Selection of Marine Yeasts for the Generation of Single Cell Protein from Prawn-shell Waste

Marine yeasts (33 strains) were isolated from the coastal and offshore waters off Cochin. The isolates were identified and then characterized for the utilization of starch, gelatin, lipid, cellulose, urea, pectin, lignin, chitin and prawn-shell waste. Most of the isolates were Candida species. Based on the biochemical characterization, four potential strains were selected and their optimum pH and NaCI concentration for growth were determined. These strains were then inoculated into prawn-shell waste and SCP (single cell protein) generation was noted in terms of the increase in protein content of the final product.

Construction waste management in India

The management of construction waste is important today. The scarcity in the availability of aggregate for the production of concrete is one of the important problems facing by the construction industry. Appropriate use of the construction waste is a solution to the fast degradation of virgin raw materials in the construction industry. This paper enlightens the importance of reduce, reuse and recycle (3R) concept for managing the construction waste in India

Sustainable Solid Waste Management Through Ecological Footprint Analysis – A Solution To Kochi City, India

Kochi, the commercial capital of Kerala, South India and second most important city next to Mumbai on the Western coast is a land having a wide variety of residential environments. Due to rapid population growth, changing lifestyles, food habits and living standards, institutional weaknesses, improper choice of technology and public apathy, the present pattern of the city can be classified as that of haphazard growth with typical problems characteristics of unplanned urban development especially in the case of solid waste management. To have a better living condition for us and our future generations, we must know where we are now and how far we need to go. We, each individual must calculate how much nature we use and compare it to how much nature we have available. This can be achieved by applying the concept of ecological footprint. Ecological footprint analysis (EFA) is a quantitative tool that represents the ecological load imposed on earth by humans in spatial terms. The aim of applying EFA to Kochi city is to quantify the consumption and waste generation of a population and to compare it with the existing biocapacity. By quantifying the ecological footprint we can formulate strategies to reduce the footprint and there by having a sustainable living. The paper discusses the various footprint components of Kochi city and in detail analyses the waste footprint of the residential areas using waste footprint analyzer. An attempt is also made to suggest some waste foot print reduction strategies thereby making the city sustainable as far as solid waste management is concerned.

Sustainable Solid Waste Management Solutions To Kochi City, India, Through The Environmental Management Tool Ecological Footprint Analysis

Solid waste management nowadays is an important environmental issue in country like India. Statistics show that there has been substantial increase in the solid waste generation especially in the urban areas. This trend can be ascribed to rapid population growth, changing lifestyles, food habits, and change in living standards, lack of financial resources, institutional weaknesses, improper choice of technology and public apathy towards municipal solid waste. Waste is directly related to the consumption of resources and dumping to the land. Ecological footprint analysis – an impact assessment environment management tool makes a relationship between two factors- the amount of land required to dispose per capita generated waste. Ecological footprint analysis is a quantitative tool that represents the ecological load imposed on the earth by humans in spatial terms. By quantifying the ecological footprint we can formulate strategies to reduce the footprint and there by having a sustainable living. In this paper, an attempt is made to explore the tool Ecological Footprint Analysis with special emphasis to waste generation. The paper also discusses and analyses the waste footprint of Kochi city,India. An attempt is also made to suggest strategies to reduce the waste footprint thereby making the city sustainable, greener and cleaner

Studies on fish waste management practices in Aroor Seafood Industrial Belt, Kerala and conversion of seafood waste into a liquid plant growth supplement

This study was materialized to analyze the management issues regarding the seafood processing waste generated including its impact on the coastal community in one of the important seafood hubs of India Aroor Seafood Industrial Belt Alappuzha District Kerala The area has witnessed serious pollution issues related to seafood waste and seldom has any action been implemented by either the polluters or the preventers Further this study is also intended to suggest a low cost eco friendly method for utilizing the bulk quantity of seafood solid waste generated in the area for the promotion of organic farming The high nutritional value of seafood enables the subsequent offal to be considered as an excellent source for plant nutrition The liquid silage accepted worldwide as the cheapest and practical solution for rendering fish waste in bulk for production of livestock feed is adopted in this study to develop foliar fertilizer formulations from various seafood waste The effect of seafood foliar sprays is demonstrated by field studies on two plant varieties such as Okra and Amaranthus

