Investigation on intestinal bacterial flora and Salmonella spp. presence in organic and conventional chickens

The aim of this study was to evaluate the possible differences in the intestinal microflora composition among the different rearing systems (conventional vs organic) and the Salmonella diffusion using bacteriological techniques. The results showed that the differences between the two groups at the same age, expressed by the bacterial count, are not conclusive in showing an influence of the rearing systems. Salmonella Hadar was isolated once in caeca of conventional and once in caeca of organic ones. Though the results are preliminary and referred to a well defined geographic area in Central Italy, Salmonella detection does not seem to be common in conventional and organic chicken farms

Comparative environmental life cycle analysis of stone wool production using traditional and alternative materials

The mineral wool sector represents 10 % of the total output tonnage of the glass industry. The thermal, acoustic and fire protection properties of mineral wool make it desirable for use in a wide range of economic sectors especially in the construction industry for the creation of low energy buildings. The traditional stone wool manufacturing process involves melting raw materials, in a coke-fired hot blast cupola furnace, fiberization, polymerization, cooling, product finishing and gas treatment. The use of alternative raw materials as torrefied biomass and sodium silicate, is proposed as an alternative manufacturing process to improve the sustainability of stone wool production, particularly the reduction of gas emissions (CO2 and SO2). The present study adopts a life cycle analysis (LCA) approach to measure the comparative environmental performance of the traditional and alternative stone wool production processes; process data are incorporated into a LCA model using SimaPro 8 software with the Ecoinvent version 3 life cycle inventory database. The CML 2000 and Eco-Indicator99 methods are used to estimate effects on different impact categories. The Minerals and Land use impacts in Eco-Indicator99 and the Eutrophication impact in CML2000 increase between 2 and 4 % for the alternative process instead of the traditional one. Similarly, the ecotoxicity-related impacts increase between 9 and 24 % with the use of the alternative process. However these increases are compensated by concomitant impact decreases in other categories of impact; consequently, the three areas of impact grouped by individual Eco-indicator 99 impacts, show environmental benefits improvements between 6 and 15 % when using the alternative process based on torrefied biomass and silicate instead of the traditional process based on coke and cement use

Life cycle energy minimization of autonomous buildings

This work aims at investigating the existence of an optimal solution from the life cycle energy point of view of an autonomous building. The life cycle energy demand of a building can be divided into three parts: the operational energy, the embodied energy and the end-of-life one. The introduction of renewable energy resources generally causes a shift of the energy demand from the operational phase to the embodied and end-of-life ones. The study aims at demonstrating that, in autonomous buildings, the relationship between total life cycle energy demand and operational energy demand is characterized by an optimal level that minimizes the overall life cycle energy demand of the construction. An autonomous building, representative of the Italian context, was chosen as a case study and, analysing different design configurations, it was observed that the low energy design solution performed better than the net zero energy building from a life cycle energy perspective