During the early 1990s, giant guillotines in Tuscan, Arizona cut up and destroyed about US5.5 billion dollars worth of B-52 bombers. These were the B-52G bomber.

In today's terms, each B-52G bomber cost about US30 million dollars to build. Over 190 were built. Of these about 10 were placed into museums. The rest were destroyed.

So why were the B-52s cut up and dumped in the Arizona desert?

The removal of the B-52Gs was part of the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START) between the former Soviet Union and the US.

Under START, Russia and the US had to reduce their total warheads to 6,000 and Strategic Nuclear Delivery Vehicles (SNDVs) such as long range bombers, nuclear submarines and intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) to 1,600.

START, which was due for renewal on December 5 last year, has seen the US  remove over 1,000 strategic ballistic missiles, 350 heavy bombers and 28 ballistic missile submarines.

Over a quarter of the bombers destroyed were B-52Gs.

Most have ended up in what is known as the boneyard, a vast airforce graveyard in Tuscan, Arizona. Over 4,400 aircraft sit at the Davis-Monthan Air Force Base. Not all are destined for destruction.

It is a perfect resting place for unused or soon to be destroyed aircarft.  Tuscan is very hot and dry. The average temperature is 28 degrees celsius (82.4 degrees Fahrenheit) and the average annual rainfall is just 300 millimetres (or 12 inches). The heat and low humidity prevents aircraft rust, while the area's flat, hard, dry clay soils provide a cheap parking surface for aircraft.

The boneyard is also very visible from space. This means Russian satellites can count every  plane to see if the US is meeting START.

Russia in turn has had to advise the US of the location of its bases. And so it is that both sides have parked thousands of weapons; bombers, submarines, missiles and other weapons so each country's satellites can carry out stock-takes. (The treaty also allowed both countries to visit bases to confirm the destruction process.)

Under START, the B-52G destruction was absolute.

The treaty required that the USD30 million B-52G would never fly again. Giant guillotines were hoisted above the bombers and cut off the planes' tails. This separated the tails from the main bodies ( fuselages) of the bombers. The wings were then cut off. Then finally the bodies were cut in half again. All of this was filmed by satellites. Finally the bombers' remains were left to stand in the Arizona boneyard, in view of the Russian satellites, for 3 months.

After that the bomber's metals were sold as scrap. According to a 1995 Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists report the average scrap metal price of a START destroyed B-52 bomber was USD20,000 (about USD28,000 in 2009).

Before the bombers were guillotined they were stripped and gutted. If defense security allowed it, re-useable parts were sold. This included wheels, landing equipment, dials and a host of non-classified parts and furniture such as ejection seats.

Each B-52G had six crew and therefore six ejection seats.

Californian based company MotoArt has converted B52-G ejection seats into office chairs for high flying executives. (The company's website does not provide prices for this chair...)

Information on how to buy scrap metal and parts from the Davis-Monthan Air Force Base can be found on the Base's website ( http://www.dm.af.mil/index.asp )

Davis-Monthan continues to decommission other US Airforce planes.

http://www.dm.af.mil/index.asp

http://www.state.gov/t/vci/rls/123551.htm

US Department of State (Under Secretary for Arms Control and International Security, Bureau of Verification, Compliance and Implememtation Fact Sheets 2009)
http://www.state.gov/t/vci/rls/130149.htm

http://www.state.gov/t/vci/rls/126119.htm

http://www.state.gov/t/vci/trty/104150.htm

DTRA Defense Threat Reduction Agency
http://www.dtra.mil/newsservices/fact_sheets/display.cfm?fs=start

http://www.drms.dla.mil

Defense Treaty Inspection Readiness Program (co-ordinated by US Department of Defense, Central Intelligence Agency, Federal Bureau of Investigation, NASA, US Joints Chief of Staff and other agencies)
http://dtirp.dtra.mil/About/origin.cfm

http://dtirp.dtra.mil/TIC/synopses/start.cfm

http://www.stratofortress.org/index.htm

http://www.acc.af.mil/library/factsheets/index.asp

Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists; Vol 51, No. 1; Educational Foundation for Nuclear Science, Inc; Jan 1995

First, gain the guts or intestines of a slaughtered sheep, pig or cow and gently squeeze out as much of the pooh as possible.

Cut the guts into 50cm or 20 inch segments. Animal intestines are very long.

Open up one end of a gut, place under a tap and flush out the remaining excrement with water. Repeat over and over again until all the guts (also known as runners) are completely clean of pooh etc.

Importantly, seek advice from official government health and safety departments as to whether the runners are sufficiently clean to be eaten.

It can be difficult to buy runners from an abattoir. (Exporters and meat processors with appropriate documentation have little or no problems. These organisations buy the runners, once abattoirs have squeezed out  most of the pooh. The runners are then chilled. In the abattoir trade, all chilled semi-cleaned intestines are  called green runners.)

In the event that it is difficult to find pooh lined guts seek out companies which process runners. An ability to speak Mandarin Chinese is useful.

Australia is one of the world's top sheep producers. Most of their runners go to China as chilled, partially cleansed guts.

One of Australia's major customers for green runners used to be Germany, home to over 1500 types of  Wurst  or sausage. But cleaning out pooh and the like is a dirty labour intensive business, so now most of the runners go to China to be cleaned. There labour is cheap and pollution laws are less strict.

After processing in China, the cleaned casings are exported around the world, to be eaten in homes and restaurants in Europe, Australia, New Zealand and the Americas.

Back to making the sausage....Once a clean casing has been gained, pump a tasty  filling into it; then twist the casing closed at the desired sausage length.

For a filling, perhaps use appropriately prepared minced offal (animal organs), animal blood and salt. This is a traditional style filling which ensures as much meat as possible is used (thus preventing wastage.) The salt acts as a preservative. When minced offal is mixed with herbs, oil (or fat) and spices, sausages are tasty.

Nowadays fillings also use rusk dry biscuits (to bind the meat together), starch, flavours and supaphos (a phoshpate) which keeps the sausage moist for quite a long time.

Bon appetit

During the Cold War,  West Berlin was completely surrounded by East Germany. The Berlin Wall sealed the city...and its waste.

While food and supplies could be transported in from West Germany, there was no way West Berlin could send its waste all the way through East Germany and over the border to West Germany. It wasn't practical.

During the Cold War East and West Germany's border ran from near Lubeck in the north, down to midway between Dresden and Nurnberg. Berlin sat firmly inside East Germany.     CIA World Factbook map

So as the US and its allies poured money into rebuilding West Germany,  West Berlin's rubbish grew and grew.

Initially the city used landfills for rubbish. But eventually the landfills could take no more so an incinerator was built. This made little difference.

As well as rubbish, there was also the matter of sewage which caused problems for West Berlin's administrators. Solving this problem became one of the first waste agreements the Communist East had with the West.

Under the agreement,  East Germany would handle West Berlin's sewage provided the West helped fix the East's leaking sewage plants.  This included financing upgrades to the Nord plant , at Schonerlinde, on the outskirts of Berlin.

So US post-war reconstruction funds helped pay for Communist sewage plants.

While this sewer diplomacy bubbled along, East German soldiers continued to shoot at East Berliners trying to escape over the Berlin Wall into the West.

Thousands were trying to join separated families in wealthier West Berlin. This part of the city  was booming and in 1971 had a population nearly double that of Communist East Berlin (2,083,987 compared to 1,087,982)

Nevertheless as West Berlin's affluence grew so too did it effluence. The city  was being swamped by waste. So the Communist East once more entered into some Capitalist haggling over consumption and waste disposal. Thus despite hostilities and disagreements on most things, the two Cold War opponents were quite prepared to reach an agreement on one thing....waste.

In 1972, East Berlin agreed to take some of West Berlin' s rubbish. The arrangement worked well for the East. The West had lots of waste. And the East  had ample space for landfills. After all Berlin was surrounded by Communist East German territory..

East Germany wanted the arrangement to continue. But more than that, it insisted West Berlin continue to tear down and construct buildings, toss out  food, throw away furniture and create high levels of waste. Basically the West had to meet target levels of waste, otherwise the deal ended. Then in 1974, both agreed the waste relationship seemed to be working so a 20 year contract was signed.

Under this agreement apart from paying annual fees, the West Berlin public waste company Berliner Stadtreinigungsbetriebe (BSR) agreed to fund the modernisation of East Berlin's waste system.

West Berlin had no alternative but to accept the conditions. It was a costly agreement.

Throwing out waste became an expensive luxury.  So West Berliners and the BSR were determined to reduce the burden of waste disposal. Although consumption increased, their waste did not exceed the East's targets. Thus they were not penalised with even higher costs.

The West Berliners did this by recycling everything they could. Residents separated metals, glass, paper, timber and kitchen waste. Incineration was expanded. More importantly, investments were made in new waste treatment methods.This new technology placed West Germans at the forefront of  waste recovery and treatment technology.

Berlin: The Spatial Structure of a Divided City. Elkins, T.H; Hofmeister; Methuen & Co, New York; 1988

http://www.stadtentwicklung.berlin.de/umwelt/umweltatlas/ed110_06.htm Senate Department for Urban Development, Berlin

http://www.fundinguniverse.com/company-histories/Berliner-Stadtreinigungsbetriebe-Company-History.html

Apart from Microsoft, Bill Gates biggest public US investment is in waste.

Currently he owns about USD1.44 billion worth of shares in Republic Services (RSG), the second biggest waste company in the US. In September last year, his private charitable fund (the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation Trust)  also owned 15,716,367 shares (worth about USD500 million) in the biggest US waste company Waste Management Inc (WM).

RSG operates in 40 US states, controls 400 trucking companies, 213 landfills, 79 recycling facilities and over 240 waste sorting or transfer stations. It employs about 34,000 people.

WM employs about 46,000 people. It has 273 landfills, 104 recycling facilities and 355 transfer stations.

The RSG shares are owned through his private investment company Cascade Investments. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation also owns some RSG shares.

Gates seems to have a very keen interest in RSG. He owns about 15 percent of the waste company. And in July 2008 he pushed off an attempt by WM to take over RSG. Then in October last year Gate's adviser and friend, Michael Larson joined the RSG board. Larson is the Business Manager for Cascade and the Chief Investment Officer for the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

The former Microsoft chief still owns over USD18 billion worth of shares in the computing giant.

Apart from Microsoft, his largest investment is in Canadian National Railways (CNI). Cascade owns over USD1.74 billion worth of shares in this rail company, the biggest in Canada and one of the largest in North America.

(01/2010)

http://www.nasdaq.com/

http://www.republicservices.com/

http://www.wm.com/

http://www.wme.com.au/insidewaste/downloads/Issue31_July.Aug2009_InsideWaste.pdf

http://www.gatesfoundation.org/Pages/home.aspx

Around 250 million years ago, gigantic clouds of rotten egg gas swept over and smothered the earth and caused a mass extinction. In recent years the dumping of construction plasterboard has seen this same gas seep out of landfills across the world.

The prehistoric rotten egg gas or hydrogen sulphide (H2S) followed massive volcanic eruptions.   The result was cataclysmic and is referred to as the Great Dying.

