Push on to get rid of Styrofoam

Styrofoam continues to be targeted for bans in the county as yet another city will consider forbidding restaurants from using the food service containers for take-out orders.

The Foster City Council will consider a ban on Styrofoam, known also as polystyrene, that mirrors a recently passed county ordinance.

While some on the council say the ban should be enacted immediately, others say the impact to businesses should be considered first.What to consider before you buy Wholesale pet supplies.

The San Mateo County Board of Supervisors recently passed an ordinance banning the use of all polystyrene-based take-out containers in retail food establishments in the unincorporated areas of the county.

The ordinance went into effect July 1 and requires all retail food establishments to use only compostable containers.

The Board of Supervisors has urged all cities in the county to adopt identical ordinances for the purposes of consistency. In cities where the identical ordinance is adopted, county restaurant inspectors would enforce the city ordinance.

In San Mateo County, there are five cities that have existing polystyrene or Styrofoam bans ¡ª Burlingame, San Bruno, Pacifica, South San Francisco and Millbrae.

Belmont and San Carlos are also currently considering such a ban.

In February 2009, the Foster City's Environmental Sustainability Task Force recommended that the city consider banning both plastic bags and polystyrene products.

Councilwoman Pam Frisella sat on the task force at the time and would like to see the ban take effect sooner rather than later.

"Why wait to analyze it. It will be done eventually," Frisella said. "We should make a decision and approve it now. I'm all for it.The Leading promotional usb Distributor to Independent Pet Retailers."

Critics of polystyrene say it is a large component of litter and is hazardous to marine life when it enters waterways. It is also non-recyclable, non-biodegradable and not reusable.Welcome to the official Facebook Page about RUBBER MATS. There is also some evidence that the chemicals used to make polystyrene can be hazardous to human health.

Polystyrene products, however, are widely used in food establishments because they are inexpensive, lightweight, moisture-resistant and an effective insulator.

Some say,For all DVS Bedding in PDF format. however, that banning polystyrene places an undue financial hardship on small restaurants by requiring them to switch to more expensive products.

For this reason, Councilman Charles Bronitsky would rather weigh the impacts to restaurants in Foster City before approving such a ban.

Bronitsky wants to make sure restaurant owners who use polystyrene have the opportunity to address the council on the issue.GreenRay's hydraulic hose design uses a different energy storage approach,

Quakes put coal trade in jeopardy

It has been 10 days since state-owned mining firm Solid Energy was last able to ship its coal exports to international customers.

The only South Island facility with the equipment required to export the company's minerals - Lyttelton Port's coal wharf, near Christchurch - took a hit in the June 13 aftershocks and remains out of action.

The rest of the port was up and running 96 hours after last week's quakes.

Lyttelton Port chief executive Peter Davie said work was continuing on strengthening piles beneath the coal wharf's ship loader.

There was no definite timeframe on how long it would take to get the facility up and running, he said, but it would take two more weeks "at the maximum".What to consider before you buy oil painting supplies.

In the meantime, Solid Energy's exports of West Coast coal are travelling by rail to the port, where they are stacking up in a holding area.

Solid Energy's chief operations officer, Barry Bragg, said the situation was a concern.Our Polymax RUBBER SHEET range includes all commercial and specialist "It's a problem now and it just becomes a bigger problem the longer it goes on," he said.

Bragg said Solid Energy's international customers kept backup stocks on hand to tide them over when deliveries were impeded. "All our customers allow for a certain amount of delays that occur," he said.

Bragg said there was enough space at Lyttelton Port to store three more weeks worth of output, and after that there was some storage space available on the West Coast.

"Once that's full we'll have to stop production [mining operations],We processes for both low-risk and high risk merchant account." he said.

"We don't want that to happen."

Bragg said the company was investigating alternative means of exporting its products if Lyttelton Port's coal facilities remained out of action for longer than expected, such as the costly option of chartering ships with onboard loading equipment.

The port of Westport, which NZX-listed mining firm Bathurst Resources was planning to upgrade to allow for coal shipments, could be a future backup facility for Solid Energy, he said.

"It's all a question of cost. It's prudent to have a look at the alternatives ... but at this stage our preferred solution is to bring all of our coal by rail to Lyttelton."

Solid Energy extracts, processes, markets and distributes various types of coal from mines around Greymouth and Westport on the West Coast, as well as New Vale in Southland and Huntly,Houston-based Quicksilver Resources said Friday it had reached pipeline deals south of Auckland.

More than half of the firm's output is exported to customers in countries such as China, India and South Africa, where the coal is used in the production of steel, carbon fibre, activated carbon and silicon metal.

Lyttelton Port shipped 1.2 million tonnes of coal in the six months to last December.Has anyone done any research on making Plastic molding parts from scratch?

Meanwhile, Solid Energy yesterday announced an agreement with Bathurst Resources to collaborate on the proposed coal mining of the Denniston Plateau, North of Westport.

3D Solar Cell Boosts Efficiency By 80 Percent

Scientists at the USA's Dept. of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory have created a three-dimensional solar cell which could boost photovoltaic (PV) light-to-energy conversion rates by 80 percent.
 
Typically, when sunlight is strikes the surface of a solar panel and is absorbed by PV cells, some of the charge created by solar photons becomes trapped by natural flaws in the bulk materials that make up the layers of the cell, resulting in a loss of final electricity output.

Optimising the energy efficiency of these charges – negative electrons and positive "holes" – was the focus of the Oak Ridge team, led by Jun Xu, of ORNL's Chemical Sciences Division.

"To solve the entrapment problems that reduce solar cell efficiency, we created a nanocone-based solar cell, invented methods to synthesize these cells and demonstrated improved charge collection efficiency," Xu said.

Oak Ridge's 3D solar cell uses zinc-oxide n-type nanocenes to serve a framework for conducting electrons. A p-type matrix of polycrystalline cadmium telluride – often used in thin-film solar panel manufacture - serves as the primary photon absorber medium and hole conductor.

With the new structure and materials, the new cell demonstrated a light-to-energy conversion efficiency rate of 3.2 percent, compared to 1.8 percent efficiency of a conventional two-dimensional solar cell structure.

"We designed the three-dimensional structure to provide an intrinsic electric field distribution that promotes efficient charge transport and high efficiency in converting energy from sunlight into electricity," Xu said.

A world leader in solar energy research and development, Oak Ridge National Laboratory scientists are also working on a hybrid solar cell that harnesses the light-harvesting abilities of photosynthetic bacteria.
 
Unfortunately, Oak Ridge National Laboratory appears to have attracted some unwanted attention recently and last week shut down email and internet access after a virus designed to steal technical information successfully invaded its network.