Laser un-printers that can remove toner from scrap paper so that it can be used again may be coming to an office near you in the future, results from a new Cambridge study show.

“What we need to do now is find someone to build a prototype. Thanks to low-energy laser scanners and laser-jet printers, the feasibility for reusing paper in the office is there.” —Dr Julian Allwood

Dr Julian Allwood, Leader of the Low Carbon Materials Processing Group at the University of Cambridge, and David Leal-Ayala, PhD student in the group, tested toner-print removal from paper by employing a variety of lasers.

The results showed that toner-print can be removed effectively without causing significant paper damage, allowing the paper to be reused, without being discarded, shredded or sent to a recycling plant.

Coupled with advances in low-energy laser scanning technology, copiers and printers, the research means that toner-removing devices may be a common sight in offices around the country in the future.

Julian said: “What we need to do now is find someone to build a prototype. Thanks to low-energy laser scanners and laser-jet printers, the feasibility for reusing paper in the office is there.”

The implications of the study also extend beyond the workplace and into the forest. Reducing the use of trees from the paper lifecycle is a real possibility. Along with saving forests from being used for new paper, reusing paper could save an additional 50-80% in carbon emissions over recycling.

The study poses the question of what would happen if paper was unprinted and reused instead of recycled. The action of removing toner with a laser would remove four steps from the paper production cycle: forestry, pulping, paper making and disposal by incineration or landfill.

Julian added: “Material recovery through reusing eliminates the forestry step from the life cycle of paper and eradicates emissions arising from paper incineration or decomposition in landfill.”

With the aid of The Bavarian Laser Centre, a total of 10 laser setups spanning a range of strength and pulse durations were tested in the study. The lasers also spanned the ultraviolet, visible and infrared spectrum. The paper used in the experiments was standard Canon copy paper with HP Laserjet black toner, common in offices around the world.

Once the paper was exposed to the laser, the samples were then analysed under a scanning electron microscope and subjected to colour, mechanical and chemical analyses.

The study predicts that the emissions produced by the pulp and paper recycling industry could be at least halved as a result of paper reuse. “This could represent a significant contribution towards the cause of reducing climate change emissions from paper manufacturing” Julian said.

The toner print removal project is discussed by Julian along with his work on ways to recycle rare metals much more efficiently, on the BBC World Service programme ‘One Planet’ available on BBC iPlayer at the link below.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/p00n6z6d/One_Planet_Rare_metals_and_smart_lizards/

]]> http://www.flainox.com/blog/2012/04/save-trees-use-laser/feed/ 5 http://www.flainox.com/blog/2012/04/future-earth/ http://www.flainox.com/blog/2012/04/future-earth/#comments Tue, 17 Apr 2012 08:11:38 +0000 Flainox http://www.flainox.com/blog/?p=1825 Future Earth: New global platform for sustainability research presented at Planet Under Pressure

The new 10-year initiative unifying and scaling up existing ICSU-sponsored global environmental change activities, will deliver solution oriented research in partnership with society.

An alliance of international partners from global science, research funding and UN bodies, announced a bold new 10-year initiative on global environmental change for sustainability at the Planet under Pressure conference on Tuesday. Future Earth – research for global sustainability, operational in 2013, will provide a cutting-edge platform to coordinate scientific research which can respond to the most critical social and environmental challenges of the 21st century at global and regional levels.

“This initiative will link global environmental change and fundamental human development questions”, said Prof. Diana Liverman, co-Director of the Institute of the Environment at the University of Arizona and co-Chair of the team that is designing Future Earth. “Global environmental change affects our ability to access food, water, energy, increases our vulnerability to hazardous events, and erodes our ability to eradicate poverty. Only by actively engaging natural sciences, social sciences and humanities and working with the full range of users and producers of knowledge, can we provide a full understanding of global change and its impact on societies and ecosystems.”

Future Earth will have a new global governance body and secretariat, building on the strengths of the existing core global environmental change programme, which are co-sponsored by ICSU. Its official launch will be in June, 2012, at the United Nations “Rio+20” conference. Future Earth will embody an interdisciplinary approach to provide early warning signals of environmental risk and change, and stimulate new research to support the transition of society towards sustainability.

The development of new pathways for global sustainability requires a new way of doing research, expanding and improving our knowledge of transformations in societies and biophysical processes, and how they interact across scales. “Future Earth will support the creation of that knowledge through multidimensional and interdisciplinary research”, said Roberto Sanchez, Professor at the Department of Urban and Environmental Studies, El Colegio de la Frontera Norte Mexico. Sanchez added that “regional perspectives and multiple sociocultural approaches are essential tools to incorporate in Future Earth research to understand the complexity and diversity of our societies.”

This interdisciplinary initiative arises from the ICSU-led Earth System Visioning process, a three-year consultation with researchers and research users concluded in early 2011 that identified options for a unified approach to Earth system research for global sustainability. Collaboration with other international organizations has strengthened the basis of the initiative, which is now jointly supported by ICSU, the International Social Science Council (ISSC), the Belmont Forum of funding agencies, UNEP, UNESCO and UNU, with WMO as an observer.

“We are very proud of the enormous scientific achievements of the ICSU-sponsored Global Environmental Change Programmes over the last decades”, said Prof. Yuan T Lee, winner of the 1986 Nobel Prize in Chemistry and ICSU President. Lee stressed that “unifying the different efforts through this new broad partnership will provide the step-change needed in international research coordination to face the challenges posed by global environmental change”. He added, “the enthusiasm and engagement of the whole community will be essential to the success of this endeavour.”

For more information on Future Earth, see: http://www.icsu.org/future-earth/

There are 7 billion people to feed on the planet today and another 2 billion are expected to join by 2050. Statistics say that each of us drinks from 2 to 4 litres of water every day, however most of the water we ‘drink’ is embedded in the food we eat: producing 1 kilo of beef for example consumes 15,000 litres of water while 1 kilo of wheat ’drinks up’ 1,500 litres.

When a billion people in the world already live in chronic hunger and water resources are under pressure we cannot pretend the problem is ‘elsewhere’. Coping with population growth and ensuring access to nutritious food to everyone call for a series of actions we can all help with:

• follow a healthier, sustainable diet;
• consume less water-intensive products;
• reduce the scandalous food wastage: 30% of the food produced worldwide is never eaten and the water used to produce it is definitively lost!
• produce more food, of better quality, with
• less water.

At all steps of the supply chain, from producers to consumers, actions can be taken to save water and ensure food for all.

And you? Do you know how much water you actually consume every day? How can you change your diet and reduce your water footprint? Join the World Water Day 2012 campaign “Water and Food Security” and find out more!

ScienceDaily (Feb. 17, 2012) — Improving natural photosynthesis to make new fuels and boost crop production is the focus of Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC) funded research presented at the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) Annual Meeting February 17. It could see us one step closer to bottling the sun’s energy or turbocharging plants to produce bumper crops.

Photosynthesis allows biological systems to take energy from the sun and use it to produce food and fuel. It is one of the most important biological processes on earth but it’s not as efficient as it could be. Natural trade-offs results in less than 1% efficiency in many important crops and so there is significant scope for improvement.

Scientists from the UK and US are working to engineer or enhance photosynthesis to benefit food and fuel production.

Professor Douglas Kell, Chief Executive of BBRSC, explains why funding this research is vital: “We are facing global challenges in food and energy security that must be addressed. Improving photosynthesis within plants, or externally using synthetic biology, would bring huge benefits.”

The artificial ‘leaf’

Professor Richard Cogdell from the University of Glasgow is taking a synthetic biology approach in a bid to create an artificial ‘leaf’ capable of converting the sun’s energy to liquid fuel.