Nearly all marine life was wiped out and about seventy percent of reptiles became extinct. The remains of dead life lay thick on the earth's surface and eventually turned to calcium carbonate rock.

Now millions of years later this mineral is used in plastics, nappies, iron, soy milk, paints and plasterboard. (Builders use plasterboard for wall and ceiling linings)

The calcium carbonate in plasterboard is called gypsum and global demand for this mineral is staggering.

In 2005 plasterboard was the most popular material in the world for the construction of interior walls and ceilings.

This was the peak of the world housing boom. Plasterboard was used from Australia, to Ireland, Russia, China and the US. It changed the construction industry. It was cheap, light, flexible, more fire resistant than timber and easy to use. Plasterboard became a building block of the instant home. McMansions, villas, flats and apartments sprung up all over the world.

In 2008 the world used about 80 million tonnes of gypsum. By 2015 this is expected to rise by at least 50 percent to 120 million tonnes.

All this use has caused quite a bit of waste; and that’s become an ugly problem.

That’s because for years scrap plasterboard was tossed into landfills where it was mixed with household food and organic waste. This waste reacted with the gypsum and caused hydrogen sulphide. The same gas, which some scientists believe, caused the Great Dying.

Although the amount of rotten egg gas, which leaked out of landfills, was miniscule in comparison to the gas clouds of the Permian Triassic extinction it was highly toxic and this concerned governments.

So governments across the world banned the mixing of plasterboard with organic waste. In future, they decided, dumped plasterboard would have to be placed into specially designed landfills.

At the same time many countries also decided to reduce landfills. This was because landfills used and polluted valuable real estate. Levies (or fees) were introduced to decrease the dumping of waste and targets were set for waste reduction. In the EU this means approximately 60 percent of landfills will close by about 2020.

So the plasterboard industry is faced with a problem. What can it do with its waste? Some companies have sprung up offering to recycle old plasterboard. These are efficient and well organised. But unfortunately new plasterboard only uses a small percentage (25 percent) of recycled gypsum.

Nonetheless gypsum recycling companies say they are able to recycle all of the gypsum they process. This is probably because landfills are still operating. So, many construction companies do not use recyclers. Instead they put up with the high levy costs and still dump plasterboard into landfill.

About 14.5 million tonnes of gypsum is dumped into landfills across the world.

But this situation is going to change pretty quickly. Landfills are not only going to be more expensive, they will have limited space. So landfills will not be able to take plasterboard.

Furthermore the amount of plasterboard waste will become monstrous. This is because the McMansions, the apartments and villas of the housing boom have not yet been demolished. But they will come down one day and with them so will the plasterboard. Hopefully by that time old plasterboard will be completely recyclable.

http://www.regyp.com.au/whyrecycle.html

http://www.gypsumrecycling.co.uk/6688-1_Whyrecycle/

http://www.theconcreteproducer.com/industry-news.asp?articleID=1097287&sectionID=1419

http://www.boral.com.au/AnnualReview/2009/AnnualReport/review-of-operating-divisions-plasterboard.asp?mnu=7

http://www.defra.gov.uk/environment/business/products/roadmaps/pdf/plasterboard0909.pdf

Hidden inside Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde is a story of hogwash, tax, a vicar, drunkenness and the Gin Epidemic of 18th Century England.

To understand this it's helpful to know a little of the history of English gin and two distantly related men, the Reverend Walter Jekyll and Sir Joseph Jekyll.

The story of English gin begins in the late 1600s when mildewy, rotten English wheat and barley was fed to pigs as hogwash because bakers and brewers (beer makers) couldn't use the grain.

Then, in about 1690, some imaginative English distillers decided to use this hogwash to make a truly awful spirit which would go on to become one of the world's first alcopops. This foul spirit was English gin. And although disgusting  its production opened the door to the English Gin Craze of the 1700s and drunken social disorder.

All of this began with the English taste for Dutch gin.

Dutch gin had been seeping into England since the rule of William of Orange in the late 1600s. The problem was it cost too much for most people. This was because hefty taxes had been placed on Dutch gin to help pay for William's war against France.

Yet despite the high cost of Dutch gin many English developed a taste for the spirit. Small doses of gin, unlike beer, caused quick intoxication. What's more gin could be hidden in cupboards, then secretly brought out and gulped down.

English distillers therefore recognised a market for cheap gin. So, from about 1690, English hogwash gin (which was only vaguely like Dutch gin)  was made and sold by malt distillers.

Then in about 1720, English compound distillers recognised an opportunity and entered the gin business. They started to mix the hogwash malt gin with additives to mask the offensive taste. Seasonal fruits, sugar and anything which might make the gin more drinkable, marketable and saleable were added.

These compound distillers sold the 18th century gin alcopop to masses of unlicensed gin peddlars and merchants. Men and women, young and old, the poor and not so poor all bought the compound distiller's gin and went into business. Many also mixed the alcopop gin with water (to increase profits) then sold it to their neighbours, friends, relatives and passerbys.

This marked the beginning of the Gin Craze. The compound distiller's alcopop saw gin sales leap, particularly in London. Consumption of spirits doubled. By 1729 the spirit consumption had doubled again. It was to keep soaring up until 1751. And by the far the most popular and cheapest spirit was gin. By the 1740s English consumption of spirits had risen by over 700 percent compared to that in 1700.

But it wasn't as if the English, in particular the Londoners had given up drinking beer. Remarkably the amount of beer consumed by the average English person remained the same throughout the Gin Epidemic (1720-1751). What happened  was more people began to drink alcohol. And unfortunately many of these new drinkers were women, particularly poorer women.  Mothers, grandmothers, single women and pregnant women all fell victim to gin; sometimes neglecting their own health and their children's health. A generation of children were blighted by Fetal Alcohol Sydrome. (Physical and mental damage caused by drinking alcohol during pregnancy.)

While the landed gentry and distillers were delighted with how the gin craze had created a thirsty market for grains and malt spirits some in government and the community were less delighted. England needed strong soldiers, healthy merchant sailors and reliable laborers. Gin, on the other hand,  was inflating crime and giving birth to a frail, dull, sickly generation of men and women. Something had to be done....

So what's this got to do with the story of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde published in 1886, over 150 years later?

Robert Louis Stevenson, the story's author, was a dipsomaniac. That is an alcoholic with a dreaded craving for alcohol. He admitted as much to his friend Sidney Colvin.

His classic Victorian horror story Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde was written in England during the anti-alcohol or Temperance Movement of the 1800s.

In the story the respectable Dr Jekyll becomes smitten by a potion he manufactures in his laboratory. The potion causes him to turn into the monstrous Mr Hyde, Jekyll's evil alter ego.

Stevenson wrote the story in the midst not only of the Temperance Movement but also during a time when wealthy men frequently enjoyed having their own private laboratories.

A private laboratory was a sign of affluence, leisure and education. As the understanding of organic chemistry and atoms grew so too did the number of private laboratories. These sprung up in well-to-do homes across Europe, North America and the English speaking world. A house with a laboratory was a little like owning a luxury car, a cinema or a boat today.

At the same time, a growing interest in the mind and psychiatry, combined with the mental misery of the Industrial Revolution, saw an increase in "lunatic asylums" and studies on the cause and treatment of madness.

So this was the society in which the dipsomaniac, often drunk Stevenson lived; a society aware of science, madness and the curse of alcohol. It's not surprising therefore his character Jekyll is a respectable doctor who tinkers away in a laboratory and secretly drinks potions which release his evil alter ego.

At the time of writing his horror story, one of Stevenson's best friends was the Anglican clergyman Reverend Walter Jekyll. Stevenson was sufficiently impressed by Rev Jekyll's decency that he used his friend's name for the fictitious, respectable characater Dr Jekyll.

Yet Dr Jekyll was a fatally flawed character, addicted to a potion and the evil transformation it caused.

At first glance it would seem Rev Walter Jekyll might have reason to be offended by Stevenson's use of his name. So was there another reason why Stevenson used the uncommon English name "Jekyll"?

It appears there was. The story of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde is an allegory to the curse of alcholism and English attempts to control it.

One man famous for his attempts to control alcohol was Sir Joseph Jekyll, who lived during the Gin Craze. Sir Joseph  was a legendary politician, barrister and judge who loathed drunkenness, in particular the unlicensed sale of gin. He was obsessed by a desire to control it and consequently introduced the Gin Act of 1736 which placed a huge tax on gin sales. This Act  caused public riots, but laid the foundations for the GIn Act of 1751 which banned the sale of gin by unlicensed peddlars and merchants.

Over one hundred years later Sir Joseph Jekyll's disgust for gin helped inspire and guide the Temperance Movement. It was certainly a name very familiar to Robert Louis Stevenson. But more than that, the ghostly presence of Sir Joseph Jekyll  haunted the dipsomaniac Stevenson. That was because his very good friend the Reverend Walter Jekyll was a descendant of the legendary anti-drunkenness crusader..

The transforming draught: Jekyll and Hyde, Robert Louis Stevenson and the Victorian alcohol debate; Thomas L. Reed; McFarland and Co; North Carolina and London; 2006

Vailima Letters: Being Correspondence addressed by Robert Louis Stevenson to Sidney Colvin, November 1890-October 1894, Methuen; London; 1895.

Craze. Gin and Debauchery in an Age of Reason; Jessica Warner; Profile Books; London; 2003

Sir William Hogarth, Prints and Drawings (1720-60) Including Beer Street and Gin Lane (1751)

Serendipity is the accidental discovery of something useful whilst looking for something else. And this is exactly what happened to a 17th century German while experimenting with urine.

Hennig Brandt was an unsuccessful businessman and former soldier from Hamburg who was determined to discover the Philosopher's Stone.

The Philosopher's Stone was based on the studies of the 8th century Iranian alchemist Abu Musa Jabir ibn Hayyan (known in short as Geber). Geber who also studied philosophy, astronomy and physics thought it might be possible to rearrange the properties of one common metal to form gold.

Geber believed all that was required was a  potion or material  which contained the al-iksir ( elixir) which would transform ordinary stones into gold. He used the idea that elements  were made of four qualities: heat, coldness, dryness and moisture.

Geber's ideas had popular appeal and seemed to be based on reasonable science. Thus alchemy was born and with it the quest to find the mythical ingredient which would make a person rich.

It was certainly an idea which was attractive to the bankrupt Hennig Brandt in Hamburg.

Brandt had heard rumours that it might be possible to use urine to turn silver or lead into gold.

So in 1669 Brandt decided to fully investigate the idea using a very large amount of urine. He collected buckets and buckets of urine. Some reports say he used 40 buckets, others say he collected 50 buckets. What ever, it was a lot. He was utterly determined to find the Philosopher's Stone.

The poor Hamburg alchemist let the buckets of urine putrify then gather maggots. Eventually the urine turned into a pasty glue and white marks appeared on the laboratory walls.

Then one evening Brandt noticed his workroom was glowing. He went and investigated and found the walls and the paste in the buckets were shining with a strange white green light.

Brandt named his discovery phosphorous, which meant light bringing.

Phosphorous was further developed by other chemists. It is now used in explosives, lamps, china crockery, cleaning powders, detergents,  pesticides and a host of other products.

Unfortunately it did not make Brandt wealthy....

