The Sustainable Public Procurement Initiative (SPPI) is nowadays the key policy instrument to promote sustainable development and move towards a green economy that fosters the development of products and services maximizing social and environmental benefits. EU public procurement directives oblige contracting authorities to base tendering decisions on the most economically advantageous tender (MEAT) principle, focusing on life-cycle costs and environmentally and socially sustainable products. Member States should generally promote the whole life-cycle cost analysis as standard practice in long-term investment.
Transport infrastructure investments have a positive impact on economic growth, creates wealth and jobs, but it has to be done in a way maximises these positive impacts and minimises negative impact on the environment. Specifically, rail transport causes 0.2% of global emissions in EU27. Infrastructure supposes 28% of these emissions, half of them caused during construction. This shows the high environmental impact of these activities.
According to the IODC post “Fighting climate change: the ultimate data challenge”, data are most powerful when they are available as open data and scientists are using data not only to monitor climate change but to help provide solutions, combining data science with climate science.
In line with these ideas an initiative, partially supported by LIFE+ Programme of the European Commission, combines life cycle assessment (LCA) techniques with intelligent data analysis, in order to improve sustainability of railway infrastructure construction processes as a whole, considering environmental, economic and social aspects. The goal is to reduce carbon and water footprints of railway infrastructure construction projects from their earliest stages, i.e. design and planning processes.
On a recent keynote speech, Martina Werner, member of the European Parliament and the ITRE Committee on Industry, Research and Energy, argues that many manufacturers concentrate on competing mainly on the basis of the mere purchase price. A thorough implementation of the procurement directives and particularly the MEAT principle gives suppliers a competitive advantage. Numerous factors now can be taken into account during the procurement procedure. This includes the reliability of the supply chain, services, maintenance costs, environmental factors and criteria of corporate social responsibility.
Based on environmental and social impact of most relevant tasks, an Open Access tool provides selected specific footprint values and environmental & social indicators as open data to the community, promoting the incorporation of environmental criteria on construction projects. This tool is available online, with all the information regarding LCA and Social LCA (SLCA) and it is intended for spreading the word on sustainable development and paving the way for the use of this or similar tools by public bodies or bidders.
The Taoist philosophy defines through the Ying and Yang duality, that has everything that exists in the universe, so that there are always two antagonistic and complementary forces that need each other. You can hardly appreciate the value of the Peace without the existence of wars or health if there were no diseases.
This dual approach is also applicable to technology, imposing conditions that often are opposite, but allow the balance of systems. According to the Thermodynamics, for the production of cold (heat extraction to a source of lower temperature) has to provide external power and dissipate heat to a medium that is hotter than the area you want to cool, so that the heat and cold coexist like the Ying and Yang were addressed.
The conditions of habitability that living beings we have, they require us to maintain a suitable temperature to carry out life processes, in such a way that values at 23 ° C environment, they allow us to be comfortable. However the weather and outdoor conditions present values sometimes far removed from this optimum: from – 40 ° C, which can be in areas close to the Poles, up to 55 ° C which can be summer in areas close to the Equator being essentially the presence or absence of solar radiation which causes these differences.
Technology has developed systems for the transformation of solar energy into heat or electricity, making it applicable to both heating and cooling. The absence of solar radiation produces the need for heating, and therefore it seems unlikely that we can take advantage of the available radiation that will generally be small for heating. However, the need to cold will be generally associated with the presence of sunlight, as if they were also of the Ying and Yang. In fact the air conditioning is one of them technologies star for the World Football Championship of Qatar in which is going to use fields of soccer refrigerated through energy solar (“Wolfgang Kessling: “How to air-condition outdoor spaces”).
The solar cooling offers a set of technologies in which the solar radiation is used to produce coldwater with sorbents systems (absorption or adsorption machines) previously heated with solar panels or from electricity produced with photovoltaic solar energy to power a system based on compressor. As if they were the brothers of “Rich man, poor man”, their temporal evolution has been and is different.
Until makes some 10 years, were the systems of cold solar based in machines sorbent which had of a greater number of applications and developments technological. In those days the photovoltaic face was expensive. However, with the reduction of the cost that has suffered recently this last, the use of photovoltaic to produce cold solar is increasing of way important. On the other hand, there are manufacturers of machines of absorption with systems of triple effect and yields of the 180% willing to present a hard battle for the air conditioning with radiation solar.
In any case regardless of the technology that is winner, I have clear is that, the future of the cold is hot, as hot as the Sun.
Agriculture and husbandry are economical activities with high social value in some places around Europe; they have an important share in the economy of many European regions and the European Union devotes a significant part of its annual budget to farming and the related rural world. In spite of this, farmers usually have lower incomes than other citizens in the same social and cultural conditions.