Utilization of waste expanded polystyrene: Blends with silica-filled natural rubber

Expanded polystyrene (EPS) constitutes a considerable part of thermoplastic waste in the environment in terms of volume. In this study, this waste material has been utilized for blending with silica-reinforced natural rubber (NR). The NR/EPS (35/5) blends were prepared by melt mixing in a Brabender Plasticorder. Since NR and EPS are incompatible and immiscible a method has been devised to improve compatibility. For this, EPS and NR were initially grafted with maleic anhydride (MA) using dicumyl peroxide (DCP) to give a graft copolymer. Grafting was confirmed by Fourier Transform Infrared Spectroscopy (FTIR) spectroscopy. This grafted blend was subsequently blended with more of NR during mill compounding. Morphological studies using Scanning Electron Microscopy (SEM) showed better dispersion of EPS in the compatibilized blend compared to the noncompatibilized blend. By this technique, the tensile strength, elongation at break, modulus, tear strength, compression set and hardness of the blend were found to be either at par with or better than that of virgin silica filled NR compound. It is also noted that the thermal properties of the blends are equivalent with that of virgin NR. The study establishes the potential of this method for utilising waste EPS

Pretreatment Of Agricultural Waste With Pleurotus Sp. For Ethanol Production

Bioethanol is a liquid fuel obtained from fermentation of sugar/starch crops. Lignocellulosic biomass being less expensive is considered a future alternative for the food crops. One of the main challenges for the use of lignocellulosics is the development of an efficient pre-treatment process. Pretreatments are classified into three - physical, chemical, and biological pretreatment. Chemical process has not been proven suitable so far, due to high costs and production of undesired by-products. Biologically, hydrolysis can be enhanced by microbial or enzymatic pretreatment. Studies show that the edible mushrooms of Pleurotus sp. produce several extracellular enzymes which reduce the structural and chemical complexity of fibre. In the present study, P. ostreatus and P. eous were cultivated on paddy straw. Spent substrate left after mushroom cultivation was powdered and used for ethanol production. Saccharomyces sp. was used for fermentation studies. Untreated paddy straw was used as control. Production of ethanol from P. ostreatus substrate was 5.5 times more when compared to untreated paddy straw, while the spent substrate of P. eous gave 5 times increase in ethanol yield. Assays showed the presence of several extracellular enzymes in the spent substrate of both species, which together contributed to the increase in ethanol yield

A Study of Single Stage Semi‐Dry Anaerobic Digestion of Organic Fraction of Municipal Solid Waste