The study of faeces (commonly known as pooh) is actually very important. It's scientific name is scatology or coprology.

There is a hall of other words related to scatology and coprology. These are areas studied by palaeontologists, geologists, psychiatrists, historians, parasitogists, pathologists, psychologists, archeologists, anthropologists, zoologists, chemists and others. Some of these study the letting off of faeces, others study the taking in of faeces. And sometimes they study both.

In modern medicine what's inside faeces can tell us whether a patient has internal bowel bleeding, is infected by parasites or has problems with their diet. That's all fairly obvious.The study of very old hard pooh on the other hand is a little more remarkable

Consider for example a coprolite . This is a rock of fossilized faeces.

Palaeontologists examine these ancient rocks to learn about the living conditions of dinosaurs and prehistoric marine reptiles. The remains of bones, fish scales, sea shells, leaves, seeds and wood inside these rocks of prehistoric excrement help palaeontologists understand the diet and environment of ancient animals. Coprolites also help identify the parasites and sicknesses which harmed dinosaurs and marine reptiles.

Taphonomists are researchers whose interests cross into palaeontology, anthropology, zoology and geology. These people study how the remains of ancient living organisms decayed. An abundance of coprolites from one area tells taphonomists the animal was part of a large population. While the type of rock layers covering and holding the ancient pooh shows if and when water, volcanoes or earthquakes swept over the area.

Archaeologists also study very old rocks of pooh. But while palaeontologists study 200 million year old coprolites, archaeologists study pooh that is only a few thousand years old. These more modern lumps of pooh are also often called coprolites. But technically they should not be called this. Real coprolites are fossils which take at least 10,000 years to form.

Like palaeontologists, archaeologists examine coprolites to understand the diet and diseases of whoever or whatever made the faeces. Studies of South American coprolites from about 2200BC have shown people suffered from tapeworm (Enterobius Vermicularis) and gastro (Giardia). This gave them itchy bottoms and diarrohoea.

Geologists and chemists also study coprolites. This is because coprolites are high in the mineral phosphate.

Phosphate is used both in explosives and as a fertiliser. One of the most common sources for phosphate is guano. This is the droppings and remains of ancient seabirds and bats. One major source for guano has been the Pacific Islands. Ancient sea birds used these islands for breeding and to rest during trans-oceanic voyages. (see: http://www.wotwaste.com/waste-articles/agricultural-waste/us-bird-pooh-laws-pacific-islands-and-a-very-large-british-home )

Zoologists are also interested in faeces, in particular the eating of pooh by animals. Young koalas, pandas and elephants eat their mother's faeces to gain bacteria for the break down of food. Gorillas also eat their own excrement to assist in digestion. Flies and dung beetles feed off the faeces of animals, and assist in the decomposition of it. There are actually quite a few animals which eat pooh for practical reasons.

Then there is the eating or handling of faeces for non-practical peculiar reasons. Humans very occassionally do this....Eat their own or other people's faeces. And yes it will make them sick and vomit; which is why psychiatrists and psychologists study this behaviour. They've given it a couple of special names coprolagnia and coprophilia (These deal with getting a weird pleasure from doing revolting things with human pooh).

About the only thing that is not automated inside the Exeloo Galaxy is the reason for entering this space age toilet unit.

Entry into the Exeloo is via automated doors. Upon entry clients are welcomed by a computerised male voice. This is followed by muzak versions of Burt Bacharach's What the World Needs Now and Barbra Streisand's Evergreen.

This is a cutting edge oblutions box where everything is calibrated, calculated and measured. The only thing a guest has to touch within the Galaxy is the exit button. (That is unless a client needs to read the Braille signs or grip the disabled access bars.)

The Exeloo Galaxy costs about AUD250,000. It rolls out 18 sheets of toilet paper per guest and six litres of water per flush. The toilet flushes automatically when hands are washed or when a guest leaves the Exeloo. Research has shown the average visit to a public toilet lasts two minutes. So the Galaxy is programed to unlock it's door after two minutes. (This however can be modified by the unit owners.)

After 30 flushes the Exeloo Galaxy shuts down and cleans itself. During these seven minutes of decommissioning, the Galaxy sprays water and disinfectant around the unit and then airdries the unit.

The Galaxy is one of five unit types sold by the Australian company Exeloo RBA Group. (The RBA Group also installs most of the toilets and wash fittings for Australian gaols.) Exeloo units range in price from about AUD75,000 to AUD250,000. There are about 120 located across Australia. Examples of the Exeloo can be seen in Alice Springs, Emerald and Kings Cross. see http://www.exeloo.com

For humans, locusts are insects of destruction and waste. So why was Volvo interested in them?

Swarming in massive, roaring, ravenous clouds locusts completely destroy farms without bumping into each other. And this is what fascinated the Preventative Safety Team at Volvo.

The Swedish car company decided to see if they could use the locust's bump prevention system in cars. Their idea was to prevent Volvo drivers hitting pedestrians.

As it turned out the locust system proved to be too smart for Volvo. They were unable to copy the locust anti-crashing system... but research is continuing.

"We learned of Dr Claire Rind's, Newcastle University, UK, studies into the migratory African Locust, which showed that they tend to to avoid bumping into each other during flights," said Jonan Ekmark, Preventative Safety Leader at Volvo Car Corporation.

"Our original thoughts centred on pedestrian safety. If we could trace how locusts are able to avoid each other maybe we could program our cars not to hit pedestrians."

During the study, Dr Rind learned that visual input is instantly transmitted to the insect's wing nerve cells, seemingly bypassing the brain.

"Locusts are quick reacting and have reliable circuits. They do their computations against lots of background chatter, much like driving around town," said Dr Rind.

Primary to Volvo's research was to synthesise a locust algorithm that could be applied to the car. Unfortunately the locust system was much more sophisticated than anything modern IT could offer the team at Volvo.

"In the end technology was no match for for nature .: said Volvo's Ekmark.s

http://www.volvocars.com/uk/footer/about/NewsEvents/News/Pages/default.aspx?item=143

The current price for bulls testicles is about USD2,000 per tonne. In North America they're crumbed and fried and sold as Rocky Mountain Oysters, Prairie Oysters or Sweetbreads. In China they're sold as "testosterone enhancers".

The only waste product not sold in an abattoir is the bloody, salty waste water used for skin packaging.

Apart from meat there are markets for intestinal guts (or sausage linings...once the faeces is removed), endocrine glands, hooves, horns, skins, fat, kidneys, faeces, wool, grease, blood, tongues, hearts, livers, brains and gallstones.

Gelatin which is found in bones, cartilage and tendons has been used for microscope culture plates and in cosmetics, paper money, pharmaceuticals, cakes, jellies, lollies, glues, vaccinations, photography and cinematography. It is an ancient process and is made from boiled animal tissue.

So how was gelatin used in photography? Up until the 1870s photography had relied upon wet development plates. Photographic paper was soaked in silver nitrate and saltwater baths. It was then placed wet into the camera. The exposed paper gave a dark silver image which had to be immediately washed to fix the image and remove the remaining silver chloride. It was a time consuming fiddly process. Photographers had to carry portable darkrooms and chemicals with them whenever they took photos. Then in 1871, English doctor Richard Maddox suggested a simple solution, the use of dry plates coated with an emulsion of gelatin and silver salts. The gelatin emulsion preserved the pictures. This meant the plates could be taken back to a darkroom much later, moistened and the pictures developed.

Gelatin is just a tiny part of the abattoir waste industry story. Bone China, as the name suggests, uses bone. Those fine cups on your grandmother's sideboard are made of bone ash, kaolin and China stone (a type of granite).

Then there's bull's testicles. If you're a US truck driver, you may well like them crumbed and fried and eaten as Rocky Mountain Oysters, Prairie Oysters or Sweetbreads. If you're a Chinese medicine customer they'll be ground and pulverised and sold to you as as a testosterone enhancer. The edible sort cost about USD2,000 per tonne whereas the pharmaceutical grade will cost about USD4,000 per tonne.

But the list doesn't end there. Apart from meat there are markets for intestinal guts. These are known in the trade as "runners"...or sausage linings. The faeces is squeezed out of the guts. They are then chilled and exported to China where they are thoroughly cleaned and then re-sold. The biggest market is Germany.

And so it goes on. There are scientists for instance using endocrine glands for research. Then there are markets for hooves, horns, skins, fat, faeces, kidneys, wool, blood, tongues, wool grease, hearts, liver, brains and gallstones. And for each of these products there are layers of complex and unexpected uses. Skins for instance are not only used for Ugg boots, rugs and coats. The wool is often shorn or chemically removed and used for carpets, underlay or coats. Athletes runners and luxury shoes frequently have bare sheepskin liners.

Finally there are gallstones. While every animal has a heart, kidneys and brain, gallstones are comparatively rare and valued as an antipyretic in Chinese medicine. These are frequently the illicit province of abattoir shift supervisors who slip them into an esky and sell them for about USD35 each to Chinese herbal medicine suppliers.

So what is the filler Collagen made of... or as cosmetic surgeons describe it purified bovine collagen? Well let's descramble those words a bit so we know what they mean. "Purified" equals very, very clean. "Bovine" equals cow and "collagen" equals skin glue. Or to give it a little bit more medical gravitas: highly processed - cow skin - connective tissue protein (...an abattoir by product.)

And what about  AlloDerm and other acellular human cadaveric dermis products, which are also popular fillers? To get these, one follows the same sort of process as that for collagen and dead cows, except it involves cadavers or dead humans.

Finally what is Botox (used to erase frown lines)...otherwise known as Clostridium botullinum? This is a food poisoning bacteria found on moulding, contaminated food.

(See the very candid site http://www.yestheyrefake.net and search Botox, Injectable Fillers, Injectable Bio-implants).

by Stavros Mouslopoulos (theoretical particle physicist) and Anastasia Joyce.

The cutting edge of particle physics deals with the possibility of 11 dimensions and parallel universes.

Most of us can understand four dimensions. (The three Spatial Dimensions of left to right, up and down and backwards and forwards; and the Time Dimension or fourth dimension.)

Physics is now looking at an M- Theory (sometimes called the Membrane Theory). This provides some theoretical answers to problems posed by String Theory which tried to explain everything including the Big Bang. Put very simply it involves space being curled up within a whole lot of other dimensions.

This M-Theory provides answers to some of the long standing problems physicists have been grappling with in a search for a perfect Grand Unifying Theory (GUT). Not only that but the M-Theory favors the possibility of parallel universes.

So if the M-Theory is correct and there are parallel universes would those universes be waste free? The simple answer is "no" because of the Second Law of Thermodynamics.(See: http://www.wotwaste.com/waste-articles/universal-waste/the-universal-law-of-waste-part-1-or-the-chicken-corn-and-egg-in-a-lonely-cosmic-journey )

However this question does raise the hot philosophical debate of determinism versus free-will.

A strict determinist would propose that within these parallel universes there would be humans, identical to us making identical mistakes and causing identical problems. That's because every event is determined by an unbroken chain of prior events over which there is no control: Humanity is hopeless in the face of physical laws.

Someone who believed in free-will however would propose it was possible these parallel universes contained living beings (perhaps humans) who were able to predict, measure and modify the results of actions. Therefore while a parallel universe would still produce waste maybe its world, or worlds, might not be polluted.

