Chapter 3 looks at our emerging resources crisis and its solutions.

Canada is one of the largest mining nations in the world, ranking among the top five countries in the global production of thirteen major minerals. Despite the economic strength of the sector, R&D, innovation, and commercialization remain challenges for the Canadian mining sector. With increasing environmental standards and regulations, companies operating in this sector are continually searching for technological solutions to advance sustainable mining. Patent data is an excellent starting point for understanding these innovative efforts as the information contained in patents reveals the specific technical knowledge embedded in the invention. This detailed information reveals who is patenting and what they are patenting, allowing for the identification of collaboration opportunities while avoiding costly duplicative research. The chapter provides a lens into the patenting effort in the Canadian mining sector, including trends, landscape maps and collaboration and is the result of a collaborative effort between the Center for International Governance Innovation (CIGI) and the Canadian Intellectual Property Office (CIPO).

This chapter explores the links between consumption and social status through an ethnographic study of how waste pickers, individuals and communities who reclaim and recycle the discards of elite and middle-class consumption, make claims to social status in the neoliberal city.It demonstrates how organizations representing waste pickers, who perform stigmatized work and are marginalized in urban environmental movements, effectively use ecological citizenship discourses to make successful claims to status, security, and urban inclusion. However, in the process, elite power over environmental imaginaries is reasserted in a manner that further exacerbates inequities in environmental status.

Success stories in clean-up of toxic sites. Sydney, Singapore, US Superfund. Key global chemical treaties. New approaches to chemical clean-up. Shortcomings in scientific, medical and chemical training. Curbing the global toxic deluge. Citizen responsibility for a cleaner Planet.