Professor Cogdell explains: “The sun gives its energy away for free but making use of it is tricky. We can use solar panels to make electricity but it’s intermittent and difficult to store. What we are trying to do is take the energy from the sun and trap it so that it can be used when it is needed most.”

The researchers hope to use a chemical reaction similar to photosynthesis but in an artificial system. Plants take solar energy, concentrate it and use it to split apart water into hydrogen and oxygen. The oxygen is released and the hydrogen is locked into a fuel. The latest research aims to use synthetic biology to replicate the process.

Professor Cogdell added: “We are working to devise an analogous robust chemical system that could replicate photosynthesis artificially on a grand scale. This artificial leaf would create solar collectors that produce a fuel, as opposed to electricity.”

The artificial system could also improve on natural photosynthesis to make better use of the sun’s energy. By stripping back photosynthesis to a level of basic reactions, much higher levels of energy conversion could be possible.

Ultimately, success in this research could allow the development of a sustainable carbon neutral economy arresting the increasing carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere from fossil fuel burning.

‘Turbocharging’ photosynthesis

Professor Howard Griffiths, University of Cambridge, is also hoping to enhance the potential of photosynthesis by focusing on an enzyme called RuBisCO (Ribulose-1,5-bisphosphate carboxylase oxygenase). It’s a key enzyme in photosynthesis that allows plants to use atmospheric carbon dioxide to create energy-rich molecules, such as simple sugars.

Some plants have evolved mechanisms that act like biological turbochargers to concentrate carbon dioxide around the enzyme for optimal photosynthesis. This boosts growth and production. Professor Griffiths’ research is developing a deeper understanding of these biological turbochargers so that they may one day be incorporated into crops to increase yields.

Professor Griffiths explains: “We want to improve the operating efficiency of RuBisCO in crops and we believe algae may one day provide the answer. Their turbocharger is contained within a structure called the algal pyrenoid which could be utilised in a crop’s photosynthetic structures. By combining algal and plant photosynthesis to improve photosynthetic efficiency we would see an increase in agricultural productivity for the production of food and renewable energy.”

Capturing ‘wasted’ solar energy

Professor Anne Jones from Arizona State University is looking at other ways to ensure the sun’s energy is not wasted.

Cyanobacteria (bacteria that get their energy from photosynthesis) can absorb much more solar energy than they can utilize. Professor Jones’s research seeks to develop a mechanism to take advantage of this excess, wasted energy by transferring it to a fuel-producing cell.

Professor Jones said: “We want to couple the photosynthetic apparatus in one bacterial species to the fuel-producing metabolism of a second species. We could then funnel excess energy directly into fuel production. It would see two biological systems working together to make fuel from the sun’s energy.”

A simple analogy is a power station that isn’t connected to the distribution grid. Unconnected, the excess energy goes to waste. The researchers hope to create a connection that will transfer this energy to make fuel. This connection could be provided by hair-like electrically conductive filaments called pili.

Professor Jones explains: “Certain bacteria naturally grow conductive filaments called pili. These pili could be exploited to transfer energy between the cells we want to use.”

Are 3D printers not amazing enough already? Apparently some scientists at the Vienna University of Technology (TU Vienna) didn’t think so, as they have now built one that can create intricate objects as small as a grain of sand. While the ability to 3D-print such tiny items is actually not unique to the TU Vienna device, the speed at which it can do so is. According to the researchers, this makes the commercial production of things such as medical implants much more viable.

The printer uses an existing process called “two-photon lithography,” and utilizes a special type of liquid resin. That resin contains molecules which cause the liquid around them to harden into a polymer, once they’re exposed to laser light. In order to be activated, however, they must absorb two photons of that light at once. The only place where the beam is intense enough for that to happen is right at its center. This allows for great precision in the printing process, as only the very middle of the beam is the “active” part.Additionally, unlike traditional 3D printing, two-photon lithography allows for solid material to be created anywhere within the depth of the liquid resin – it isn’t limited to simply adding to a surface layer of hardened material.

Along with the resin, another one of the keys to the Vienna printer’s peppy performance is a high-speed motorized mirror system, that directs the beam of the laser within that resin. Because the mirrors are constantly in motion throughout the printing process, their acceleration and deceleration times have been minimized as much as possible, in order that more of their time can be spent on the actual creation of the object.

“The printing speed [of two-photon lithography] used to be measured in millimeters per second,” said Prof. Jürgen Stampfl. “Our device can do five meters in one second.”

As can be seen in the video below, the printer is currently pretty darn good at building things such as tiny race car models – it can make one that’s a mere 285 micrometers long in just four minutes. A bio-compatible resin is currently in the works, however, which could hopefully be used to build micro-scaffolding for a patient’s living cells to grow into, in the creation of biological tissues.

Source: TU Vienna

As humans warm the planet by releasing carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, some researchers believe that capturing CO2 and trapping it in buried rocks could lower the risk of catastrophic climate change. Now a team of researchers has shown that bacteria can help the process along. They can even be genetically modified to trap CO2 faster, keeping it underground for millions of years.

When CO2 is pumped into underground porous rocks, it combines with metal ions in the salty water that fills the rock pores and mineralizes into mineral carbonates, such as calcium carbonate (CaCO3). The process can take thousands of years. To see if they could speed things up, biochemist Jenny Cappuccio and colleagues at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory’s Center for Nanoscale Control of Geologic CO2 put a diverse mix of common bacterial species in a calcium chloride solution in the lab and then pumped in CO2. They found that calcium carbonate formed faster in areas where the bacteria were living than it did in sterile solutions. The CaCO3 also had a different mineral structure when the bacteria were around. It tended to grow into crystals of white calcite instead of amorphous black lumps (see picture). The bacteria enhanced the formation of calcite even when they were just lying around, not growing or multiplying.

Intrigued, the team guessed that the surfaces of the bacteria were somehow helping the CO2 hook up with calcium ions. To test that idea, they decided to modify one of the bacterial species, Caulobacter vibrioides, shaping its surface to attract calcium ions, and see what happened.

Cappuccio and colleagues inserted a short DNA sequence that coded for a loop of six glutamic acids—a type of amino acid—into C. vibrioides. The loop sticks out of the bacteria’s surface protein and is repeated over the entire surface of the bacteria in a hexagonal pattern. Each six-acid loop contains six negative charges. The team reasoned that this “negative loop” could fit neatly around positively charged calcium ions in water, attracting them to the surface of the bacteria and coaxing them to form CaCO3.

It worked. When the researchers pumped CO2 into the tanks where the modified bacteria were living, even more CaCO3 solidified than in tanks with unmodified bacteria. Better yet, more of it was in the crystalline calcite form, which is more stable—and likely to sequester CO2 over geological time—than amorphous CaCO3. Cappuccio reports the team’s results today at a meeting of the Biophysical Society in San Diego, California.

Robin Gerlach, a biological engineer at Montana State University in Bozeman, who was not involved with the study, calls the work “very fundamental.” He anticipates broad applications, including stabilizing soil in flood zones, isolating radioactive isotopes, and identifying early life in the fossil record by tracking changes in carbonate mineralization.

But Cappuccio is the first to admit that the results need to be demonstrated in conditions closer to real life. She wants to test her modified bacteria at higher pressures, higher temperatures, and lower pH, conditions closer to those that might be found underground. Eventually, her team wants to modify hard-to-grow extremophiles—bacteria that grow in very hot, high-pressure environments—that are more like the microorganisms that colonize the underground rock formations where CO2 would be sequestered.

Download full research summary by clicking here.

Source: ScienceNow

The Aid by Trade Foundation follows an innovative approach in development cooperation. Rather than sending money to Africa, the Cotton made in Africa Initiative follows the principles of “social business” – as the name of the Foundation says, this is aid by trade, helping people to help themselves by means of commercial activities. The African smallholder farmers who have joined this initiative are partners on an equal footing.