We are entering the dawn of the terminally ill skyscrapers.

Modern multi-storey buildings started to emerge out of the landscape in the middle of 20th century. And for many of these early skyscrapers...their days are numbered.

The average US multi-storey building will last for about 73 years, according to research prepared for the US Department of Energy by Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL).

This average is generally accepted throughout the world. Though some buildings can last for about 200 years.

At the moment there are two main ways of demolishing a skyscraper...belting it down with a wrecking ball or blowing it down with explosives. Though the Japanese have developed another method which involves the building being lowered down floor by floor..( See article: http://www.wotwaste.com/waste-articles/commercial-waste/zen-buddhism-and-the-art-of-building-demolition.)

Sick and dying buildings are going to become more common and more problematic. One could say its a growth industry for engineers and demolition companies.

End of life buildings was one of the  topics at the Annual Demolition Summit, held on November 6, in Amsterdam.

Martin Bjerregaard from UK engineering firm Golder Associates spoke on the challenges facing demolition and engineering companies who have to safely and economically remove these buildings.

These challenges include how to sort through, identify and handle ozone depleting CFCs (chlorofluorocarbons), asbestos, lead and PCBs (polychlorinated biphenyls).

Hazardous chemicals and materials are knitted into the fabric of these worn out buildings.

PCBs were used for aircondtioning coolants, sealants, water proofing, fluorescent lighting, adhesives, wooden floor coatings, PVC coatings and as electrical insulators. They were also used in electrical appliances such as toasters and fridges.

PCBs have been linked to liver, thyroid, stomach and skin disease; in addition to immune system and learning problems in children.

In 1976, PCB production was banned by the US. Then in 2001 the UN introduced the Stockholm Convention on Persistent Organic Pollutants which banned PCB production. Over  152 countries have signed the convention.

But it is not only PCBs and CFCs which are woven into ageing skyscrapers and high rise flats. Up until about the 1980s many of the pipes and walls were painted with lead paints. Asbestos was used in floor tiles, roofing, wall plaster, insulation and fireproofing.

And just to make the problem of building contaminants even more difficult many of these materials cannot simply be dumped into landfill.

The buildings have to be thoroughly and one would hope responsibly stripped out into a shell by demolition contractors before the building is levelled.

Painted concrete for instance has to be assessed to find out the lead concentration. If its too high it cannot be recycled into concrete aggregate.

All PCB and CFC building parts have to be carefully stripped, separated and removed. Any spillage, or escape of vapours risks worker health and contamination of other building parts.

These PCB and CFC coatings, insulators, coolants, sealants, lights, tiles and the like are then taken away to be destroyed, usually by incineration or irradiation (though sometimes ultrasound, microbes or chemicals are used for PCBs)

Quite apart from all of that,  strip out specialists also remove glass, wiring, shelving, metals, built in furniture, plastics and other recyclable materials. About 50 percent of a building is recycled. With the biggest recyclables being concrete (for roads), steel, glass and copper.

But its a complicated process made more complicated by the hazardous materials inside these old buildings. And within the next 20 years that problem is going to become larger.

see http://www.emporis.com

http://www.demolitionsummit.com/

www.disasterwaste.org

http://www.ecy.wa.gov/programs/hwtr/index.html

http://chm.pops.int/

http://www.wbdg.org/ccb/ARMYCOE/PWTB/pwtb_200_1_44.pdf

http://www.cecer.army.mil/techreports/ERDC-CERL_TR-07-2/ERDC-CERL_TR-07-2.pdf

Physics has a law which states waste will always occur.

This law is The Second Law of Thermo- dynamics. It says waste always occurs because of entropy.

On the other hand, physics has another law which says energy cannot be destroyed or lost. This is The Law of Conservation of Energy.

For us mere mortals trying to understand what these both mean and how they relate to waste, it's important to understand entropy. So here's a little story to help.

Imagine you are alone and stranded on a spaceship (isolated system). While you wait for help you have to stay alive by eating (receiving energy).

Unfortunately all you have is a chicken and some corn. What would you do? There are two choices.

1) Eat the chicken and eat the corn. In this case you get the maximum amount of available energy. (Your primary need.)

2) Feed the corn to the chicken. The chicken will lay eggs. You could then eat the eggs and then the chicken. But in this case you are receiving less energy because the chicken has used up some of the corn's energy by breathing, clucking, producing droppings etc. (Secondary products for you and therefore arguably waste.)

So how does this relate to entropy, the Second Law of Thermodynamics and the Law of Conservation of Energy?

No matter what you decide to do your spaceship (isolated system) will contain the same amount of energy. This is because of the Law of Conservation of Energy. However with the second choice there is a much greater amount of entropy (while there is only a little bit of entropy in the first choice.) The energy has been devalued and is of less use to your own personal energy needs. But it hasn't disappeared. The chicken has converted it into kinetic energy (to move), thermal energy (heat) and droppings.

So what are you going to do? Eat the chicken and the corn? Or store the droppings as fertiliser and keep the chicken for a while and enjoy its very existence....your companion on a lonely cosmic journey.

by Stavros Mouslopoulos (Theoretical Particle Physicist)

Up until 1668 and Francesco Redi's rotting meat experiments, sex and birth were universally misunderstood. Chinese Buddhists believed all things came from germs. Ancient Egyptians believed frogs came from mud. Medieval Europeans believed mice came from mouldy, rotten wheat and rats from sewerage.

Birth was due to spontaneous generation or divine intervention, or so it was thought.

Christian Europe believed it was God who was responsible for children. God blessed and rewarded marriage and the union of men and women with children...God's little gifts. There was absolutely no understanding of the connection between intercourse and the birth nine months later of a child. (Thus some very large families.)

Redi questioned this doctrine of spontaneous generation. His experiments proved meat became infested with maggots when contacted by flies. Therefore the air and the divine had little to do with the creation of living organisms.

The Italian's experiments were simple. Meat was placed inside three jars. One jar was covered with a lid. On another he placed a piece of gauze fabric allowing the flow of air and smells. No cover was placed on the third jar. After a number of days he noticed only the uncovered jar held maggots and rotting meat. And on the gauze covered jar he noticed eggs. He scraped the eggs off the gauze, dropped them onto the clean meat and noticed they turned into maggots and then flies. His simple experiment had shown it was living organisms which created other living organisms and not the air, earth or non-living matter.

Thus thanks to maggots and rotting meat we understand a whole lot more about living organisms and... sex.

Yes and that's because it contains an amino acid called Cysteine Hydrochloride (HCL). This amino acid is refined into L-Cysteine and can be used to process dough. It conditions and reduces the time to mix dough and is used in pizzas, croissants, bagels and a wide range of bakery items.

Dark hair is rich in this amino acid and as it happens there is a uniform, cheap and plentiful supply of this in east Asia. So for many years barbers and hairdressers in Asia have been gaining an income from not only cutting their customers' hair but from also baling it up and selling the sweepings to chemical companies.

China is the world's largest producer of hair and poultry based L-Cysteine.

But Germany also produces the chemical. Their's is petroleum based and is a synthetic chemical.

While many western government food agencies do not mind human hair additives in croissants and pastries other countries do mind. Jews do not view human hair L-Cysteine as kosher and prefer the synthetic product. Moslems also will not eat it. Islamic countries consider it a haram (human body) product. They are not permitted to eat any part of the human body.

Russia is very cold. So cold that when Russians are asked if they are concerned about global warming, they tend to frown, look bewildered and ask things like: " When..?". And " will I still need six pairs of sheepskin boots?".

So it's not surprising some Russians are very interested in things like temperature and thermal energy. One such person was Mikhail Ivanovich Budyko, a climatologist from the Leningrad Geophysical Observatory.

Dr Budyko (1920-2001) is famous for a couple of things; his snowball idea and the blanket named in his honor.

The first of these, the Snowball Effect relies on research begun by Budyko during the 1950s. Basically it says the globe could suffer from an extreme shortage of CO2 (carbon dioxide) brought on by  natural weathering and the earth's ability to soak up and sink CO2. This in turn would cause a rapid freezing of the earth and a new Ice Age. Temperatures would fall to an average minus 40 degrees celsius, except in tiny areas around volcanoes and thermal hot spots where life lingered on and survived.

Simply explained all of this would be due to a shortage of CO2 warmth. Ice and snow would appear in the warmer latitudes. The white snow  would then reflect the solar energy. The earth would get cooler. The albedo effect.  And the earth would race into an Ice Age.

Budyko's hypethesis is not a very popular one. The Russians probably don't like it; nor do those climate scientists who say the world should be worried about too much CO2, rather than too little.

What's a little perplexing is this Snowball Effect forms the basis of the Budyko Blanket hypothesis. And this is a pretty popular one amongst geoengineers.  (Though Al Gore definetely does not like the idea.)

Using the Budyko Blanket idea,  some scientists and geoengineers believe they could cool down the earth by pumping sulphur dioxide into the stratosphere. This would blanket the globe with a thin layer of sulphur dioxide, one of the waste emissions from coal power stations and other industries.

Its all supposed to be a fairly simple process. Narrow 30 kilometre hoses would be attached to power stations and then suspended in the stratosphere by giant helium balloons. The sulphur dioxide would be pumped up into the stratosphere by hundreds of small pumps spread along each hose.

The hoses could then be turned up or down; on or off. Thus with the aid of taps humanity, finally and simply, could control the climate. Or so the theory goes.

Budyko's Blanket is based upon the belief that, as with snow, the tiny particulates in sulphur dioxide would act like a mirror and reflect heat.  The earth would be blanketed against the heat of the sun. And all it would take is a few (maybe less than six) hoses attached to some dirty coal power stations, spread about the globe, which are already spewing out sulphur dioxide.

Of course there are a few problems associated with this (assuming it works). Things like: unfriendly countries with dirty power stations being able to control the world's climate (a climate cold war); finding people to service faulty stratospheric hose pumps; ensuring planes don't bump into the hoses etc etc.

http://theblanketeffect.blogspot.com/

http://www.superfreakonomicsbook.com/

http://www.intellectualventures.com/

A Japanese company is using a children's game as the basis for a new way of demolishing high rise buildings.

Daruma-otoshi is a Japanese children's game, stacked with four coloured pieces of wood. At the top of these pieces sits a Buddhist inspired dharma wish doll. This limbless, blind doll is a symbol of persistence and strong determination.

The object of the game is to use a small wooden hammer to knock down all four coloured pieces, one at a time, without causing the whole stack to collapse.

The dharma dolls are based on the story of Bodhidharma, the 5th century Indian monk and founder of Zen Buddhism.

Bodhidharma meditating in front of the cave wall. Painting by the 15th century Japanese zen monk Toyo Sesshu: "Hui ke offering his arm to Bodhidharma"

Bodhidharma is said to have sat motionless facing the wall of a cave for nine years. During the process he lost his arms, legs and sight but gained enlightenment...

Japanese company, Kajima has developed a floor by floor demolition process for skyscrapers, called Daruma-otoshi. This new method is an alternative to demolition with wrecking balls or explosives.