Solid waste generation is a natural consequence of human activity and is increasing along with population growth, urbanization and industrialization. Improper disposal of the huge amount of solid waste seriously affects the environment and contributes to climate change by the release of greenhouse gases. Practicing anaerobic digestion (AD) for the organic fraction of municipal solid waste (OFMSW) can reduce emissions to environment and thereby alleviate the environmental problems together with production of biogas, an energy source, and digestate, a soil amendment. The amenability of substrate for biogasification varies from substrate to substrate and different environmental and operating conditions such as pH, temperature, type and quality of substrate, mixing, retention time etc. Therefore, the purpose of this research work is to develop feasible semi-dry anaerobic digestion process for the treatment of OFMSW from Kerala, India for potential energy recovery and sustainable waste management. This study was carried out in three phases in order to reach the research purpose. In the first phase, batch study of anaerobic digestion of OFMSW was carried out for 100 days at 32°C (mesophilic digestion) for varying substrate concentrations. The aim of this study was to obtain the optimal conditions for biogas production using response surface methodology (RSM). The parameters studied were initial pH, substrate concentration and total organic carbon (TOC). The experimental results showed that the linear model terms of initial pH and substrate concentration and the quadratic model terms of the substrate concentration and TOC had significant individual effect (p < 0.05) on biogas yield. However, there was no interactive effect between these variables (p > 0.05). The optimum conditions for maximizing the biogas yield were a substrate concentration of 99 g/l, an initial pH of 6.5 and TOC of 20.32 g/l. AD of OFMSW with optimized substrate concentration of 99 g/l [Total Solid (TS)-10.5%] is a semi-dry digestion system .Under the optimized condition, the maximum biogas yield was 53.4 L/kg VS (volatile solid).. In the second phase, semi-dry anaerobic digestion of organic solid wastes was conducted for 45 days in a lab-scale batch experiment for substrate concentration of 100 g/l (TS-11.2%) for investigating the start-up performances under thermophilic condition (50°C). The performance of the reactor was evaluated by measuring the daily biogas production and calculating the degradation of total solids and the total volatile solids. The biogas yield at the end of the digestion was 52.9 L/kg VS for the substrate concentration of 100 g/l. About 66.7% of volatile solid degradation was obtained during the digestion. A first order model based on the availability of substrate as the limiting factor was used to perform the kinetic studies of batch anaerobic digestion system. The value of reaction rate constant, k, obtained was 0.0249 day-1. A laboratory bench scale reactor with a capacity of 36.8 litres was designed and fabricated to carry out the continuous anaerobic digestion of OFMSW in the third phase. The purpose of this study was to evaluate the performance of the digester at total solid concentration of 12% (semi-dry) under mesophlic condition (32°C). The digester was operated with different organic loading rates (OLRs) and constant retention time. The performance of the reactor was evaluated using parameters such as pH, volatile fatty acid (VFA), alkalinity, chemical oxygen demand (COD), TOC and ammonia-N as well as biogas yield. During the reactor’s start-up period, the process is stable and there is no inhibition occurred and the average biogas production was 14.7 L/day. The reactor was fed in continuous mode with different OLRs (3.1,4.2 and 5.65 kg VS/m3/d) at constant retention time of 30 days. The highest volatile solid degradation of 65.9%, with specific biogas production of 368 L/kg VS fed was achieved with OLR of 3.1 kg VS/m3/d. Modelling and simulation of anaerobic digestion of OFMSW in continuous operation is done using adapted Anaerobic Digestion Model No 1 (ADM1).The proposed model, which has 34 dynamic state variables, considers both biochemical and physicochemical processes and contains several inhibition factors including three gas components. The number of processes considered is 28. The model is implemented in Matlab® version 7.11.0.584(R2010b). The model based on adapted ADM1 was tested to simulate the behaviour of a bioreactor for the mesophilic anaerobic digestion of OFMSW at OLR of 3.1 kg VS/m3/d. ADM1 showed acceptable simulating results.

Recycling urban waste as possible use for rooftop vegetable garden

Urban authorities in Europe are confronted with increasing demands by urban dwellers for allotment gardens, but vacant urban soil tends to be scarce and/or polluted by past industrial activities. A possible solution for local authorities could therefore be to promote rooftop gardening. However little technical information exists on certain forms of rooftop urban agriculture, called Z-Farming. In 2012, a pilot experiment was run in Paris (France). Simple and cheap systems of rooftop gardening were tested on a rooftop using as crop substrates only local urban organic waste so as to contribute to the urban metabolism. Production levels and heavy metal contents in cropping substrates and edible vegetables were measured. Available results show (i) high levels of crop production with limited inputs compared to land professional gardening, (ii) low levels of heavy metal pollutants in the edible parts of the crops, especially for Cd and Pb with respect to EU norms for vegetables and (iii) positive influence on yields on organizing the substrate in layers and enhancing the biological activity through earthworm inoculation. These encouraging results allow us to consider that rooftop gardening is feasible and seem to have a great potential to improve urban resiliency. It will nevertheless be necessary to identify more precisely the types of roof that can be used and to assess more fully the generic result of the low level of pollution, as well as the global sustainability of these cropping systems.