Win-win situation for clothing suppliers and cotton farmers

Cotton made in Africa works on the principles of a social business. That means the initiative operates in accordance with sound business methods, except that it does not aim to maximise the profits of individuals, but rather to improve the conditions of life of a large number of African cotton farmers. In order to do that, it is building an alliance of international retail companies, which have targeted demand in the global market for sustainably produced cotton, and use this material in their products. Cotton made in Africa acts in accordance with the rules of the market, avoiding subsidies or interventions in the system of world market prices, which are dependent on supply and demand as are the prices of practically all raw materials.

In return for the right to produce garments in Cotton made in Africa quality, the members of the Demand Alliance pay licence fees to the Foundation. The surplus from this is passed on in accordance with the principles of a social business to the partners who have made the label possible by means of their work, that is the smallholder farmers in Africa. This holistic approach gives a win-win situation for everyone involved – the partners of the Demand Alliance get cotton produced in accordance with a social and ecological standard, without paying a significantly higher price for it. The African smallholder farmers and their families get several advantages – they learn more efficient growing methods, so that they can improve their income by better yields, and they benefit from social projects such as improvement of schools. The planned future distribution from surpluses shall improve the income of the cotton growers.

Different initiatives, different approaches

There are many initiatives which are aimed at improving the conditions of life of the smallholder farmers involved, and which give important stimuli to enlarge the market for sustainable cotton. They take different approaches to do that. CmiA has some points in common with other initiatives for production and marketing of sustainable cotton, but also some important differences.
Whereas “fair trade” organisations guarantee cotton farmers higher prices for the raw material, Cotton made in Africa avoids the use of subsidies and artificial price increases. Cotton made in Africa provides higher incomes and better conditions of life for smallholder farmers by means of the steady growth in the international Demand Alliance, increasing the demand for African cotton. One of the special features of Cotton made in Africa is the verification system. It works through the cotton companies, and thus involves lower verification costs than certification systems that work through the individual farmers or groups of farmers. That means a large proportion of the licence fees received will in future benefit the farmers and their families directly.

Sustainable cotton growing

There are other initiatives that focus on the cultivation and sale of organic cotton. But as it is still quite expensive to grow this cotton, in many cases it is not yet able to meet the requirements of the mass market, and remains a niche product for the time being. Big retail companies want to buy the cotton raw material at the lowest possible price, because consumers are normally not willing to pay more for it. Cotton made in Africa wants to sell as much African cotton as possible in the market, to improve the conditions of life of as many smallholder farmers as possible. So CmiA cotton has to hold its own in the mass market.

Cotton made in Africa is not organic cotton. But sustainable growing of the raw material is ensured – together with its partners, the initiative gives the farmers training in modern, efficient growing methods, with awareness of pesticide use, i.e. use of the minimum amount of pesticides. Rain fed cultivation and crop rotation is used. But the initiative works in close cooperation with the organic cotton organisations, for joint work to increase the sales of sustainably grown cotton.

“Sustainability” – more than just a buzzword

For the Aid by Trade Foundation, “sustainability” comprises an economic element (Profit), a social element (People) and an ecological element (Planet). The Aid by Trade Foundation defines the following “sustainability indicators”:

• Profit – income and assets of the farmers
• People – percentage of primary-school-age children in school
• Planet – water use and soil fertility

Cotton made in Africa believes that sustainable development work can only by integrating all three of the above elements in a balanced way. Only then is it possible to achieve long-term improvement of the conditions of life of the African smallholder farmers. Cotton made in Africa checks regularly to what extent the criteria for fulfilment of these indicators are met. That makes it possible to assess development in a systematic way in the individual growing areas.

Cotton made in Africa as a mediator for social projects

Cotton made in Africa makes Public Private Partnerships (PPP) possible. The special feature of PPP projects is that they are cooperative ventures where public or government institutions work together with private-sector companies for joint accomplishment of a project, including joint funding. The initiative takes on the role of the stimulus provider and the mediator – it shows where there is need and opportunity for support, and gets the two sides together around a table in order to ensure the best possible realisation of joint projects. In the case of Cotton made in Africa, these are mostly projects to improve the social infrastructure. For example educational projects in primary education and adult education, e.g. literacy programmes.

Source: Cotton Made in Africa

Would you consider wearing a battery ? Of course not, it might seem too dangerous.
However, researchers from the Polytechnic School of Montreal in Canada under the leadership of Maksim Skorobogatiy have made the idea possible.They have created a prototype of a flexible battery that can be neatly entwined into fabrics.

Similar to the structure of a regular battery that enables it to produce electricity; the flexible battery consists of lithium titanium anodes and thermoplastic sheets of lithium iron phosphate cathode. Bracketing the materials are sheets of solid polyethylene oxide (PEO) electrodes. The layer is exposed to mild heat, allowing the materials to be stretched into singular fibers.

Strips cut from the sheet are integrated into fabrics, giving them electrical power storage capability. The conductive threads weaved into the fabric are responsible for connecting the series of batteries and so, the researchers have created smart textiles that will be very useful.

The conductive properties of the thread ensure the garment does not require liquid electrolytes, usually important for conductivity in regular batteries. Thus, it is safe for people to wear without fear of shocks.

The research team headed by Maksim Skorobogatiy, claims that the garment can provide hundreds of volts of electricity. It can feed power to charge many essential gadgets that are constantly being used in our daily life.

The technology is raising many hopes, but it will not be entering the market anytime soon until one chief flaw has been eliminated. Smart textiles has to be made waterproof to avoid problems when the material is exposed to any kind of liquids.

The biggest expectation from these smart textiles is that it can offer assistance to people with medical conditions, who depend on certain electronics. The fabric charge could power up medical electronic devices like a defibrillator that help people with cardiac arrhythmia. The defibrillator would be fully functional almost all the time and be able to deliver a dose of electricity to a faltering heart when needed.

Source: Smartplanet

The 22-member Panel, established by the Secretary-General in August 2010 to formulate a new blueprint for sustainable development and low-carbon prosperity, was co-chaired by Finnish President Tarja Halonen and South African President Jacob Zuma. The Panel’s final report, “Resilient People, Resilient Planet: A Future Worth Choosing”, contains 56 recommendations to put sustainable development into practice and to mainstream it into economic policy as quickly as possible.

• Resilient People, Resilient Planet: A Future Worth Choosing (full report, publication version)
  
• Overview of the Report
  [English (letter size paper)] [English (A4 size paper)]
  [Français]  [Русский]

Please click here to view the Press Release of the launch of the report.

Researchers have developed a soap made of iron-rich salts that could one day safely clean tainted water.

]]> http://www.flainox.com/blog/2012/02/magnetic-soap/feed/ 0 http://www.flainox.com/blog/2012/02/technology-options-for-co2-capture/ http://www.flainox.com/blog/2012/02/technology-options-for-co2-capture/#comments Wed, 15 Feb 2012 15:13:56 +0000 Flainox http://www.flainox.com/blog/?p=1576 Technology options for CO2 capture

This is the first in a series of reports that provide detail on the various capture technologies, with a primary focus on the power industry. These reports appeal not only to technical stakeholders, but also to non-technical project people and other stakeholders responsible for regulation and funding of large-scale integrated projects. The reports have been developed by the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI) for the Global CCS Institute.

By necessity, the reports have been split in terms of technology (post-combustion, pre-combustion, and oxy-combustion carbon capture), with a specific section examining each topic in detail. There is also an overview that provides an overall comparison, as well as background to allow stakeholders to interpret information in the different capture technology report sections.