Using the Daruma-otoshi method, Kajima replaces the building's ground floor support pillars with huge metal columns. Everything from the ground floor is then removed. The concrete, steel, glass, insulation and electrical wiring is separated for recycling contractors. Once the ground floor has been cleared the computer controlled metal columns lower the entire building down one floor. Then the next floor is cleared. And so on and so forth.

OK. So what happens to all of that really grotty private waste inside household garbage? The stuff that makes you blush:  like ear buds, nappies, sanitary pads, those little rubber things and the like.

There's a bit of a myth they just rot away without anybody else ever having to see them, let alone touch them. It's a myth.

The truth is as waste technology advances so too does the revolting likelihood that other people will have to see this waste and pick it up. Over and over again. For hours and hours. Day after day.

Currently about 70 percent of household waste goes to landfill. But that figure is decreasing. So more and more waste is being treated by Alternative Waste Treatment (AWT) facilities and Materials Recycling Facilities (MRFs). AWTs treat unsorted household waste. MRFs treat sorted household recyclables.

By 2014 state governments across Australia hope that only about 30 percent of household rubbish will go to landfill. The reasons for this are pretty simple: governments wish to encourage recycling and land is too expensive to be used for dumps.

So what  now happens at AWTs and MRFs  is a fairly good illustration of where the household waste industry is headed.

By and large AWT and MRF technology is extremely impressive. They efficiently regain vast amounts of materials, convert other waste to energy and also produce compost.

But when it comes to all that unpleasant stuff, we would rather forget about, the situation is not pretty...particularly for AWTs.

Here's a very quick summary of how AWTs process mixed household waste. The bin is picked up by a truck. The waste is compacted and transported to the AWT. There it is received and slowly moves along a conveyor belt. This is where the manual sorting takes place. Nappies, bloodied bandages, incontinence pads, tampons and those little rubber things roll along in front of people employed to pluck them out with gloves. This waste is dropped into special bins. After that water, magnets, wind, screens and vibations and the like sort through and process the remaining waste.

The manual sorting situation is gross. Its made worse by the fact potentially dangerous waste is mixed up in a sludge of  rotting food and (all too frequently) used syringes. In fact needle stick injuries are common in waste facilities.

MRFs also have to sift out grotty personal waste. Even though recycling bins should only contain paper, cardboard,metals and plastics. MRF operators have to contend with nappies, condoms and the normal gang of potentially contagious human filth.  Often bottles are stuffed with syringes. It seems some households believe this will prevent harm. It doesn't. Hidden away inside bottles, the needles can stick into the unsuspecting waste worker.

The waste companies are well aware of the problem. But they cannot fix the problem while people keep on tossing this stuff into bins; and manufacturers, retailers and government share no responsibility. For instance the promotion and supply of containers or easy to identify color coded bags would mean waste workers recognised potentially harmful human body waste.

WSN Environmental solutions runs an AWT at Jacks Gully, Sydney. The facility has trialled the use of coloured easy-to-identify bags. These bags have withstood the compacting pressure of the trucks and have rolled along the conveyor belt, largely intact. But the waste processors biggest problem is gaining public, business and government awareness and assistance. And so far not much of that has happened....

http://www.wasteservice.nsw.gov.au/dir138/wsn.nsf/Content/Medical+and+Hygiene+Waste

http://www.environment.nsw.gov.au/resources/warr/07226_WARRreport07.pdf (NSW Waste Avoidance and Resource Recovery Strategy)

http://www.wasteservice.nsw.gov.au/

http://www.workcover.nsw.gov.au/Publications/LawAndPolicy/CodesofPractice/Pages/cop_collection_domestic_waste.aspx

Engineers from the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT University) are investigating using old cigarette butts to make bricks.

So far the research, being led by Abbas Mohajerani,  has found it is possible to include cigarette butts in light weight bricks. About five percent of the raw materials for their bricks are cigarette butts.

Furthermore the research has shown the inclusion of butts reduces the energy normally needed to make bricks. (The heat and energy generally used to produce light weight bricks drops by about 60 percent if five percent of the raw materials are cigarette butts.)

Light weight bricks can be used for most buildings except if heavy load, high strength bricks are needed.

Mohajerani and his team of post graduate researchers also found bricks containing more than five percent of butts were unsatisfactory and weaker. This was because more butts meant the bricks absorbed too much water.

The butts were provided by Buttout Australia, a company which supplies public outdoor cigarette disposal uints.

They were disinfected and heated at 105 degrees celsius for one day before being mixed with the brick raw materials.

http://www.scribd.com/doc/19211990.Cigratte-Butt-Business-Idea

http://www.buttoutaustralia.com.au/index.asp?pgid=4

Yes, petrol (or gasoline as it is known in the US) was not only a waste product, it was an unprofitable nuisance.

During the mid to late 1800s industrializing countries (such as America) were throwing crude (raw unprocessed) oil into rivers.

In the 1850s crude oil was tossed into the Kanawha River (West Virginia, USA). Then up until about 1880 petrol (its lighter by-product) was dumped into the Cuyahoga River (Ohio, US).

This all seems bizarre now in an age when crude oil has reached nearly USD150 per barrel. But there it is. Oil and petrol used to be tossed out. They had no value. They were waste products.

The peculiar story of oil, during the mid to late 1800s, has quite a lot to do with salt, whales and electric lights.

Crude oil is a greasy, thick, dark liquid which often naturally seeps out of the ground or oceans floors.

The ancient Mesopotamians, Persians and Chinese used it to illuminate fortresses, waterproof boats, fight wars and heat kilns. Nineteenth century industrializing countries however were quite ignorant of its potential.

The massive popular use of oil (or black gold) did not begin until the mid 1800s.

It was the search for salt during the 1850s which helped give birth to the oil industry of today.

In an age where there were no refrigerators, salt was used to preserve foods and was therefore valuable. Salt was sometimes mined out of brine wells. There the salt was found mixed with a black, murky substance. This dark, thick, slimey goo which oozed out of the salt mines was a nuisance. It was called crude oil.

Miners either offloaded this oil to snake oil salesman or dumped it. The travelling salesman sold it as a cure for anything from broken bones to arthritis.

Then in 1854 the Canadian Abraham Gesner developed kerosene which could be used for oil lamps.

Kerosene heralded in the popular use of crude oil products. It was made from the heat separation or distillation of crude oil.

Kerosene provided a cheaper alternative to whale oil for lighting. During the mid 1800s huge numbers of whales were killed to provide lighting and lubrication oil.

The demand for whale oil was so high that whales were nearly reduced to extinction. Whaling ships had to remain longer and longer at sea because it was harder to find whales.

The decrease in numbers saw whale oil prices increase. By the mid 1800s whale oil was worth about USD1.77 a gallon, whereas kerosene ( gained without the expense of costly ships in hazardous seas) was less than a third of the price. And so kerosene became the preferred oil for lighting.

The cheaper supply of kerosene caused lighting sales to increase. More and more people could afford to stay awake and work at night. And with that came the Oil Boom of the mid 1800s and the entry of the legendary John D Rockefellow, America's first oil tycoon and the founder of Standard Oil (or ESSO).

Rockefeller (born in 1839) was primarily a refiner, transporter and marketer of oil, rather than a miner of oil. The son of a door to door salesman (who dropped his young son on the ground and then advised him to trust no one) Rockefeller was famously frugal. He disliked anything being thrown out and tried to find a use for everything.

By 1863 at the age of 24 he was the partner in a small oil refinery.

During the 1860s and 1870s refineries along Ohio's Cuyahoga River found their storage was glutted with a lighter more flammable crude oil product, they called gasoline.

"Before the automobile, nobody knew what to do with the light fraction of crude oil known as gasoline, and many refiners, under cover of dark, let the waste product run into the river. The noxious runoff made the Cuyahoga River so flammable that if steamboat captains shovelled glowing coals overboard, the water erupted in flames." Titan: The Life of John D Rockefeller, Ron Chernow, Random House, 1998

Unlike his competitors Rockefeller reduced his waste by using the light flammable oil by-product Naptha. This he used to power his refineries.

_{Standard Oil Refinery Cleveland, Ohio 1870. Photo Courtesy US Department of Justice}

His avoidance of waste saw his buinesses grow. By 1870 he was the biggest shareholder in the business and had named the company Standard Oil.

Over the next few years he further developed the oil market. Refined oil was used to make chewing gum, paints, asphalt and lubricant so that by 1879 Rockefeller's Standard Oil controlled about ninety percent of the US refining business. He was forty years old.

At the same time the oil industry was hit hard by the kerosene price collapse. The electric light bulb was invented in 1879 and by 1880 was being sold. Therefore the need for kerosene crashed.

But another vehicle of opportunity had just arrived...the automobile. Rockefeller climbed into this and drove off in search of new fortunes.

Visit Moorland School (for explanation of oil refining process).

Energy for the 21st Century: A Comprehensive Guide to Conventional and Alternative Sources . Roy L. Nersesian, M.E. Sharpe Inc.

_{Standard Oil Refinery No. 1, (1899). Photo courtesy Global Marshall Plan US Image}

In 1856 the USA passed a remarkable law which said it could take control of over 70 islands, reefs and atolls in the Pacific, Atlantic and Caribbean Oceans. By 1900 this number had risen to over 100.

This bold, one sided law leaped into life because of Britain’s monopoly of bird pooh, or guano.

Under the law any "guano islands discovered by citizens and not belonging to other countries may be considered as appertaining to the United States."

The list of islands claimed under the Act included the Caribbean islands of Navassa,  and Swan; as well as the smaller Quitasueno,  Rosalind, Serrana and Serranilla Banks. In the Atlantic, it covered  Fox and Constable Islands; Pacific islands included Baker, Birnie, Caroline, Christmas, Guano, Bowditch, Flint, Fanufuti, Worth, Jarvis, Canton, Makin, Independence, Rakahanga, Sydney, McKean, Marcus, Gardner, Sophia, Nukufeta, Penrhyn, Rakahanga, Phoenix, Starbuck, Swains, Fanning, Washington and Staver Islands; Carondelet, Kingman and Winslow Reefs; Johnston,  Midway and Palmyra Atolls.

The Act also said  the US military could be used to protect the islands. Some of the islands are now military bases. From 1958 till 1962 the US used Johnston Atoll for nuclear tests.

So why was the US so interested in bird pooh?

In 1804 the German naturalist Baron Alexander von Humboldt returned from a five year exploration of South America. Worshipped and venerated by Charles Darwin (author of The Origin of Species),  Humboldt brought back with him fathomless  notes on the South American climate, people and ocean currents. (1) and (2)

He also filled his ship with 60,000 plants and piles and piles of rocks. Amongst these rocks were some which revolutionized agriculture and motivated the USA’s first expansion into areas outside of continental America.

The man who brought guano to Europe and Charles Darwin's hero:German explorer Baron Alexander von Humboldt by Friedrich Weitsch, 1806.

The Atacama is the driest place on earth. Hundreds of years can pass before it receives any rain.

Lying in the ocean next to this moonscape are the Chincha Islands. At the time of Humboldt’s exploration they were covered with light grey rocky outcrops and cliffs.  Embedded into the bottom layers of the cliffs were dark ochre rocks. These brown rocks were truly prehistoric.

