Livestock trade networks for guiding animal health surveillance

BACKGROUND: Trade in live animals can contribute to the introduction of exotic diseases, the maintenance and spread endemic diseases. Annually millions of animals are moved across Europe for the purposes of breeding, fattening and slaughter. Data on the number of animals moved were obtained from the Directorate General Sanco (DG Sanco) for 2011. These were converted to livestock units to enable direct comparison across species and their movements were mapped, used to calculate the indegrees and outdegrees of 27 European countries and the density and transitivity of movements within Europe. This provided the opportunity to discuss surveillance of European livestock movement taking into account stopping points en-route. RESULTS: High density and transitivity of movement for registered equines, breeding and fattening cattle, breeding poultry and pigs for breeding, fattening and slaughter indicates that hazards have the potential to spread quickly within these populations. This is of concern to highly connected countries particularly those where imported animals constitute a large proportion of their national livestock populations, and have a high indegree. The transport of poultry (older than 72 hours) and unweaned animals would require more rest breaks than the movement of weaned animals, which may provide more opportunities for disease transmission. Transitivity is greatest for animals transported for breeding purposes with cattle, pigs and poultry having values of over 50%. CONCLUSIONS: This paper demonstrated that some species (pigs and poultry) are traded much more frequently and at a larger scale than species such as goats. Some countries are more vulnerable than others due to importing animals from many countries, having imported animals requiring rest-breaks and importing large proportions of their national herd or flock. Such knowledge about the vulnerability of different livestock systems related to trade movements can be used to inform the design of animal health surveillance systems to facilitate the trade in animals between European member states. ELECTRONIC SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIAL: The online version of this article (doi:10.1186/s12917-015-0354-4) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users

Uncertainties in the design of support structures and foundations for offshore wind turbines

Offshore wind industry has exponentially grown in the last years. Despite this growth, there are still many uncertainties in this field. This paper analyzes some current uncertainties in the offshore wind market, with the aim of going one step further in the development of this sector. To do this, some already identified uncertainties compromising offshore wind farm structural design have been identified and described in the paper. Examples of these identified uncertainties are the design of the transition piece and the difficulties for the soil properties characterization. Furthermore, this paper deals with other uncertainties not identified yet due to the limited experience in the sector. To do that, current and most used offshore wind standards and recommendations related to the design of foundation and support structures (IEC 61400-1, 2005; IEC 61400-3, 2009; DNV-OS-J101, Design of Offshore Wind Turbine, 2013 and Rules and Guidelines Germanischer Lloyd, WindEnergie, 2005) have been analyzed. These new identified uncertainties are related to the lifetime and return period, loads combination, scour phenomenon and its protection, Morison e Froude Krilov and diffraction regimes, wave theory, different scale and liquefaction. In fact, there are a lot of improvements to make in this field. Some of them are mentioned in this paper, but the future experience in the matter will make it possible to detect more issues to be solved and improved

Comparative Life Cycle Assessment of Packaging Systems for Extended Shelf Life Milk

The aim of this study is to carry out a comparative analysis of the environmental impact of different packaging systems used for extended shelf life milk. The analysis, carried out exploiting the life cycle assessment approach, takes into account the packaging manufacturing process, the food packaging process, the transport phases and the end-of-life management of the different packaging systems. The packaging end of-life is modelled by considering three possible options, such as recycling, thermo-valorization with energy recovery and landfill. One litre of extended shelf life milk is used as the reference unit, while multilayer cartons, polyethylene terephthalate bottles labelled with shrink sleeve film and high-density polyethylene bottles are analysed as the packaging types. The key characteristics of each component of the three packaging systems were either provided by packaging manufacturers or derived from data available in literature. The evaluation of the end-of-life impact was performed considering the Italian scenario, exploiting, in particular, the data provided by specific Italian consortia. Other data for the inventory analysis phase were extrapolated from the SimaPro databases (e.g. Ecoinvent or Plastic Europe Database). Cumulative energy demand and CML2001 were adopted as the impact assessment methods. The results obtained show that the multilayer carton system is the less environmentally impactful option for almost all the considered impact categories and that its environmental impacts are, on average, more than 12% lower than high-density polyethylene system and more than 34% lower than polyethylene terephthalate with shrink sleeve label

The use of stainless steel in structures

The past 15 years have seen the introduction or major revision of structural stainless steel design codes throughout the world, and at the same time, interest in the use of stainless steel in construction has been accelerating. Historically the high initial material cost of stainless steel has limited its use primarily to specialist and prestige applications. However, the emergence of design codes, a better awareness of the additional benefits of stainless steel and a transition towards sustainability are bringing more widespread use into conventional structures. Although a number of similarities between stainless steel and ordinary carbon steel exist, there is sufficient diversity in their physical properties to require separate treatment in structural design. In addition to the straightforward differences in basic material properties (such as Young's modulus and yield strength), further fundamental differences exist, such as the nature of the stress–strain curve and the material's response to cold-work and elevated temperatures; these have implications at ultimate, serviceability and fire limit states. This paper describes the use of stainless steel as a structural material, discusses current structural design provisions, reviews recent research activities and highlights the important findings and developments