Other key points raised in the overview are:

• Although current technology needs further improvements, it is extremely important to demonstrate CCS on a commercial scale as soon as possible. This is necessary for the demonstration of capture technology operating in an integrated mode in a real power plant and in a real power grid environment.
• Unless progress is made at the commercial CCS demonstration scale, it will become increasingly difficult to justify continued R&D funding on potential improvements to capture and storage technologies.
• If multiple CCS demonstrations with improved technologies are to be achieved at large scale by 2020 to proceed with commercial deployment, many technologies need to be approaching the pilot plant stage today.
• Thermal efficiency improvements in ‘host’ power plants (without carbon capture) offer an effective way to mitigate carbon emissions in their own right (2 per cent efficiency improvements result in a 5 per cent reduction in carbon emissions).

Download the report (168KB PDF)

Episode 1

Episode 2

Episode 3

Episode 4

Episode 5

Episode 6

End of the series prequel

Episode 7

Episode 8

Rising human carbon dioxide emissions may be affecting the brains and central nervous system of sea fishes with serious consequences for their survival, an international scientific team has found.

Carbon dioxide concentrations predicted to occur in the ocean by the end of this century will interfere with fishes’ ability to hear, smell, turn and evade predators, says Professor Philip Munday of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies and James Cook University.

“For several years our team have been testing the performance of baby coral fishes in sea water containing higher levels of dissolved CO2 – and it is now pretty clear that they sustain significant disruption to their central nervous system, which is likely to impair their chances of survival,” Prof. Munday says.

In their latest paper, published in the journal Nature Climate Change, Prof. Munday and colleagues report world-first evidence that high CO2 levels in sea water disrupts a key brain receptor in fish, causing marked changes in their behaviour and sensory ability.

“We’ve found that elevated CO2 in the oceans can directly interfere with fish neurotransmitter functions, which poses a direct and previously unknown threat to sea life,” Prof. Munday says.

Prof. Munday and his colleagues began by studying how baby clown and damsel fishes performed alongside their predators in CO2-enriched water. They found that, while the predators were somewhat affected, the baby fish suffered much higher rates of attrition.

“Our early work showed that the sense of smell of baby fish was harmed by higher CO2 in the water – meaning they found it harder to locate a reef to settle on or detect the warning smell of a predator fish. But we suspected there was much more to it than the loss of ability to smell.”

The team then examined whether fishes’ sense of hearing – used to locate and home in on reefs at night, and avoid them during the day – was affected. “The answer is, yes it was. They were confused and no longer avoided reef sounds during the day. Being attracted to reefs during daylight would make them easy meat for predators.”

Other work showed the fish also tended to lose their natural instinct to turn left or right – an important factor in schooling behaviour which also makes them more vulnerable, as lone fish are easily eaten by predators.

“All this led us to suspect it wasn’t simply damage to their individual senses that was going on – but rather, that higher levels of carbon dioxide were affecting their whole central nervous system.”

The team’s latest research shows that high CO2 directly stimulates a receptor in the fish brain called GABA-A, leading to a reversal in its normal function and over-excitement of certain nerve signals.

While most animals with brains have GABA-A receptors, the team considers the effects of elevated CO2 are likely to be most felt by those living in water, as they have lower blood CO2 levels normally. The main impact is likely to be felt by some crustaceans and by most fishes, especially those which use a lot of oxygen.

Prof. Munday said that around 2.3 billion tonnes of human CO2 emissions dissolve into the world’s oceans every year, causing changes in the chemical environment of the water in which fish and other species live.

“We’ve now established it isn’t simply the acidification of the oceans that is causing disruption – as is the case with shellfish and plankton with chalky skeletons – but the actual dissolved CO2 itself is damaging the fishes’ nervous systems.”

The work shows that fish with high oxygen consumption are likely to be most affected, suggesting the effects of high CO2 may impair some species worse than others – possibly including important species targeted by the world’s fishing industries.

The team’s latest paper “Near-future CO2 levels alter fish behaviour by interfering with neurotransmitter function” by Göran E. Nilsson, Danielle L. Dixson, Paolo Domenici, Mark I. McCormick, Christina Sørensen, Sue-Ann Watson, and Philip L. Munday appears in the journal Nature Climate Change.

Source: http://www.coralcoe.org.au/news_stories/braindamage.html

Predicted future CO2 levels have been found to alter sensory responses and behaviour of marine fishes. Changes include increased boldness and activity, loss of behavioural lateralization, altered auditory preferences and impaired olfactory function1, 2, 3, 4, 5. Impaired olfactory function makes larval fish attracted to odours they normally avoid, including ones from predators and unfavourable habitats1, 3. These behavioural alterations have significant effects on mortality that may have far-reaching implications for population replenishment, community structure and ecosystem function2, 6. However, the underlying mechanism linking high CO2 to these diverse responses has been unknown. Here we show that abnormal olfactory preferences and loss of behavioural lateralization exhibited by two species of larval coral reef fish exposed to high CO2 can be rapidly and effectively reversed by treatment with an antagonist of the GABA-A receptor. GABA-A is a major neurotransmitter receptor in the vertebrate brain. Thus, our results indicate that high CO2 interferes with neurotransmitter function, a hitherto unrecognized threat to marine populations and ecosystems. Given the ubiquity and conserved function of GABA-A receptors, we predict that rising CO2 levels could cause sensory and behavioural impairment in a wide range of marine species, especially those that tightly control their acid–base balance through regulatory changes in HCO3− and Cl− levels.

Carbon Dioxide Capture from the Air Using a Polyamine Based Regenerable Solid Adsorbent

Alain Goeppert, Miklos Czaun, Robert B. May, G. K. Surya Prakash, George A. Olah, and S. R. Narayanan

Loker Hydrocarbon Research Institute and Department of Chemistry, University of Southern California, University Park, Los Angeles, California 90089-1661, United States

Easy to prepare solid materials based on fumed silica impregnated with polyethylenimine (PEI) were found to be superior adsorbents for the capture of carbon dioxide directly from air. During the initial hours of the experiments, these adsorbents effectively scrubbed all the CO2 from the air despite its very low concentration.

The effect of moisture on the adsorption characteristics and capacity was studied at room temperature. Regenerative ability was also determined in a short series of adsorption/desorption cycles.

Download as PDF attachment

MIT today announced the launch of an online learning initiative internally called “MITx.” MITx will offer a portfolio of MIT courses through an online interactive learning platform that will:

• organize and present course material to enable students to learn at their own pace
• feature interactivity, online laboratories and student-to-student communication
• allow for the individual assessment of any student’s work and allow students who demonstrate their mastery of subjects to earn a certificate of completion awarded by MITx
• operate on an open-source, scalable software infrastructure in order to make it continuously improving and readily available to other educational institutions.

MIT expects that this learning platform will enhance the educational experience of its on-campus students, offering them online tools that supplement and enrich their classroom and laboratory experiences. MIT also expects that MITx will eventually host a virtual community of millions of learners around the world.

MIT will couple online learning with research on learning

MIT’s online learning initiative is led by MIT Provost L. Rafael Reif, and its development will be coupled with an MIT-wide research initiative on online teaching and learning under his leadership.

“Students worldwide are increasingly supplementing their classroom education with a variety of online tools,” Reif said. “Many members of the MIT faculty have been experimenting with integrating online tools into the campus education. We will facilitate those efforts, many of which will lead to novel learning technologies that offer the best possible online educational experience to non-residential learners. Both parts of this new initiative are extremely important to the future of high-quality, affordable, accessible education.”

Offering interactive MIT courses online to learners around the world builds upon MIT’s OpenCourseWare, a free online publication of nearly all of MIT’s undergraduate and graduate course materials. Now in its 10th year, OpenCourseWare includes nearly 2,100 MIT courses and has been used by more than 100 million people.