The local Indian people told Humboldt, bird pooh (guano) had produced these cliffs and outcrops. Furthermore the rocks, they said, were miraculous as they caused lush crops to grow on the barren Atacama desert soil.

.The complete lack of rain meant none of this pooh had been dissolved by water. It had been slowly accumulating over millions of years. Perhaps more than 60 million years.

Humboldt marvelled at the height of the cliffs and the depth of the miraculous bird pooh: “ Each island is 5 to 6 miles in circumference, and consists of granite covered with guano in some places to a height of 200 feet, in successive horizontal strata…No earthy matter whatever is mixed with this vast amount of excrement.” (3)

When Humboldt returned to Europe the guano was studied and tested on farms. The results were remarkable. News of its potential for farming reached Britain, the most powerful commercial shipping country.

The Scottish chemist, Andrew Ure described guano as an exceptional natural fertilizer. “This is a point established beyond all question by nearly every agriculturist in the kingdom; and recorded by all classes of writers on agricultural subjects.” (4)

But what made guano even more desirable was the huge supply of it on the Chincha Islands. British farmers would no longer have to rely on cow, chook, sheep and horse manure.

What’s more because the Chincha guano contained very little water it was much more concentrated. This meant farmers needed only small amounts as fertiliser.

British traders set sail for  Peru to negotiate an agreement for the mining of  guano. Peru was faced with severe debts and agreed to do business with the British. Thus Britain had gained control of guano. Mining began and the guano was dug up using imported Chinese and cheap local labor.

Shipments at first were small. In 1841 Britain imported 1,733 tons of guano. By 1851 this had soared to 219,764 tons. The price also leaped. In 1841 it was just over one pound per ton by 1851 it was nearly 15 pounds. (5)

The most prominent British guano trader was William Gibbs, of Antony Gibbs and Co. Gibbs used his guano profits to build an immense neo-Gothic stately home in Somerset England and to assist build the Keble College chapel at Oxford University.

While Gibbs was using bird pooh to build a place of worship and his own stately pleasure dome, in the English country side, resentment and panic in the US was growing.

By  1850 about 30 percent of the US fertilizer market was guano. A guano rush had taken hold of Europe and the US. Demand for the pooh in the US could not be met by supplies. The US had managed to gain a few small supplies direct from Peru. But  it  was largely at the mercy of British merchants, who demanded high prices.

The US decided something had to done to secure their own guano supplies.

US traders knew guano could be found on some islands in the Pacific, Caribbean and Atlantic. The problem was none of these islands had similar vast deposits to that found on Chincha. Nor was the quality as good. Rain fell on many of these islands and this dissolved the guano and reduced its quality.

The US was undeterred. To counter the lack of quantity and quality the government passed a law allowing it to take over any uninhabited (and in many cases submerged) islands, atolls, reefs or banks which it thought might have guano. This was the Guano Islands Act of 1856. (6)

But by the 1870s this bold piece of legislation had become largely pointless for the purpose of guano fertilizer. This was because chemistry was producing artificial fertilizers which used waste from steel-making, gas plants or the remains of ancient decayed sea shells.

Nonetheless the Act remained and with it US claims to islands named under the Act. What's more every so often the US would dig up the Act and claim another island, atoll or reef. (This sometimes caused major problems with a number of countries including Canada, Japan, Kiribati and Honduras who clearly thought some islands and the like belonged to them.)

While the US has now abandoned a large number of Guano Island territories, it still  controls a significant number . The remaining islands are a focus of political lobbying by US organizations such as State Department Watch. This organization wishes the US to retain control of the islands for oil, fish and other resources.

(1) Charles Darwin letter to his friend the botanist  Joseph Hooker ( J.D. Hooker)  August 6,1881

(2) Charles Darwin letter to J.D. Hooker February 23, 1844

(3) Ure's Dictionary of Arts, Manufactures and Mines containing A Clear Exposition of Their Principles and Practice (Vol 2) Robert Hunt, Longman, Green, Longman and Roberts, London, 1860 (p 413 -419)

(4) and (5) Rural Cyclopedia (or a General Dictionary of Agriculture and of the Arts, Sciences, Instruments, and Practice, Necessary to the Farmer, Stockfarmer, Landsteward, Farrier &c.) (Vol. 2)  Rev. John M Wilson, Fullarton and Co., Edinburgh, 1851 (p 547-558)

(6) The Guano Islands Act 1856 (U.S. Code, Title 48, Chapter 8, Sections 1411-1419)

http://www.darwinproject.ac.uk/component/option,com_frontpage/Itemid,1/

https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/

http://www.yellowpigs.net/virginislands/us_territories

http://www.statedepartmentwatch.org/GuanoActIslands70.htm

http://guanoisland.wordpress.com/about/

http://www1.american.edu/ted/ice/guano.htm

Here's an interesting piece of noise trivia from the sensible and well organized lap of Mother Nature.

According to the American Tinnitus Association (ATA) a person's hearing will be damaged when exposed to sounds of over 85 decibels (dB) for more than eight hours. The noise of a screaming child is about 110 dB. The recommended maximum exposure at this level is about half an hour. This might help explain why parents so quickly attend to their children.

In fact a screaming child's dBs are higher than a chainsaw and only slightly less than a rock concert, thunderclap or a jet plane.

The human hear suffers damage after about 108 seconds of 130dB. At 140dB the ear experiences excruciating pain.

Here is how the intensity of some sounds are ranked:

• Whisper - 30dB
• Refrigerator - 40dB
• Rain; normal conversation - 50dB
• Daytime suburban street - 55dB
• Sewing machine - 60dB
• Washing machine - 70dB
• Alarm clock (2 feet or about .6 metres away) - 80dB
• Average traffic; electric razor - 85dB
• Hair dryer; subway train - 100dB
• Lawn mower; chainsaw - 105dB
• Screaming child; stereo headset - 110dB
  Rock concert; thunderclap - 120dB
  Jet plane (100 feet or about 30 metres away); jackhammer - 130dB
  Rocket launch - 180dB

A dB is not a linear measurement like a ruler. Instead it is a logarithmic measurement. In other words 20dB is ten times more powerful than 10dB; 30dB is ten times more powerful than 20db and so on and so forth. This means for instance that a screaming child (110dB) is 100,000 times more powerful than your average sewing machine (60dB) since the dB difference is 50 or 10x10x10x10x10. Ah the sound of domestic bliss.

The dB measurement owes its name to engineers from the Bell Telephone Laboratories who developed the term in honour of their founder the inventor Alexander Graham Bell. (The deci means one tenth.)

For more information see:

www.phys.unsw.edu.au/jw/dB.html
www.dallashodgson.info/articles/Acrobat/DecibelPrimer.pdf

Mauveine is a purple coloured dye. Before it was invented purple materials were very rare.

Roman emperors used to wear togas that had been dyed purple. But more than ten thousand molluscs had to be crushed up to get enough purple dye for just one toga.

Purple cloth was so hard to get that owning something purple became the ultimate display of wealth and power and ordinary people could never use it.

All that changed in 1856 when William H. Perkins (then just 18 years old) invented mauveine.

Perkins wasn’t trying to make mauveine. In fact he tried for a long time to make the anti-malaria drug quinine, but never got anywhere.

One of the reactions he tried involved coal-tar and an oxidant. It didn’t give quinine..... just a horrible black mess.

Perkins tried to wash this ‘waste’ down the sink using a little bit of ethanol. To his amazement, the black ‘waste’ dissolved in ethanol to give a beautiful purple solution. Perkin poured some of the solution onto colourless cloth, and when it dried, the material was dyed purple. He had invented mauveine.

Perkins recognised the potential of the dye, and patented it at once.

He set up a factory that made mauveine and became exceedingly wealthy.

For the first time in history, ordinary people could afford to have purple coloured clothes. And paper could be dyed purple too, so companies such as Cadbury’s could wrap there goods in purple paper.

Queen Victoria was so impressed that she wore a mauveine dyed dress to the Royal Exhibition and mauveine became so popular that the 1890’s is often called the mauve decade.

Mauveine was the first ever synthetic dye, and it started the entire organic chemical industry. This industry makes many things we take for granted, including highly coloured clothes. And amazingly, it all started with ‘waste’!

by Chris McErlean (Phd), School of Chemistry, University of Sydney (see: Contributors)

The word pollution comes from the Middle English pollucioun, originally from the Latin polluere (meaning to soil, defile or contaminate).

The thing is, in about 1380 the Middle English meaning of pollucioun was a little remarkable..

At that time it meant: desecration/profanity; spiritual or moral impiety and the discharge of semen other than during sexual intercourse....

This last meaning is how Chaucer used it in The Canterbury Tales: (The Parson's Tale):

"Another synne (sin) aperteneth (relates) to leccherie (leachery), that comth in slepynge (sleeping), and this synne cometh ofte to hem than ben (be) maydeness, and eek to hem that ben corrupt, and this synne men clepen (speak/call) polucion, that comth in foure maneres, som tyme it comth of langwissynge (languishing) of body, for the humours (one of the four bodily fluids) been too rank and too habundant in the body of the man......"

What makes this a little more intriguing is it wasn't till about the 1700s we understood sex had anything to do with reproduction. (See: Rotting Meat, Three Jars, Maggots and Sex.) Up until then society believed in the Theory of Spontaneous Generation.

What does it all mean...?

The study of physics and chemistry is confusing.... So when the local crematorium says your aunt's gold dental fillings can't be recovered, what should you think? And what about her old silver fillings, what happens to the mercury in them?

The standard crematorium kiln operates at between 800 - 1000 degrees Celsius.

The average gold filling contains about 75% gold with the other main ingredients being palladium and silver. (There are a few other less common ingredients such as Platinum, Copper and Zinc.)

Gold dental alloys melt at an average 930 degrees celsius and silver at 961 degrees. This suggests the dental fillings may turn to either liquid gold or globules. So what happens to this gold? And where does the mercury go?

_{The Smoke-Buster Ener-Tek IV Cremation System (The "Utimate in Production and Performance")}

Cremation takes about 90 minutes. (Though the latest cremation systems can turnover as many as 15 bodies in 18 hours.)

After incineration the bone fragments are swept out into a retort.

A magnet is run over the cooling remains to pick up any metal objects such as surgical pins, articial limbs and coffin nails. (Stainless steel, chrome, iron and a few other metals do not melt in the furnace. These metals melt at much higher levels than gold and silver.)

The use of the magnet might not detect gold and silver, as they are not very magnetic. However staff also do a manual sort of the remains.

If the gold and silver have liquified they should have cooled during this process. They might now be identifiable as molten fragments. Gold boils at about 2,800 degrees celsius (silver about 2,200 degrees celsius), so it cannot vaporise during the cremation process. Nevertheless according to crematoria operators, no gold fragments are found.

At the end of sorting, the bone particles are placed into a cremulator by the operator, where they are pulverised.

The mercury in the meantime has been released into the atmosphere. In the UK, mercury from crematoria is expected to cause 35 percent of mercury emissions by 2020.

There is debate over how much, if any, mercury in the air is acceptable. US research indicates that the cremation of one human lets off 2.0 to 3.0 grams of mercury into the atmosphere.