Since the coming of the Enlightenment Age farming has enjoyed technical improvements that increased farming outcomes. During current century, Internet became a widespread technology and the Internet of Things is getting common. Both farming and husbandry will benefit from the Internet of Things. Is about machine communication and it relies on cloud computing and sensor networks. It is mobile, virtual and required reliable and fast data connections. It allows machines and processes to sense the environment and provides the intelligence needed to allow them to optimise by themselves.
Precision farming may be the first application of Internet of Things in farming. The key is to install sensorsto gather data from all the farming processes and to make decisions based on data in an automated way. Soil, plants, livestock, machines, weather can be monitored and actions can be taken to reach exploitation targets in an optimal way, as we reported here.
Although IoT can improve farming activity, we must keep in sight the prices farmers are payed depend on the market. Currently in Europe there is a market deregulation and therefore farmer incomes depend on the market whims. In this scenery, to organise the offer could help farmers to preserve their interests. Could IoT help to organise offer?
Imagine a region where all the farms use the IoT in their everyday activities. They use it to efficiently develop their work and they measure all the important parameters that allow knowing their state and performance. Imagine now that all the farms are connected and share the information gathered by the sensors. Finally, assume the network has intelligence.
Besides the farms information, that artificial intelligence receives information about who and where are the ones that potentially would buy farms products, how much the pay, how is production in other competitor regions, what are the forecasts for market and weather. Putting together all that information, that artificial intelligence would manage the farms by suggesting farmers different operations in order to maximise the delivery price. For instance, the artificial intelligence using available information may conclude that the maximum price for a given product could be reached if certain amount of tons is offered to a defined buyer a precise day. Among all the farms in the network, the artificial intelligence would choose those where the product is in the optimal maturation moment and would inform the farmers about the circumstances so they could proceed with harvesting and transport.
A schema like the one proposed would transform farms into things connected to Internet and smart enough to optimise the farming revenues by themselves. And it would be another technical innovation in the row started centuries ago that would improve farmers live.
Everybody has lived something like this. Open the pantry, take a packet of rice, flour or pasta and… insect! We find out that our foods are infected with bugs.
Insect contamination of stored food is a very annoying and worrying problem for consumers and for food companies. It involves high losses of raw materials and stored products, giving room to huge economic losses and damaging the image of the brand.
These animals are not pathogenic and do not represent a health problem for consumers, but the contaminated packet is discarded directly blaming the manufacturer, even without being responsible in the most cases.
The contaminating insects of stored products are diverse and attacks multitude of food: flour, rice, nuts, dried fruit, bread, cookies, pasta, etc. In Europe, there are approximately 300 million tons of grains which run the risk of contamination by pests during post-harvest treatment, storage and then, in food companies facilities (Stesjakl, V. 2014)
Raw materials and food companies face a big problem trying to control and remove of their facilities these arthropods, which find in silos and warehouse the perfect place to feed and reproduce. Companies use different methods of food insect contamination prevention, control and elimination in all their processes, in order to ensure that their products are free from any contamination. In addition, they must pass rigorous audits in which each process and corner of their factories are reviewed for this purpose.
However, once products leave the factory, the control over is very difficult. These insects live to feed and reproduce, so looking for food is their priority. Contamination by insects is much more susceptible during the transport process, during storage and at homes, despite all the measures.
These arthropods have an exceptional sense of smell and they are able to smell the food through packaging and packages, so they introduce themselves by any small hole or crack of the package. Besides, they are able to drill paper, cardboard and all kind of plastics (penetrator insects). For this reason, the R&D departments of food businesses, and research centers with which they work, are constantly innovating their packaging and seeking alternatives to improve them and make them more resistant to bugs.
As consumers, we must look at the supermarket if the packages have some sign of being damaged and, at home, we have to keep products in glass or metal. In addition, if we find out in our pantry some infected package, we must remove all products that may have been contaminated and proceed to clean it thoroughly.
From the point of view of researching, due to the increasing restrictions on the use of insecticides, such as methyl bromide or phosphine, they are conducting studies to replace these methods by others technologies less harmful and more friendly with environment, such as the use of pheromones or the use of extreme temperatures for cleaning and control plants.
In relation to packages, advances are aimed at the incorporation of repellent substances to deter insects attack. Last trials are aimed at the use of essential oil which, encapsulated and polyvinyl alcohol, could be printed as an ink onto polypropylene film and used as packaging material repellent to insects (Jo Hean-Joo, 2015)
With all these advances, it will be difficult to say ‘there is a bug in my pantry!’
The tools that engineeringprovides to the medicine are a fundamental pillar. The mathematical and computational modeling is essential to the generation of new therapeutic strategies for the treatment of diseases. Behind many of the medicine advances there is an enormous scientific and technological development, whose main responsible is the engineering.
For engineering, the health has been always one of its main objectives in terms of applied research. From the design and use of technologies to control variables that affect human health, to the design and use of control technologies to support health sciences. A clear example of this is the progress in diagnostic equipment, prosthetics, therapy devices, etc.