MIT President Susan Hockfield said, “MIT has long believed that anyone in the world with the motivation and ability to engage MIT coursework should have the opportunity to attain the best MIT-based educational experience that Internet technology enables. OpenCourseWare’s great success signals high demand for MIT’s course content and propels us to advance beyond making content available. MIT now aspires to develop new approaches to online teaching.”

OCW will continue to share course materials from across the MIT curriculum, free of charge.

MITx online learning tools to be freely available

MIT will make the MITx open learning software available free of cost, so that others — whether other universities or different educational institutions, such as K-12 school systems — can leverage the same software for their online education offerings.

“Creating an open learning infrastructure will enable other communities of developers to contribute to it, thereby making it self-sustaining,” said Anant Agarwal, an MIT professor of electrical engineering and computer science and director of MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL). “An open infrastructure will facilitate research on learning technologies and also enable learning content to be easily portable to other educational platforms that will develop. In this way the infrastructure will improve continuously as it is used and adapted.” Agarwal is leading the development of the open platform.

President Hockfield called this “a transformative initiative for MIT and for online learning worldwide. On our residential campus, the heart of MIT, students and faculty are already integrating on-campus and online learning, but the MITx initiative will greatly accelerate that effort. It will also bring new energy to our longstanding effort to educate millions of able learners across the United States and around the world. And in offering an open-source technological platform to other educational institutions everywhere, we hope that teachers and students the world over will together create learning opportunities that break barriers to education everywhere.”

Source: http://web.mit.edu

BEIJING — As the Chinese government struggles to meet several of its own environmental targets to 2015, China’s textile industry could face a new ‘green tax’, which together with higher wages and a slump in exports, puts additional pressure on an industry that is already facing big challenges.

Within the last few weeks, the State Council of China has revealed that it is preparing a new ‘green tax’ for the country’s giant manufacturing sector in a bid to meet its own overall environmental targets and commitments as part of its 12th five-year plan to 2015. And in a bid to boost its chances of hitting these targets, China will now “actively promote reforms in environment related taxes” and “conduct research regarding the collection of an environmental tax’’, a policy note carried by the state-run Xinhua news agency has reported.
The move suggests that the debut of a ‘green tax’ is now officially on the Chinese government’s agenda and that reform will make substantial progress during the country’s 12th Five-Year Plan period, said the official state media organization.

Calls for the debut of an environmental tax have grown considerably in recent years, as China’s explosive development in the manufacturing sector has taken a heavy toll on its resources and environment. “The stress on environmental tax reforms in the guideline comes as China faces a grim situation in meeting its emission control target,” Bai Jingming, an official from the Ministry of Finance said.

In a blueprint of China’s energy-saving programs, China says it aims to cut energy consumption per 10,000 yuan ($1,570) of gross domestic product (GDP) by 16 per cent by 2015, saving 670 million tons of coal equivalent by that time.

The move comes as China’s government also promises to evaluate the environmental performance of listed companies and on November 16 it listed an investigation into the environmental responsibility of more than 2,000 A-share listed companies. The evaluation “will be based on the most prevalent international standards and conducted by third parties,” said government sources, and the results are planned to be released in a report in December 2012, along with a list of the most environment-friendly companies as an example for future industrial development.

Meanwhile, last month, the Vice-chairman of Federal of Hong Kong Industries said that minimum wages in the Pearl River Delta region are likely to go up by 16 – 20% from January 1st 2012.

“This means textile companies here can expect a dramatic rise in labour costs and together with higher raw material prices,” it said, and could result in significant business failures for firms that are “highly labour intensive and produce basic textile products”.

]]> http://www.flainox.com/blog/2011/12/china-manufacturing-tax/feed/ 0 http://www.flainox.com/blog/2011/12/arvind-spring-denim-collection/ http://www.flainox.com/blog/2011/12/arvind-spring-denim-collection/#comments Thu, 15 Dec 2011 08:57:33 +0000 Flainox http://www.flainox.com/blog/?p=1319

Arvind Spring launches Summer 2013 Denim Collection

Arvind launches its Spring and Summer – 2013 for European Brands at Denim by Premiere Vision, Paris. The collection brings the best in Denim for Spring and Summer – 2013. Some key products to be showcased  by Arvind are:

• Light weight Shirtings in Linen Blends and Light weight cross denims for loose bottoms.
• A set of Soft stretch and power stretch in cold grey and black. Cement color, grey coat and hints of black are the key ashen look of the season.
• The 80-ies inspired indigo is still the season’s favorite in rigid and stretch.
• For the contortionist they have power stretch in soft hand, rich full blue and red cast sateen.
• The Summer Luxe has very refined light weight rigid and stretch along with new slubby light weight.
• Sensual Denims are bright indigo, open weave in Excel stretch. Other sensual denims are soft power stretches and new wax touch.
• The Time -Tested Products are in 80’s inspired color in modern construction, super dark indigo cross denim, refined one way slubby look and real vintage, grey cast, natural streaky denim. Soft Streaky Denim features in 11 Ozs and 9Ozs.

Arvind shall also be presenting  the Excel Denim in Trend Area at Denim by PV on 30th Nov.  Arvind Denim has a very strong positioning on ‘ Sustainability’. Various products like Organic Denims , BCI cotton based denims, Recycled cotton and Recycled Polyester based denims are an important part of Arvind Denim portfolio. This commitment to sustainability also had led Arvind to develop its Excel Denim in collaboration with Birla Excel. The third generation Cellulose fiber – Excel is made from Wood Pulp, a natural and renewable resource. Arvind and Birla claim the following eco benefits of Excel Fiber : “Excel Plantations have higher air purification per hectare of land in comparison to cotton. Solar heat absorption prevents generation of black holes. The water used for producing per unit kg of Excel fiber is significantly lesser than compared to the water used for producing any other cellulosic fiber”.

Arvind Denim True Properties

Excel denim offers a unique combination of sustainability and fashion and is being added to collections of major brands worldwide.

Arvind shall also be presenting their Future Denims at the show which includes the:

• Authentic Denims
• Modern Denims

Authentic Denim includes denim from Organic Cotton, dyed in Natural Plant Indigo and woven on the vintage shuttle loom with selvedge. Denims range from a true authentic heavy weight 14.8 Ozs, Selvedge toa Natural Indigo with Natural Indigo fill to one with a Natural Linen. All of them are very comfortable to wear and age naturally.

Arvind Spring Denim Collection

Modern Denim includes denim made with all modern technologies available. New age yarn design, new combinations of dyeing, compact weave constructions, hybrid stretch combinations and super-tech coatings.

Source: denimsandjeans.com

With Google Earth you can view climate change scenarios, interact with narrated tours, investigate deforestation, and even dive into the depths of the oceans.

]]> http://www.flainox.com/blog/2011/12/google-earth-climate-change/feed/ 0 http://www.flainox.com/blog/2011/12/vintage-denim-and-environment/ http://www.flainox.com/blog/2011/12/vintage-denim-and-environment/#comments Mon, 12 Dec 2011 14:05:41 +0000 Flainox http://www.flainox.com/blog/?p=1340 Vintage Denim – At What Cost To Environment ?

Vintage Denim – At What Cost To Environment ?

Readymade garment sector is booming world wide & specially in 3rd world countries, and garment processing has emerged as one of the important production routes towards meeting quick changing demands of the fashion market. In this article we look at processing of denim garments & its impact on environment.

Brands seeking to improve their environmental credentials can look beyond the use of organic cotton to a range of new products and technologies that lower the levels of chemicals, stones residue, rivets, buttons, hand tags, water and energy needed to manufacture denim fabric & garments.

The spread of denim culture, all over the world brought with it a trend of fast changing fashions. One after another, several washes were introduced such as stone wash, acid wash, moonwash, monkey wash, show wash, frosted wash, white wash, mud wash, distressed wash etc. Over the last 6-8 years, India has probably seen the most dramatic and exciting changes in the washing of denim garments.