Alternative ways to estimate change points in multinomial sequences. An application to an authorship attribution problem

The statistical analysis of literary style is the part of stylometry that compares measurable characteristics in a text that are rarely controlled by the author, with those in other texts. When the goal is to settle authorship questions, these characteristics should relate to the author’s style and not to the genre, epoch or editor, and they should be such that their variation between authors is larger than the variation within comparable texts from the same author. For an overview of the literature on stylometry and some of the techniques involved, see for example Mosteller and Wallace (1964, 82), Herdan (1964), Morton (1978), Holmes (1985), Oakes (1998) or Lebart, Salem and Berry (1998). Tirant lo Blanc, a chivalry book, is the main work in catalan literature and it was hailed to be “the best book of its kind in the world” by Cervantes in Don Quixote. Considered by writters like Vargas Llosa or Damaso Alonso to be the first modern novel in Europe, it has been translated several times into Spanish, Italian and French, with modern English translations by Rosenthal (1996) and La Fontaine (1993). The main body of this book was written between 1460 and 1465, but it was not printed until 1490. There is an intense and long lasting debate around its authorship sprouting from its first edition, where its introduction states that the whole book is the work of Martorell (1413?-1468), while at the end it is stated that the last one fourth of the book is by Galba (?-1490), after the death of Martorell. Some of the authors that support the theory of single authorship are Riquer (1990), Chiner (1993) and Badia (1993), while some of those supporting the double authorship are Riquer (1947), Coromines (1956) and Ferrando (1995). For an overview of this debate, see Riquer (1990). Neither of the two candidate authors left any text comparable to the one under study, and therefore discriminant analysis can not be used to help classify chapters by author. By using sample texts encompassing about ten percent of the book, and looking at word length and at the use of 44 conjunctions, prepositions and articles, Ginebra and Cabos (1998) detect heterogeneities that might indicate the existence of two authors. By analyzing the diversity of the vocabulary, Riba and Ginebra (2000) estimates that stylistic boundary to be near chapter 383. Following the lead of the extensive literature, this paper looks into word length, the use of the most frequent words and into the use of vowels in each chapter of the book. Given that the features selected are categorical, that leads to three contingency tables of ordered rows and therefore to three sequences of multinomial observations. Section 2 explores these sequences graphically, observing a clear shift in their distribution. Section 3 describes the problem of the estimation of a suden change-point in those sequences, in the following sections we propose various ways to estimate change-points in multinomial sequences; the method in section 4 involves fitting models for polytomous data, the one in Section 5 fits gamma models onto the sequence of Chi-square distances between each row profiles and the average profile, the one in Section 6 fits models onto the sequence of values taken by the first component of the correspondence analysis as well as onto sequences of other summary measures like the average word length. In Section 7 we fit models onto the marginal binomial sequences to identify the features that distinguish the chapters before and after that boundary. Most methods rely heavily on the use of generalized linear models