In CARTIF, we have researched for nearly 10 years in a line which joins both disciplines. This line has focused on the improvement of the criteria used by physicians in order to predicting of Abdominal Aortic Aneurysms rupture, with the aim of identifying the right timeto perform surgery from the point of view of the engineering, specifically, with the strength of materials.
Abdominal aortic aneurysm is an irreversible dilation of the aortic wall segment that elapses between the bifurcation of the renal arteries and branches of the iliac arteries, affecting sometimes these ones. 70% are asymptomatic and they are detected in advanced stages, so it is very important their assessment of rupture risk.
The rupture of abdominal aortic aneurysms (AAAs) is one of the leading causes of death in the world:
• 8% of people with more than 65 years, and 10% of people with more than 80 years have an AAA. • It is the tenth cause of death in people with more than 65 years in occidental countries. • Factors such as smoking, atherosclerosis, obesity or hypertension increases the risk of developing an AAA. • The rupture of the artery leads to death before arriving to the hospital, in 90% of cases. • The mortality rate associated with surgery is 5,8% for open surgical repair and 1,7% for endovascular repair.
Currently, when the aneurysm has a diameter of 5 cm or its growth rates exceeds 0.5 cm/yearis needed intervene surgically. 24% of aneurysms rupture has a smaller diameter than considered critical one. Therefore, the current clinical criteria used to assess the rupture risk are not considered as the most reliable predictors.
CARTIF teamhas used the main geometric parameters of AAAs: maximum diameter, healthy artery diameter, length, wall thickness and asymmetry (geometrically). These parameters can be measured easily by the doctor through computerized axial tomography, diagnostic means used by doctors.
These parameters are combined in an efficient way to generate the tool to assess the rupture risk. This tool has been programmed using free software, which allows generating a database for each patient, and within it, files with data for each follow-up examination. It contains a graphical manager that can represent the evolution of rupture risk.
The tool provides a number of suggestions to the surgeon, who takes the right decision about if it is convenient going on with surgeryor continue monitoring the evolution of the aneurysm.
To verify that the tool was effective, validation tests were performed on patients for several years. The results showed that the method is able to estimate reliably the risk of aneurysm rupture, allowing identify those potentially dangerous to break, even when its maximum diameter is less that used by the medical community today, and allowing identify cases where the break is not going to occur, preventing the patient has to undergo the surgical repair procedure.
This work demonstrates that collaboration between medicine (led by HCUV) and engineering (led by CARTIF) is incredibly productive. The results allow a breakthrough with an eminently practical application and highlight the importance that research and R&D have in society.
The newly closed Rio 2016 Olympic Games are still in our minds, means of communication and webs, and we are wondering some questions such as how the diet is for athletes? what kind of products they consume? Are they suitable for any athlete with less level?
After 14 years of discussion, the European Commission published last June the highly anticipated report on food intended for sportspeople. The purpose of this report was determine whether the food for sportspeople are special food (and therefore, if it would be necessary a specific provisions) or simply consider them as a food used commonly.
This report builds upon a market study on food intended for athletes carried out by the Food Chain Evaluation Consortium (FCEC). The number of sport products present in the market can be estimated, on the basis of the innovation rate at EU level, to between approximately 20,000 and 30.000. The FCEC Study identified the following three categories of sport food:
1.Isotonic drinks (61 %) 2.Protein-based products for muscle strengthening, building and post exercise recovery (26 %). 3. Products to increase energy and performance and continuous complementary products for athletes (13 %).
Sport food is not defined in EU legislation. For the purpose of this report, the study considered as “sportspeople” those people who practice sport once a week or more. Also the definition of “sportspeople” included the requirement to consume at least a sports food in the last year.
Finally, the Commission concluded that there is no necessity for specific provisions for food intended for sportspeople. After 20 July 2016, a sport food will be considered under horizontal rules of food law as a food supplement (accordance with Directive 2002/46/CE) or, as a fortified food (accordance with Regulation (EC) 1924/2006 and Regulation (EU) Nº 1169/2011). The arguments for this decision are:
• People who carry out sport activities hardly can be characterized as a specific vulnerable group of consumers. • Sometimes, it is very difficult to understand whether a specific product has to be considered as a food intended for particular nutritional uses by sportsmen or a food for normal consumption fortified in certain nutrients with a health claim targeting sportspeople. • The horizontal rules of food law provide the necessary safeguards for these products in terms of food safety, food composition, consumer information and legal certainty.
Currently, there are already some authorized healthy claims aims at sportspeople (see next table). Relevant claims for sportspeople on caffeine are under discussion. On the other hand, despite the fact that EFSA regarded the beneficial effect of sodium, there is not authorization to say ‘high in sodium’, because it is not beneficial for everybody.
Operators are clearly divided on the question whether specific legislation is necessary for sports food or whether sports food should be legislated by horizontal rules of food law.
An industry group is worried because they think the innovation of these products is limited. But, you know, “you can´t please everybody”.