Although the denim industry has long been known to be resource intensive, a full picture wasn’t known publicly until Levi Strauss & Co. shared results of its life cycle assessment on what went into making one pair of its iconic Levi’s 501 style.

Examining the 2006 production year for jeans headed to the U.S. market, Levi’s found that making one pair of 501s required almost 920 gallons of water, 400 mega joules of energy and expelled 32 kilograms of carbon dioxide. Levi’s said this was equivalent to running a garden hose for 106 minutes, driving 78 miles and powering a computer for 556 hours.

Faded, ripped scrunched and ‘distressed’ to the ultimate degree are very costly denim garments for well-known brands cost USD 100 plus for a pair! However, hot this distressed denim might appear on the runway there is a more depressing tale to tell apart from the overpricing, regarding the production of denim in general and the techniques and practices employed in the stonewashing and distressing process with various chemicals.

There are huge ecological and ethical concerns as this business is an enormous affair. To give an example , more than 520 million pairs of jeans are sold in USA alone each year. The majority of which will have been coloured with dyes, acid bathed, sandblasted and chemically doused to give the aged , worn in look we all so desire.

• The life cycle of denim starts with the cotton boll, amid the vast cotton crops recorded as covering 2.4% of the world’s farm land. If not organically grown the valuable crops will be drenched in toxic pesticides to protect them from insects and weeds. Organophosphates are used which are poisonous and ultimately pass into the soil and reek havoc with wildlife.
• Cotton fibres are spun into yarn and the denim yarn is “sized” using starch to give it strength and “mercerized” in caustic soda. Starch is biodegradable but if released into the rivers the microbes that devour it also consume the oxygen. This in turn kills off the aquatic life in the water as does the toxic caustic soda.
• Other shocking facts are that it takes 1,500 gallons of water to produce 1.5 lbs of cotton needed to make one pair of jeans.
• To achieve the correct blue shade, the denim in doused in vats of synthetic indigo. Environmental regulations are not upheld in many developing countries. Apart from the initial dyeing the stone washing or distressing of the denim is achieved by repeated washing and rinsing and bleaching, chemical blasting with such toxic substances such silica, dye stripped or bleached with potassium permanganate. All toxic to wildlife if let into the waterways and to the workers who breathe it in.
• Very recently we came to know similar situation of untreated water was going in to rivers & waste was spread every where on streets in Lesotho. Worldwide many water sources and land are affected by untreated water from Laundries & Denim plants.

Is Anything Can Be Or Being Done To Control The Damage

1. There are  many up and coming companies producing friendly denim using organic cotton and more eco friendly ways of distressing the fabric, such as using ozone to fade the denim It is the responsibility of the consumer to search these enlightened businesses out by checking for labels such as Fair Trade and Global Organic Standard certification and the Recycling logo.
2. Some designers have solved the problem in another way by recycling old denim, naturally aged and worn by time, and re-styled and modelled it into new and inventive fashion designs. Denim seems to be an ongoing favorites on the fashion scene and as such needs to clean up its act totally to keep in step with the environmental and ethical requirements that are so rightly being put into place as a global fashion and textile effort.
3. There are many eco friendly ways being introduced & keep coming. Reducing chemicals consumption and Stone usages , Enzymes being introduced in each process step.. desizing , Abrasion & now its being used bleaching enzymes also…. these are bio degradable products hence eco friendly. At fabric front Denim Mills started producing quicker wash down denim to have faster distress look with minimum efforts & usage of chemicals.
4. Many chemical companies making their products keeping in mind the Global Restricted substances of toxic chemicals to produce environment friendly products. All most all leading brands started critical testing’s of their merchandise through third party testing for these banned chemicals.A large chemical company – Clariant – recently introduced a product – Advanced Denim – which it claims water usage by 60% during dye process.
5. Buildinggreen.com is using denim waste to create cotton insulation products.

However, these steps are far few and make hardly any impact. It is only when the governments the world over realize the impact of denim that we will see real innovations towards creating products which will help in reduction of the same.

Source: denimsandjeans.com

The financial crisis of 2009 saw the developing world’s carbon emissions from consumption shoot past the developed world’s years earlier than expected, new research shows

The carbon footprint from consumption in the developing world has overtaken that of the developed world, according to research published on Monday. The change happened years earlier than expected due to the fact that the developing world’s emissions were largely unaffected by the global financial crisis.

Emissions within the borders of developing countries outstripped those emitted in developed countries (as defined by the Kyoto Protocol’s ‘Annex B’) in around 2005. But the rich world still accounted for the majority of the carbon footprint of consumption due to the goods it imports from China and other developing economies.

Crowds outside an Apple store in Beijing in 2011; the developing world's carbon emissions from consumption have now overtaken the developed world's. Photograph: ChinaFotoPress/Getty Images

Experts expected this situation to remain unchanged until around 2015, but the research in the journal Nature Climate Change shows that developing nations came to represent the majority of the carbon footprint of global consumption in around 2009, years earlier than expected.

The shift happened as a result of the markedly different way that emissions were affected by the global financial crisis in rich and poor countries. As the chart above shows, whereas the developed world’s emissions fell steeply in 2009 before bouncing back to a lower level in 2010, the developing world shot up throughout the period, apparently unaffected by the financial crisis.

Of course, this revelation doesn’t make individuals in the developing world more responsible for climate change than those in the developed world. On the contrary, the footprint per person is still far greater in the rich world, with its much smaller population, than in the highly populous developing world.

Furthermore, the rich world still has a larger historical footprint, having emitted around 73% of the CO2 since 1850, according to [figures from the WRI. Free log-in required]. Much of that CO2 is still in the air and driving current global warming.

Nonetheless, the fact that developing nations have come to represent the majority of the world’s carbon footprint touches on some of the key tensions in the UN global climate talks – in particular, the question of whether any deal needs to include binding emissions commitments from China and others large emerging economies.

The figures also highlights the increasing fragmentation of the traditional “developing world” category into different groups, including the poorest countries with minimal carbon emissions and the larger transitional economies with substantial carbon footprints.

The paper also examines how the recent financial turmoil compares to four previous economic crises in terms of impact on emissions.

How emissions have bounced back after economic crises. Source: Nature Climate Change

Worryingly, as the chart above shows, whereas previous recessions appear to have reduced the rate of emissions growth for decades to come, the current crisis has seen a full rebound to the recent rising trend within two years. In other words, thanks to strong growth in emerging economies, recent economic woes appear to have had almost zero impact on global carbon emissions.

Source: guardian.co.uk

Capturing CO2 Too Costly to Combat Climate Change?

Since a buildup of humanmade carbon dioxide is causing the planet to warm, why not just suck this greenhouse gas straight out of the atmosphere? That’s one strategy scientists have proposed to combat climate change. But a new analysis suggests that the approach may be neither economical nor practical.

Before widespread industrial activity began spewing CO2 into the air in the mid-1700s, atmospheric concentrations of the gas were around 280 parts per million (ppm). They now exceed 390 ppm and are growing rapidly, about 2 ppm per year. Rather than reducing emissions of the greenhouse gas by shifting to carbon-neutral sources of energy—wind, solar, and nuclear power, for example—and then letting vegetation and the oceans gradually absorb CO2 in the long term, humans could lower concentrations more rapidly by actively pulling CO2 from the air, some scientists have suggested.

In such a scheme, researchers would leave large vats out in the open, filled with solutions of sodium hydroxide, potassium hydroxide, or chemicals called amines. Or, the CO2-laden air could be forcefully bubbled through such reservoirs. When CO2 in the air reacts with these solutions, it becomes trapped in carbonate-rich compounds. Scientists can later heat these compounds and release the CO2 and dispose of it, typically by injecting it into deep geologic formations beneath impermeable rock, such as natural reservoirs of oil and natural gas.