To reduce this, the US State of Minnesota has proposed legislation requiring that all mercury dental fillings be removed before cremation. The legislation requires a mortician or a supervised technician remove teeth containing fillings. This prevents the mercury being released as vapour.

Mercury emissions can be reduced by the use of charcoal filters or by adding a capsule of selenium to the coffin. The selenium transforms the mercury into the less harmful (but still polluting) mercury selenide. This is deposited onto the chamber walls of the crematorium.

Funeral industry operators say metal parts are normally discarded after cremation because these parts are unrecognizable or hazardous. In the US they may be sent to landfills.

According to Invocare (Australia's biggest funeral industry business) metallic contents are buried:

"When cooled, metallic contents (such as prostheses, coffin nails etc) are removed, collected and interred within the grounds of the crematorium."

Invocare makes no mention of the gold dental fillings. Perhaps it is included within their "etc".

Whatever, it would seem the impression given to many relatives by some in the funeral business is that their loved one's metal bits are either safely buried or have just vanished; and have not been sold off to scrap and precious metals recyclers.

Relatives interested in visiting these remains, should perhaps ask crematorium staff where the metal is interred. Given the amount of metal hips, artificial joints and dental fillings passing through a crematorium it should be well known to staff.

http:www.alphadent.co.kr/eng/product/product.htm

http://www.bgop.org/melting_points.pdf

http://www.matthewscremation.com/

http://www.medcure.org/forms/cremation_auth.pdf

http:www.invocare.com.au/driver.asp?page=/cemeteries+and+crematoria/understanding+the+cremation+process

http://www.dentalmumbai.com/fillings.htm (Gold dental fillings picture)

Matthews Cremation Division, Apopka, FL, US (pictures of the Elder Davis cloth-covered cardboard casket and the Ener-Tek IV Cremation System)

Southern Italian folklore says the best way to survive the bite of the Lycosa tarantula is to fall into a mad, wild, often drunken, circular dance. This dance is called the tarantella.

According to Sicilian and Napoletana culture the bite of the tarantula causes tarantism (named after Taranto a town in Southern Italy which had a lot of these spiders). This strange condition, folklore says, makes victims extremely restless and excited. The only way to survive death is to allow the restlessness to take control and dance wildly, thereby sweating the spider's venom off the body ....Or so the story goes.

The truth is that this poor unfortunate spider, although rather large, creepy, hairy and well...rather ugly, has a bite that is only as painful as a bee sting.

So what is the reason for this mad tarantella dance?

The history of the tarantella has quite a lot to do with the southern Italians occasional fondness for getting rather drunk and then carrying on in a fairly wild, wasted manner. Such sloppy behaviour needed an excuse. And the large hairy tarantula was given that job. Though not at the beginning.

The dance parties go back thousands of years to when the Greek god Dionysus was introduced to southern Italy. In Italy this god was called Bacchus.

Worship of Bacchus was thought to help people escape from all their worries and inhibitions. Not surprisingly, this was achieved through drinking large amounts of wine and getting drunk.

Initially these parties, described as fertility ceremonies, were attended only by women. However it didn't take too long before men decided they would also like to come along to the parties. This made these ceremonies a fertile ground for conversations and other activities. Bacchus became a very popular God.

At about the same time the Roman senate became worried about Sicilian loyalty to Rome. There was too much talking going on at these events. The Senate suspected Sicilian political unrest was being encouraged by these wild parties. So in 186BC the Senate banned Bacchanalia parties. The dancing was to stop.

About a hundred years later, in the first century AD the Christian apostle St Paul was travelling through Malta when a snake fell onto his hand. He brushed this away, was admired by many and continued over to southern Italy. There he stayed at a house in Galatina.

The story of the snake travelled with him. Legend says St Paul repaid the kindness of his host at Galatina by giving him the power to heal poisonous bites. This miracle cure included the Sign of the Cross and a drink of special water.

So the treatment of poisonous bites wove itself into religion and mystery. Travelling healers offered all sorts of treatments for bites, including miraculous mud from the Galatina house where St Paul had stayed.

But it wasn't until the 1300s that dancing once again became frenzied. That was because a small plague of tarantula's began to run around the streets of Taranto, which is close to Galatina.

Mass hysteria took hold of Taranto. Evil had landed on their streets. The residents sort the protection of St Paul and danced in front of pictures and statues of the saint.

The dance brought on sweating, shaking, screaming, leaping, delirium and exhaustion. Finally the collapse of the dancer meant the bite had been cured. Over the centuries tarantella came to resemble the old merriment of the Bacchus parties; though always with the mythical dangers of the tarantula's bite gripping the dancers.

Tarantella (and therefore the tarantula) has inspired compositions from Chopin, Liszt, Tchaikovsky, Rossini, Rachmaninoff and Tom Waits.

On the evening of September 12, 2001 Fresh Kills was re-opened and made a crime scene.

Truck loads of steel and rubble from the World Trade Centre attacks began to arrive. Over the next ten months 1.7 million tonnes of debris and the remains of victims would pour into Fresh Kills.

Forensic investigators identified 4,257 human remains, about 4,000 personal photos, about USD80,000 in loose currency, the remains of a bronze Rodin statue and a sad long list of personal remains.

Building debris was sold off to scrap dealers. And the Fresh Kill's west mound grew higher and higher. In 2002, when Fresh Kills received its final load of 9/11 debris, the west mound covered about 200 hectares and was 70 metres high; taller than the Statue of Liberty.

Fresh Kills is now a parkland and a memorial to the 9/11 victims.

Opened in the 1940s Fresh Kills holds nine square kilometres of refuse. During it's peak of operations, 26,000 tonnes of rubbish were shipped in daily to the landfill.

At the foot of the Statue of Liberty, engraved in copper, rests Emma Lazarus's famous poetic dedication to Lady Liberty. Lazarus, a Sephardic Jew, sympathetically likened Eastern Europe's poor and persecuted to waste:

"...Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free. The wretched refuse of your teaming shore." The New Colossus, 1883

As it happens, across the river from Lady Liberty is Fresh Kills, the world's largest landfill. Located on Staten Island, Fresh Kills is home to nine square kilometres of refuse. At its peak 26,000 tonnes of rubbish were shipped in daily (about 9.5 million tonnes every year.)

Despite its name Fresh Kills has nothing to do with fresh meat (It does however have quite a lot to do with the mafia). Kills is a Dutch word meaning brook or stream.

The landfill was the master plan of bridge and housing developer Robert Moses, a shaper and planner of twentieth century New York. In the 1940s Moses decided to link the rural Staten Island to Brooklyn with a bridge. So Fresh Kills' estuaries were filled with New York's garbage and the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge was built.

Developers poured into Staten Island. Suburbia moved in and with it, Italian-Americans. Staten Island has the highest percentage of Italian-Americans in the US. Don Corleone's home in The Godfather was filmed in Emerson Hill, Staten Island. The borough gained a reputation as a mafia enclave and the landfill a source of mafia employment and revenue.

The landfill grew bigger and bigger. The odor became so foul that it was frequently sprayed with pine deodorant. But the landfill remained and when it could spread no further out, it went up. Four hills emerged and were sensibly named the North, South, East and West Mounds. As the hills grew so too did the complaints of local residents. Until finally in March 2001, the World's largest landfill closed. Well...for a while.

New York artists Joo Youn Paek and David Jimison have created a metal recyclables bin which spits out garbage.

Housed inside the bin is an elevated platform which uses magnets and scales to decide if the rubbish is metal or non-metal.

If the waste is not metal, its spewed back onto the street.  This takes a few seconds to happen...thus the person who tossed the rubbish has probably gone.

This means things like old pies, sandwiches, plastics, glass and dirty tissues pile up next to the bin and blow about the street. This is the art part of the bin.

The bins were designed to demonstrate the unfortunate failures of technological improvements; especially when there is little or no discussion about the good and bad aspects of design.

Paek and Jimison decided to use rubbish bins, street signs and park benches to illustrate this failure.These three public services are everyday objects. They're also pretty dull and normally not the focus of public curiosity.

The artists were asked to create the bins for the Toward the Sentient City exhibition organised by the Architectural League of New York.

Exhibition curator Mark Shepherd wanted to show art works which demonstrated the relationship between technology, architecture and urban space.

http://vimeo.com/1985213

Increasing amounts of silver are being found in wastewater. This is because of silver nanoparticle technology.

Nanotechnology involves the rearrangement of the fundamental building blocks of nature at the tiniest, or nanometer (nano), level.

A nanometer is spectacularly tiny. Consider for instance that human hair is 25,000 nanometers wide.

Using nanotechnology, coal atoms can be rearranged to make diamonds, while potatoes can be made from dirt, water and air atoms. All of this has to be done using atomic precision.

These nanoparticles are popping up in rather strange areas. One of these is the use of silver nanoparticles. These are used principally for antibacterial and antifungal purposes.

Before antibiotics, silver was sometimes used as a wonder mineral in  medicine. Compounds made from silver fought bacterial, fungal and viral infections.

Silver has recently returned to reclaim its germ fighting role. Silver nanoparticles are being used to prevent foot and body odor. People can buy sox and inner soles, which stop viruses, bacteria, athlete’s foot, corns and all those other things which cause smelly feet.

These nano particles have captured the imagination of manufacturers.  Some have decided it can be used in or on any part of the human body where germs lurk. For these manufacturers every human orifice is an opening to make money.

Thus there are anti body odour t-shirts, toothpaste advertised to prevent bad breath, tooth decay and yellow teeth and an insertable foam cream, which is promoted as being able to prevent pregnancy and embarrassing infections.

The list of products which use silver nanoparticles is long, and growing. There are germ fighting underpants, miracle food containers, filth crushing washing machines, dirt resistant toys, kitchen bench germ busters and so on. (See:  http://www.nanotechproject.org/)

Traces of silver from all of these are being washed down sinks, toilets and drains and accumulating in higher concentration in waste treatment plants.

The problem with this is waste treatments rely on friendly bacteria, which break down sewerage. And that’s right… silver kills bacteria.

http://www.nnin.org/doc/NNIN1012.pdf

http://www.nanowerk.com/

by Stavros Mouslopoulos

The message from physics regarding waste is robust: 'Waste in any form is here to stay since it relates to our existence and all physical processes'.

But this message is not hopeless since we humans, gifted with consciousness and free will, have the unique ability to predict and measure the effect of our actions. We can modify these actions to minimize waste and when possible exploit all byproducts as a new source of energy.

So how is waste related to the laws of physics?

Physics has a powerful statement about waste: The Second Law of Thermodynamics. This is perhaps one of the most fundamental and universal principles in physics. It applies to all processes and every level of the physical world.

This law states that: In any system, a process that occurs will tend to increase the total entropy of the universe.

In practical terms this means it is impossible to have a 100 percent completely efficient thermodynamic process. Given this, any process in the universe will evolve in such a way that part of the energy content will change into a form that will not be useful for the initial (primary) process. Hence will be wasted.

This does not imply that this energy is lost. The Law of Conservation of Energy states this cannot occur. This law says: Energy can transform from one form to another however it cannot be destroyed or created. This energy can however become devalued. In physics this is called increased entropy. This means it is harder (but not impossible) to exploit the energy in a profitable way.

