Ecodesign of PVC packing tape using life cycle assessment

Purpose

Polymer materials play an important role in the improvement and quality of life. However, due to their persistence in the environment, polymer materials may be harmful to the ecosystems. According to the European Directive on Packaging and Packaging Waste, management of these wastes should include prevention of their generation as a priority. The main motivation for employing ecodesign of a product is to reduce both raw material consumption and waste generation through a good initial design.

Methods

In this study, life cycle assessment (LCA) was applied to the design of printed PVC plastic packing tape in order to reduce its environmental impact. LCA software GaBi4.4^® was used to determine the PVC packing tape life cycle stage with the highest environmental impacts.

Results and discussion

LCA results showed that PVC film manufacture was the stage with the highest impact. It was therefore reasonable to assume that packing tape manufactured with material other than PVC could have reduced environmental impact, and LCA was used to evaluate this hypothesis. When using Kraft paper or polypropylene plastic packing tape, the weighted impacts were reduced by 36.3 and 39.9 %, respectively.

Conclusions

PVC plastic packing tape has been redesigned with the aim of reducing waste and raw material consumption. LCA results showed that a suitable option for reducing life cycle environmental impact is to use alternative film materials. Kraft paper and polypropylene plastic packing tape were found to give lower values of almost all environmental impact indexes and normalized and weighted impacts.     

Mass Customization: Metrics and Modularity

Mass customization as a competitive strategy is getting progressively increasing attention in business and academic arenas due to its high potential to provide sustained strategic advantage in a unique fashion. It is well documented that a manufacturing company competes with others in its industry on five dimensions: Price, quality, flexibility, delivery, and service. According to the existing literature, mass customization provides significant strategic advantage in two of these dimensions—price and customization. We, however, argue that when properly implemented, the cellular manufacturing structure associated with the appropriate implementation of mass customization strategy, provides additional competitive value in quality and delivery. Furthermore by virtue of the customer co-design as an integral aspect of mass customization, customer satisfaction also improves under this strategy. Mass customization strategy, therefore, provides competitive advantage in all five competitive dimensions simultaneously—a truly unique strategic accomplishment. We also propose, in this paper, new metrics for mass customization strategy that measure the “mass” as well as the “customization” aspects of this strategy. Finally, we describe in the clearest terms the modus operandi of modularity in product design and the role it plays in bringing about high levels of customization on one hand and economies of scale at component level, on the other. We conclude with remarks that underscore the need for conducting research in the areas at the interface of mass customization and supply chain management.     

Murine Cell Glycolipids Customization by Modular Expression of Glycosyltransferases

Functional analysis of glycolipids has been hampered by their complex nature and combinatorial expression in cells and tissues. We report an efficient and easy method to generate cells with specific glycolipids. In our proof of principle experiments we have demonstrated the customized expression of two relevant glycosphingolipids on murine fibroblasts, stage-specific embryonic antigen 3 (SSEA-3), a marker for stem cells, and Forssman glycolipid, a xenoantigen. Sets of genes encoding glycosyltansferases were transduced by viral infection followed by multi-color cell sorting based on coupled expression of fluorescent proteins.     

生物质多糖的高效降解与降解酶（系）的精确定制

自然界中多糖类生物质资源十分丰富,然而其复杂的抗降解屏障限制了生物转化的进程.近年来,随着生物质多糖结构的快速解析以及大量多糖降解酶的鉴定研究,针对不同底物结构或产物需求,仿制高效微生物多糖代谢途径,精确定制多糖降解酶系,促进生物质高效转化已成为可能.本文分析中性多糖(纤维素和木聚糖)、碱性多糖(几丁质和壳聚糖)以及酸性多糖(褐藻胶)的精细结构组成与基团性质,总结3类多糖主要降解酶的活性架构特征及其底物精确结合模式.文章还阐述蛋白质工程设计与定制策略,针对酶分子不同功能区的分析,可为酶分子的功能快速设计与改造提供靶点,以获得适宜于工业应用的高效酶分子,此外,根据微生物胞外降解酶系的降解次序与协同关系,可基于应用需求精确定制复杂多糖降解酶系,实现生物质的高效与高值降解转化.     

Syndromic Surveillance Using Veterinary Laboratory Data: Algorithm Combination and Customization of Alerts

Background

Syndromic surveillance research has focused on two main themes: the search for data sources that can provide early disease detection; and the development of efficient algorithms that can detect potential outbreak signals.

Methods

This work combines three algorithms that have demonstrated solid performance in detecting simulated outbreak signals of varying shapes in time series of laboratory submissions counts. These are: the Shewhart control charts designed to detect sudden spikes in counts; the EWMA control charts developed to detect slow increasing outbreaks; and the Holt-Winters exponential smoothing, which can explicitly account for temporal effects in the data stream monitored. A scoring system to detect and report alarms using these algorithms in a complementary way is proposed.

Results

The use of multiple algorithms in parallel resulted in increased system sensitivity. Specificity was decreased in simulated data, but the number of false alarms per year when the approach was applied to real data was considered manageable (between 1 and 3 per year for each of ten syndromic groups monitored). The automated implementation of this approach, including a method for on-line filtering of potential outbreak signals is described.