The approach is a form of carbon capture, which also includes strategies for grabbing CO2 before it gets into the air, from smokestacks, for example. Carbon capture itself is part of a suite of ideas, dubbed geoengineering, in which scientists hope to use technology to curb global warming. (Other ideas involve schemes such as seeding the seas with zillions of tiny bubbles to reflect sunlight back into space.)

Previous studies have hinted that capturing CO2 directly from the air could cost a few hundred dollars per metric ton of CO2. At a rate of $300 per metric ton, that would total more than $10 trillion to completely counteract the estimated 33.5 billion tons of CO2 emissions generated by humans—a tremendous cost, yet one that is still economically viable. But Kurt House, a geoscientist with C12 Energy in Berkeley, California, and his colleagues suggest online today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that slurping a ton of CO2 from the atmosphere may actually be much more expensive.

Among other techniques, the researchers estimated the costs of this form of carbon capture by comparing it with the price of scrubbing other pollutants such as oxides of sulfur and nitrogen from industrial emissions before they leave a power plant’s smokestack. Although pulling CO2 from ambient air rather than a smokestack, where CO2 concentrations can be as high as 12%, would be more difficult, it is technically possible. The problem, House says, is that it’s energetically as well as economically expensive to do so. Capturing CO2 once it’s in the atmosphere takes about four times the energy generated by burning the fossil fuel in the first place, he notes.

Overall, just to capture CO2 would cost at least $1100 per ton, the researchers estimate. That’s a total price tag of at least $33 trillion just to hold atmospheric concentrations of CO2 steady Then, once the gas is captured, even more energy must be expended to compress the gas into a liquid and then dispose of it. And unless the energy needed to drive these processes are carbon-neutral—that is, unless they produce no CO2 emissions of their own—the net result might add CO2 to the atmosphere, not reduce it.

“I agree that this [carbon-capture] process would be expensive now, and I agree that we need clean sources of energy to do this,” says Robert Socolow, a physicist at Princeton University. “Today, we don’t know how to do this at low cost, but there’s work that can be done that might reduce costs significantly,” he adds.

The analytical techniques used by House and his colleagues are perfectly sensible, but there’s a lot of uncertainty associated with them, says David Keith, a physicist at Harvard University. As a result, he notes, costs to pull a ton of CO2 from the air could range anywhere from several thousand dollars to as low as $100. Still, “at this point, carbon capture [from ambient air] is a very conceptual environment,” says Keith, who is also president of a start-up company developing such technology. “To really know what it costs, someone actually has to build it.”

House and his colleagues note that for the near future, it’s probably better to avoid releasing CO2 into the atmosphere in the first place. Between now and 2050, they say, carbon emissions can be captured—using more-developed techniques such as scrubbing the gas before it ever leaves the smokestack, for instance—for less than $300 per ton. But the best approach, many suggest, is simply to find greener sources of energy.

Source: news.sciencemag.org

Flainox was there!

Ecomondo is the biggest expo of green technologies and new lifestyles, a special forum where businesses in the environmental and sustainability sectors can meet institutional stakeholders, trade associations, local/central governments, NGOs and all types of industries and goods manufacturers, to discuss new models of economic growth driven by a focus on innovation, clean technologies and a new approach to urbanization and social contexts.

A dedicated forum for KEY MARKET PLAYERS to meet and share experiences on the green economy.

An unrivalled source of information and training on ecologically sustainable materials and energy efficiency for recycling and waste recovery operators.

An exemplary plan of action for businesses and local bodies that have based their business, competitiveness and quality standards on sustainability.

A single point of interaction to discuss the requirements and best ways of doing ETHICAL, RESPONSIBLE BUSINESS.

Environment Minister Stefania Prestigiacomo attended the opening ceremony with official authorities on Wednesday 9 November.

The sharp rise in the numbers registering to attend is a sign that Italian businesses have embraced the green economy (and the importance of the environment) as an important new challenge for their business and also a means of gaining an added competitive edge.

There has also been a positive response from the green equipment.

INTEXUSA INTELLIGENT INNOVATION FOR SUSTAINABLE TEXTILE PRODUCTION. FLAINOX HAS PARTICIPATED TO THE PROJECT.

Optimisation of dyeing processes with UltraSonic Technology and its integration with automatic on-line control

The usage of auxiliares (dyestuffs, solvents,…) must be NOT necessary, where it’s possible, and not dangerous if used.
GREEN CHEMISTRY Energy and water comsumption MUST be reduced.

Wool fibre at FE-SEM, Field Emission Scanning Electron Microscope, before and after UStreatment.

New research from UC Davis scientists reveals how useful a self-cleaning fabric – more specifically, cotton – can be for many professions. The fabric is able to fight off bacteria as a result of its production of hydrogen peroxide.

“When we put the chemical on the fabric and then put it into the light, hydrogen peroxide is produced,” said Gang Sun, professor of textiles and clothing at UC Davis.

According to Sun, the chemical he and his colleagues used is called 2-anthraquinone carboxylic acid, which is able to bond chemically to fabrics. He said that one of the advantages of this chemical is that it can be put into the dyes that are used in clothing, allowing for an easier method of incorporation of the chemical with the fabric.

“When the molecules in the chemical absorb different electromagnetic wavelengths, they become excited and jump to becoming excited molecules, which allows for interaction with oxygen,” Sun said.

He said that it is this interaction in which molecules become excited as a result of absorbing visible light that produces the bacteria-fighting effect.

“The fact that it is environmentally-friendly and doesn’t need anything but light means we can do this to other polymers as well,” Sun said.

He believes that there could be many more applications for this chemical, even though durability of the chemical on the fabrics is uncertain. One of the concerns is that scientists do not know how much light the fabric can be exposed to before the chemical’s effects begin to dwindle.

“We tested it under certain conditions, but not all. One of problems is that every time you expose it to light, the durability and efficacy may be reduced,” Sun said.

Ning Liu, a doctoral researcher in Sun’s group, said that the efficacy of the chemical could decline at a faster rate for people who work outside.

“It is expected that the chemical will lose its function faster for people who work outside because sunlight is much more powerful,” Liu said.

Even though the chemical is expected to lose its function faster in outside environments, it is also the place where the chemical is expected to produce its best effects.

“Normal indoor lighting works, but the chemical works better when outside because the chemical becomes more powerful as a result of the sunlight,” Liu said.

In terms of the fabric being washable, Liu said that the fabric could be washed without worry, since the chemical is bound to the fabric.

She believes that this self-cleaning fabric can be of particular use for the medical and agricultural industries.

“It is advantageous for farmers who come in contact with pesticides, but also for medical professionals,” Liu said.

According to the California Department of Public Health, Healthcare-Associated Infections (HAIs) often plague patients and hospitals.

“[HAIs] are the most common complication of hospital care, occurring in approximately one in every 20 patients,” states the California Department of Public Health website.

According to Liu, some other good uses of the self-cleaning fabric might be as curtains that surround beds in hospitals or even as the fabric in the living room couch – something which could prove especially useful for households with children.

“It has many applications – we’re not sure what the best fit is,” Liu said.

With Liu’s estimate of the self-cleaning fabric becoming commercially available in three to five years, it is possible that the public may receive an added method of protection against infections.

ERIC C. LIPSKY can be reached science@theaggie.org.

The course aims to introduce the participants into the wonderful world of natural dyes will use the historical dyeing plants dried and wild plants collected in the territory; dye yarn and fabric in various fibers: wool, silk, cotton, linen, etc.

we’ll see how the color will change with the variation of mordent, the pH of the bath.

will dye also in INDIGO.

Stefano Panconesi, more than thirty years dealing with natural dyes: courses, participation in conferences, consulting in the textile industry.