Adaptaci??n de la Sydney Attribution Scale en poblaci??n universitaria espa??ola

Resumen tomado de la publicaci??n

Plan de negocio Gree-Waste

El crecimiento apresurado de la industria tecnológica en los últimos años a nivel mundial, ha generado un nuevo problema socio-ambiental: el manejo y control de los volúmenes de aparatos y componentes electrónicos obsoletos que crecen exponencialmente, específicamente los aparatos que provienen de sistemas de informática, volviéndose en una situación descontrolada y desatendida. Esta problemática empeora cada día por el desconocimiento, la imprudencia, las malas políticas adoptadas por el gobierno y el constante deseo de los consumidores por estar en contacto con los últimos modelos del mercado, reflejándose en un incremento acelerado en las ventas de aparatos electrónicos. Sin embargo, muchos se preguntaran él porque proponemos una idea de negocio caracterizada por lo social y lo ambiental, pues dicha idea viene de la experiencia que se ha tenido durante 7 años en el mercado de tecnología en computación y periféricos, que ha logrado una relación directa con empresas y personas; observando así, las verdaderas preocupaciones de los clientes y a su vez un aumento acelerado en los desechos tecnológicos. De esta manera y siguiendo con el espíritu emprendedor que nos ha caracterizado desde pequeños, hemos llegado a pensar en una idea de negocio interesante y viable, que nos permita incursionar ante competidores importantes y sobresaliendo con una idea innovadora que no se maneja de lleno en dicho sector. Para lograrlo, aprovecharemos los conocimientos y la experiencia que hemos acumulado a través de los años con el contacto directo con los clientes, quienes consideramos son el motor del negocio y llevándonos a concluir con el transcurrir del tiempo, que en Colombia no existe una cultura para desechar los elementos tecnológicos de una manera ecológica y saludable con el medio ambiente. Gracias a la oportunidad latente que muestra el mercado en el sector de reciclaje de desechos tecnológicos, nuestro equipo de trabajo se muestra inquieto ante la oportunidad de negocio encontrada, debido a que en Colombia existen pocas organizaciones que se especialicen en el proceso de reciclaje y reutilización adecuada de dichos desechos. Por esta razón, se confirma la oportunidad para generar un completo plan de negocio que gire en torno al manejo de e-waste y cuidado del medio ambiente, mediante la implementación de productos y servicios especializados para la recolección de dichos desechos electrónicos tanto para los consumidores como para las empresas.

Plan de empresa para TECO: modelo de impacto social, autosostenibilidad financiera y de minimización de la huella del e-waste en Bogotá

La red TECO es una iniciativa que integra elementos ya conocidos en el mundo de la publicidad y de la gestión RAEE, en un nuevo modelo de negocio. Esto le permite competir de manera efectiva en un segmento de mercado que si bien no está saturado, requiere de cambios estructurales para poder cumplir su objetivo. El éxito del modelo de TECO radicará en la capacidad de generar su propio flujo de dinero, lo que le garantiza su auto sostenimiento, mientras minimiza la barrera del pensamiento tradicional en la comunidad respecto al miedo de desechar el e-waste (a través de la educación). De igual manera ayudará a todos los participantes de la red a mejorar su reputación y posicionar sus marcas. En última instancia el gran ganador de esta iniciativa es el medio ambiente. Al juntar todos los segmentos de mercado, de entre los cuales TECO podrá participar en su mercado objetivo de mil empresas en Bogotá, estos suman alrededor de ochocientos treinta y ocho mil millones. De esta cifra global nada despreciable, TECO podrá aspirar a cerca de un 0.19% de participación. Más concretamente, en lo que respecta a la categoría de presupuestos destinados a programas posconsumo RAEE y Green Businesses orientados a la publicidad institucional, TECO espera obtener un 6.13% del share.

Solid waste management in metropolitan areas: barriers and opportunities for intermunicipal arrangements in Brazil

Municipal solid waste issue has acquired a growing importance into urban management discussions, particularly in metropolitan areas. Although metropolitan regions were created for integrating public functions of common interest, it appears that the structures, in general, are limited to planning  activities. In this context, the democratization process occurred in Brazil during 1980’s led to the  strengthening of inter-municipal arrangements of voluntary cooperation, acquiring great expressiveness  in metropolitan areas, responsible for 60% of waste generated in Brazil. However, despite the  consortia emergence as an alternative management of metropolitan territory, its process of setting up and operation is not free of challenges and dilemmas. This paper starts with the hypothesis that  inter-municipal consortia in metropolitan areas have high strength asymmetry and weak regional  identity among municipalities, conditions that tend to create barriers to its concretization. In this  context, this research aim  to develop a comparative study of inter-municipal arrangements for solid  waste management in the metropolitan areas of Curitiba (pr), Belo Horizonte (bh) and Salvador  (ba), by identifying influence degree of regional identity and strength asymmetry in these arrangements. The multiple case study reveals an inverse proportionality relationship between regional  identity and strength asymmetry among the municipalities, deeply influenced by political interinstitutional  arrangement and the metropolitan area in which they are is inserted.