Conclusion

The developed system provides high sensitivity for detection of potential outbreak signals while also providing robustness and flexibility in establishing what signals constitute an alarm. This flexibility allows an analyst to customize the system for different syndromes.     

定制酶分子机器/细胞工厂，引领生物制造产业未来

工业酶制剂研发与应用已经渗透到各大工业领域,但中国作为用酶大国、产酶小国面临重大挑战,鉴于以化学催化为核心的基础物质加工业面临资源、能源和环境三大危机,酶工程与生物催化已被列入许多国家的科技与产业发展战略,应用高效、清洁的生物催化技术是实现化学工业可持续发展以及发酵工业产业升级的重要途径之一。文中以2017年第十一届中国酶工程学术研讨会杜邦-杰能科中国酶工程杰出贡献奖获得者特邀报告为基础整理编写而成,从自主酶库构建、酶分子机器/细胞工厂创制及产业化应用等角度概述当前酶工程与生物催化发展现状及前景。     

Mass Customization in Videotape Duplication and Conversion: Challenges of Flexible Duplication Systems,Fast Delivery,and Electronic Service

With the emergence of electronic commerce technology, marketers gained new methods for personalizing electronic advertisements, automating marketing research, and customizing product designs. These developments suggest that production operations also must be redesigned to support contemporary marketing objectives via mass customization. Yet, operations management research historically has focused on mass production systems buffering the customer from production operations. As such, the literature provides relatively few insights about managing mass customization operations. Thus, in this paper, we consider a previously unexamined type of mass customization production operations. The paper presents a case study of a manufacturer's videotape duplication and conversion system, consisting of a flexible network of heterogeneous, parallel machines used to duplicate and convert videotapes and other multimedia. We describe the characteristics of this flexible duplication system, discuss parallels between these systems and mass customization, and identify issues regarding flexibility, speed of delivery, and electronic service.     

Process Variety Modeling for Process Configuration in Mass Customization: An Approach Based on Object-Oriented Petri Nets with Changeable Structures

Mass customization strategies could be usefully deployed by companies whose products are characterized by a modular design. Typically, each module serves a specific aspect of the overall product function at varying performance levels. Each product variant (constructed through a unique combination of modular performance levels), therefore, serves to customize the overall performance of the product, thus serving the unique needs of each customer. The high demand for each module guarantees economies of scale and, eventually, low cost to customer. The rationale of configuring production processes for producing individual product variants originates from the fact that massive process data is commonly available in a firm and there exists a generic process structure underlying the production of similar products in a family. To design a decision support mechanism that constructs process configuration corresponding to a given product configuration, this paper develops a formal modeling of process variety using Petri nets. Object-oriented Petri nets (PNs) with changeable structures (OPNs-CS) are applied to deal with the issues of generic representation, constraints compliance, and operational sequence requirements. Object-oriented PN (OPN) models facilitate generic representation of product and process variety as well as their instantiations. The OPNs-CS model is tested with simulation. Based on simulation results, the optimal configuration of production processes can be determined for each individual product as well as the cohort of a product family. To illustrate the feasibility and potential of OPNs-CS based process variety modeling, a case study of process configuration for mass customized textile spindles is reported.     

Role for dopamine in malonate-induced damage in vivo in striatum and in vitro in mesencephalic cultures

Defects in mitochondrial energy metabolism have been implicated in the pathology of several neurodegenerative disorders. In addition, the reactive metabolites generated from the metabolism and oxidation of the neurotransmitter dopamine (DA) are thought to contribute to the damage to neurons of the basal ganglia. We have previously demonstrated that infusions of the metabolic inhibitor malonate into the striata of mice or rats produce degeneration of DA nerve terminals. In the present studies, we demonstrate that an intrastriatal infusion of malonate induces a substantial increase in DA efflux in awake, behaving mice as measured by in vivo microdialysis. Furthermore, pretreatment of mice with tetrabenazine (TBZ) or the TBZ analogue Ro 4-1284 (Ro-4), compounds that reversibly inhibit the vesicular storage of DA, attenuates the malonate-induced DA efflux as well as the damage to DA nerve terminals. Consistent with these findings, the damage to both DA and GABA neurons in mesencephalic cultures by malonate exposure was attenuated by pretreatment with TBZ or Ro-4. Treatment with these compounds did not affect the formation of free radicals or the inhibition of oxidative phosphorylation resulting from malonate exposure alone. Our data suggest that DA plays an important role in the neurotoxicity produced by malonate. These findings provide direct evidence that inhibition of succinate dehydrogenase causes an increase in extracellular DA levels and indicate that bioenergetic defects may contribute to the pathogenesis of chronic neurodegenerative diseases through a mechanism involving DA.     

Changes in lactate dehydrogenase activity in chicken tissues in hyperthyreosis in ontogenesis

The lactate dehydrogenase activity in reactions of lactate oxidation and synthesis was studied in subfractions of the chicken brain, heart and liver at the embryonal, early postembryonal and adult stages of development after thyroxine administration. It has been shown that during embryogenesis thyroxine predominantly enhanced the rate of lactate oxidation in the mitochondrial tissues. A marked increase in the lactate synthesis was found in cytoplasm of the adult chicken tissues. Specificity of enzyme activity alterations was detected in the chicken brain during ontogenesis after thyroxine administration.