INTRODUCTORY COURSE ON NATURAL DYEING

FRIDAY 4 nov

4 p.m. Course presentation – A brief history of natural dyeing over the centuries; Today’s market for natural dyes
8 p.m. Dinner
9:30 p.m. Video on natural dyes in the world

SATURDAY 5 nov

8 a.m. Breakfast
9 a.m. Preparation of the fibres to be dyed: wool, cotton, silk.
Dyeing with COCCINIGL to get red with WELD to get yellow
1 p.m. Lunch
2:30 p.m. Preparation of the fibres to be dyed: wool, cotton, silk
Dyeing with COSMOS to get brown with LOGWOOD to get purple
8 p.m. Dinner
9:30 p.m. Video on indigo dyeing in the world

SUNDAY 6 nov

8 a.m. Breakfast
9:30 a.m. Preparation of the fibres to be dyed: wool, cotton, silk
Double dyeing with colour modification through addition of salt, change in pH, etc.
11:30 a.m. Creation of a colour chart with the previously dyed sampled
1 p.m. Lunch

Fees for the course

Association 2011 € 15,00
Course Fee € 200,00
Board and lodging €100,00 in twin-bed room

ASSOCIAZIONE CASA CLEMENTINA
via Italia, 6 13843 Pettinengo (BIELLA)
Phone +39 348 3326570
casaclementina@alice.it

In the Antarctic, essentially complete removal of lower-stratospheric ozone currently results in an ozone hole every year, whereas in the Arctic, ozone loss is highly variable and has until now been much more limited. Here we demonstrate that chemical ozone destruction over the Arctic in early 2011 was – for the first time in the observational record – comparable to that in the Antarctic ozone hole.

Unusually long-lasting cold conditions in the Arctic lower stratosphere led to persistent enhancement in ozone-destroying forms of chlorine and to unprecedented ozone loss, which exceeded 80 per cent over 18-20 kilometres altitude. Our results show that Arctic ozone holes are possible even with temperatures much milder than those in the Antarctic. We cannot at present predict when such severe Arctic ozone depletion may be matched or exceeded.

Or maybe it’s a taste of excitement, because it seems entirely possible that the trailer-truck-size machine that he’s leaning up against is actually going to work.

“It’s amazing to see all this talk and paper get turned into hardware,” he says. “I really love it.”

Keith is on a patch of blacktop on the campus of the University of Calgary, in Alberta, Canada, where until very recently he has been a professor. Now his academic hat is Harvard, where he is both a professor of public policy and a professor of applied physics. His hard hat is a little start-up company, called Carbon Engineering, housed on the Calgary campus. And that company is building a machine that can actually suck carbon dioxide from the air.

The technology at the core of the device is not new. “People have done this for a long time,” he says. “There were commercial processes that took CO₂ out of the air, in fact, in the 1950s, so there’s no mystery that we can do it.”

But those companies were just extracting small quantities of carbon dioxide for industrial purposes. Keith is after a much more important question, one that is universal for anyone trying to develop a technology: Can it be done affordably on a grand scale?

“So our interest is in building full-scale commercial systems that would take tens of thousands of tons — or more — of CO₂ out of the air,” he says.

‘Not As Hard As You Think’

Taking on climate change is in part personal for Keith. This wiry man has skied across many hundreds of miles of the rapidly melting Arctic, so he knows more than most people what’s at stake.

Getting this project to work is also an intellectual challenge. “It’s fun to go after problems where there’s a wide public consensus in one direction that is sort of thin, where people haven’t thought about it very much,” he says.

Mr Forrest, chief executive of the iron ore miner Fortescue Metals, held up China as an exemplary economy that was turning its back on communism by lowering resources taxes.

”In China right now there’s a fierce debate about how to lower their resources tax to encourage the mining industry,” he told an ”axe the tax” protest before a speech by the Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd.

”I ask you which communist is turning capitalist and which capitalist is turning communist?”

Analysts in China were perplexed by Mr Forrest’s comments, as China is in fact taking steps towards imposing a resources tax, which Beijing sees as a means of conserving resources, slowing environmental destruction and rebalancing an economy that delivers bloated corporate profits at the expense of households.

“We didn’t have any taxes before. It was tiny, like 0.3 per cent on some resources, and now people are starting to think we should charge,” said Huang Yiping, professor of economics at the China Centre for Economic Research at Peking University. “A resources tax will definitely be imposed in the next five years.”

China Daily, the Communist Party’s main English-language newspaper, has held up Australia as an example for China to follow.

“A hint to this nation’s policymakers: if they are looking for guidelines to the long-awaited tax reform, take a good look at Australia’s latest plan to increase worker pension funds with a new tax on resource projects,” the paper said on May 26.

On June 1 China’s unveiled its first resources tax, at a rate of 5 per cent on fossil fuels in Xinjiang, as a way of retaining some of the region’s mineral wealth in local hands.

Since then a vice-premier, Li Keqiang, has advocated a national resources tax in a speech published in Seeking Truth, the Communist Party’s leading theory magazine.

Officials have hinted that Xinjiang will be a pilot for a resource taxes that will gradually be imposed on all mineral resources.

Chinese industry leaders are lobbying officials to obstruct the proposed tax, as they are in Australia.

Zeng Shaojin, vice-president of the  China Mining Association, said taxes on iron ore should be reduced to stimulate domestic suppliers and reduce dependence on imports.

The vice secretary of the China Iron & Steel Association (CISA), Qi Xiangdong, said he had lobbied government to reduce iron ore taxes.

Mr Forrest’s comments yesterday were not the first time an Australian mining billionaire has levelled the “communist” charge. Last week the maverick Queenslander Clive Palmer said the Treasurer, Wayne Swan, was a “communist” and a “goose”.

Nor is it the first time Mr Forrest has got China upside down when it has suited his interests. Last August he said CISA had the power to implement a vague investment deal.

”CISA was once viewed as a dog with a lot of bark. I think it is now viewed across China as a dog with a lot of bark and bite,” said Mr Forrest, after agreeing with CISA to a slightly larger price cut of 35 per cent on the condition of up to $US6 billion in finance from an unnamed Chinese institution.

One of Mr Forrest’s own advisers told the BusinessDay at the time: “Mr Forrest does not understand China – the China Iron & Steel Association has nothing to do with Chinese financial institutions.”

The proposed investment never materialised, and CISA has been ignored or overruled in China on every substantial policy matter since.

Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/business/now-china-mulls-tax-on-resources-20100609-xwwn.html#ixzz1bDFg7Lfw

Right now, 10 countries — including the U.S., China and Russia — are responsible for 80 percent of the world’s carbon dioxide emissions. The United States is the world’s second largest emitter (China ranks no. 1), sending around 5.8 million metric tons of CO2 into the atmosphere a year. That’s the equivalent to a year’s worth of greenhouse gas emissions from 1.1 billion average passenger vehicles. Below, a look at today’s big CO2 emitters — and projected emissions giants in 2030.

Countries With Top Coal Reserves

Across the globe, coal reserves are the most carbon-intensive energy resource.

Source: World Resources Institute’s Climate Analysis Indicators Tool, 2009re

Atmospheric CO2 Concentrations

Concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere are much higher than they were in the industrial era, and have been increasing steadily over the last half century. The yearly dips represent seasonal changes.

Source: Scripps Institution of Oceanography (SIO)

CO2 Emissions Compared With GDP

About half the electricity used in the United States comes from burning coal. China depends on coal even more. Burning coal puts out more greenhouse gases than does any other single source of electricity.

Source: World Resources Institute’s Climate Analysis Indicators Tool, 2009; CIA World Factbook

For more information and details please read the original article on NPR.org: http://tinyurl.com/62htd75