means they're missing the planners in the policymakers halfway if we're going to see cities that are truly sustainable. as a much opera says continue to expand we're being pushed to explore more radical

solutions to the environmental cost living in taiwan a french architecture firm is constructing a garden tower which will absorb one hundred thirty tons of carbon dioxide each year while local government in washington d.c. is utilizing the high foothold in the city center to generate energy kinetically for lighting using a technology called pay. and a south korea some dough has been dubbed the smartest city on the planet developed as a built the world's largest pneumatic waste collection system citywide recycling is projected to reach seventy six percent by twenty twenty innovations of that if there is support and funding to adopt the widely is a chance the world's much openness is could become sustainable and has so many of us living in cities the environmental impact could be huge. ambitious endeavor to create drought proof crops amazing to think that the plan b.

so many of them look now looks completely mind international efforts to combine the pests that threaten move so they bring in theirs and you the of that hops just like at the dock you're right your prescription you're doing the same thing here you're writing a prescription for the farmer in six bowls inspiring your finances to farming for the future. al-jazeera business update brought to you by they always going places together.

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