WARNING: DO NOT EAT INSECTS WITHOUT GETTING RELIABLE SAFETY ADVICE

Countries where people (intentionally) eat insects include Australia, USA, Botswana, Cambodia, Mexico, China, Venezuela and Indonesia. There are many more.

Peter Menzel and Faith D'Aluisio's book Man Eating Bugs describes the nutritional value of scorpions, dragonflies, witchetty grubs, termites, stink bugs, South American tarantulas and a smorgasboard of insects. Basically many things we stamp upon or spray...

Dr Julieta Ramos-Elorduy's book Creepy Crawly Cuisine (Park Street Press, 1998) also describes insect eating in indigenous cultures. Apart from information on the finding and storage of insects, the book provides a few gourmet recipes. These include Curried Grasshoppers, Stink Bug Pat`e, Ant Flan and Bug Pizza.

A very different type of junk food...Hotlix

Californian company Hotlix is a lonely pioneer of the US snack and candied insect market. See http://www.hotlix.com/index.html

Its products include BBQ flavored worms, ants in apple or cherry flavored candy, chocolate coated ants and sour cream and onion flavored crickets.

On October 1st, last year a mass pageant was held in Beijing to celebrate the founding of the People's Republic of China.

The spectacle included 8,000 handpicked soldiers, 1,300 military band musicians, a choir of 2,400 singers, 80,000 school students, 60 floats, 50,000 balloons, aircraft , missiles, armored vehicles and the symbol of peace...doves. There were tens of thousands of those.

A further 100,000 local citizens helped out by waving pieces of coloured material with perfect timing.

Everything was utterly ordered.

Even the height of the soldiers was ordered. They were all required to be between 163 cm and 175cm tall. Those who were chosen trained ten hours a day for six to 12 months.

Organisers wanted the pageant to showcase the spectacular achievements made by the People's Republic of China since 1949.

To assist in ensuring a perfect display of Chinese progress and order the soldiers were offered adult incontinence nappies. The 80,000 school students all wore nappies. (Chinese students who were practicing for the event shared this information with a wotwaste colleague during September this year.)

Contrary to popular opinion, the plump, brown bear is not named after that other plump, brown thing which is flushed down toilets.

The word Pooh is a quite modern word. It is a shortened version of pooh pooh.

Pooh pooh was a common phrase used by children particularly during the early part of the 20th Century to describe something that was silly or annoying .

It comes from the plosive sound of P.

A plosive is a letter which allows air to flow freely from the vocal chords. Other examples are B, D, G, K and T.

In many cultures the P, B and D are some of the first sounds made by babies. Thus baba, dada and papa.

(The very earliest sounds in a child's life are normally the nasal sounds. These are N, M and Ng. These sounds concern the sound coming from the nose. They are the earliest sounds as they are connected to crying and sucking. Thus explaining: ma, mama, nana etc.)

A.A Milne describes his meaning of pooh at the beginning of Winnie-the-Pooh

"...and whenever a fly came and settled on his nose he had to blow it off. And I think - but I am not sure - that that is why he is always called Pooh."

The use of pooh to describe the brown things found inside toilet bowls became popular from about the 1950s. Whereas Winnie The Pooh was introduced to the public on Christmas Eve 1925, in the English newspaper The Evening News.

Worthless old knicknacks

The cane-bottomed chair

by William Makepeace Thackeray (1811-1863)

In tattered old slippers that toast at the bars,
And a ragged old jacket perfumed with cigars,
Away from the world and its toils and its cares,
I've a snug little kingdom up four pair of stairs.

To mount to this realm is a toil, to be sure,
But the fire there is bright and the air rather pure;
And the view I behold on a sunshiny day
Is grand through the chimney-pots over the way.

This snug little chamber is crammed in all nooks
With worthless old knickknacks and silly old books,
And foolish old odds and foolish old ends,
Cracked bargains from brokers, cheep keepsakes from friends.

Old armour, prints, pictures, pipes, china (all cracked),
Old rickety tables, and chairs broken-backed;
A twopenny treasury, wondrous to see;
What matter? 'tis pleasant to you, friend and me.

No better divan need the Sultan require
Than the creaking old sofa that basks by the fire;
And 'tis wonderful, surely what music you get
From the rickety, ramshackle, wheezy spinet.

That praying-rug came from a Turcoman's camp;
By Tiber once twinkled that brazen old lamp;
A Mameluke fierce yonder dagger had drawn;
'Tis a murderous knife to toast muffins upon.

Long, long through the hours, and the night, and the chimes,
Here we talk of old books, and old friends, and old times;
As we sit in a fog made of rich Latakie,
This chamber is pleasant to you, friend and me.

But of all the cheap treasures that garnish my nest,
There's one that I love and cherish the best;
For the finest of couches that's padded with hair
I never would change thee, my cane-bottomed chair.

If chairs have but feeling, in holding such charms,
A thrill must have passed through your withered old arms;
I looked, and I longed, and I wished in despair-
I wished myself turned to a cane-bottomed chair.

It was but a moment she sat in this place,
She's a scarf on her kneck, and a smile on her face;
A smile on her face, and a rose in her hair,
And she sat there and bloomed in my cane-bottomed chair.

And so I have valued my chair ever since,
Like the shrine of a saint, or the throne of a prince,
Saint Fanny, my patroness sweet, I declare,
The queen of my heart and my cane-bottomed chair.

When the candles burn low, and the company's gone,
In the silence of night, as I sit here alone-
I sit alone, but we yet are a pair-
My Fanny I see in my cane-bottomed chair.

She comes from the past and revisits my room;
She looks as she then did, all beauty and bloom,
So smiling and tender, so fresh and so fair,
And yonder she sits in my cane-bottomed chair.

Some frabjous nonsense.

The Jabberwocky

"Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe;
All mimsy were the borogroves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.

"Beware the Jabberwock, my son!
The jaws that bite, the claws that catch!
Beware the Jubjub bird,
And shun the frumious Bandersnatch!"

He took his vorpal sword in hand:
Long time the manxome foe he sought-
So rested he by the Tumtum tree,
And stood awhile in thought.

And as in uffish thought he stood,
The Jabberwock, with eyes of flame,
Came whiffling through the tulgey wood,
And burbled as it came!

One, two! One, two, and through and through
The vorpal blade went snicker-snack!
He left it dead, and with its head
He went galumphing back.

"And hast thou slain the Jabberwock?
Come to my arms, my beamish boy!
Oh frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!"
He chortled in his joy.

"Twas brillig, and the slithy toves,
Did gyre and gumble in the wabe;
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.

Carbon Trading for Dummies

by Tim Hanlin, Australian Climate Exchange

Whenever I travel I am often asked by the taxi driver what I do and my answer elicits responses that range from: “So what is this carbon trading?” through to: “It’s all a scam and a way for governments to raise taxes by stealth”.

I am yet to find a cabbie who really knows what carbon trading is and given that they are the unofficial litmus test for public awareness I will hereby attempt a cabbie’s guide to carbon trading.

We must start with several “givens” so if you can’t accept these, stick to the “it’s all a scam” position. For those still with me:

• We must reduce our production of CO₂ and other “Greenhouse Gases” (GHGs) to levels that are within the biosphere’s capacity to process them, thereby stabilizing the concentration of these gases in the atmosphere.
• The human induced activities that produce these GHGs (as a waste stream) are set to increase dramatically as the population continues to increase and the developing world strives to attain parity with the developed world.
• We must therefore develop, deploy and transition to technologies that have dramatically lower rates of GHG emissions per unit of production.

Carbon Trading is a market mechanism that provides a price signal to encourage investment in low/no emission technologies by providing a tradable “Credit” to those that undertake activities at a lower rate of GHG production than “business as usual”. Depending on the design of the scheme, this is usually at the expense of high emission technologies by requiring them to buy a permit to emit or a Credit (in lieu of a permit) from a low emitter thereby establishing a carbon price and a value transfer from high to low emitters.

Because this mechanism is an artificial market construct where demand is created by a regulatory obligation, the devil (and the effectiveness of any scheme) is in the detail. Oh and do I get extra points for not mentioning Global Warming or Climate Change?

See the following link http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Q-o7IoBxEg for a short and simple video explaining the concept behind emissions trading.

Carbon Trading for Real Dummies

by the duck

Carbon (or Emissions) trading is based on the belief that mankind has been very dirty, polluted the earth's atmosphere and caused climate change.

(Those who don't think this is true are called Climate Change Sceptics because they think climate change is a natural event and not one caused by humans)

According to those who believe in man made climate change the biggest cause of this is Green House Gases (GHGs) or emissions, in particular Carbon Dioxide (CO2).

So why is that a problem? Well scientists say there is way too much CO2 hanging around in the atmosphere. Since its not being used, its causing heat. The reason for that extra abandoned CO2 is industry has been busy making electricity, cars, furniture, paper, steel etc. In fact most things.

Its been doing that by using cheap, easy to get, traditional energy like oil and coal. These are fossil fuels which are heavy in carbon. (Fossils are the remains of living things. And all living things are rich in carbon)

Normally CO2 is taken in by the oceans and vegetation. But scientists now say there is way too much CO2 hanging about, far too much for the oceans and trees to process.

This becomes more problematic because countries such as Brazil, India and China are rapidly building up their industries and becoming richer. They want to have the same standard of living as Western Europe, North America, Japan, Taiwan, Korea, Australia and New Zealand.

So they're doing what the richer countries used to do, industrialize and make lots of things. But since there are lots of people in Brazil, India and China, they can not only make lots of things... they need to make lots of things. That's how they make money.

At the same time wealthier countries are giving off GHGs with their own factories, mines, energy production, transportation etc etc.

All this industry means increased CO2. The European Union has an emissions trading scheme. Many other countries are working to adopt similar carbon or emissions trading schemes. Australia is one of these.

Carbon trading tries to make industry cleaner, smarter and more efficient.

Industries that use clean technology are rewarded with credits. These credits are valuable to the traditional energy industries, such as coal and oil.

So what are the basics of carbon trading?

Industries will need points to produce CO2. There are two types of points: permits and credits.

Some businesses are awarded a certain number of permits for CO2. Normally one permit is permission to produce one tonne of CO2.

So if the government has given an electricity producer permission to let off 100 tonnes of CO2, then the electricity producer would need 100 permits.

But what happens if that electricity company produces 120 tonnes of CO2? It will need to somehow offset the extra 20 tonnes. It does this by buying 20 carbon credits. These it can buy from a business which has been pooling carbon credits (a bit like a bank) or it might go directly to a large clean energy company.

A credit is equal to one tonne of saved CO2.

So how do companies earn a credit. Here's a classic example.

Lets say a wind farm produces enough energy for 100 houses. It does this without causing any CO2. While a traditional energy supplier might let off 20 tonnes of CO2 to provide energy for the same 100 houses. The wind farm therefore has earnt 20 carbon credits.

At the moment carbon trading is not something the general public can get involved in.. That's because the government hasn't included Voluntary Trading within their model. Under Voluntary Trading the ordinary person might earn credit points. These could be invested into a pooled fund, then traded...a bit like shares...

The most recent Australian figures show (from 1997 until 2007) baby boys under the age of one year had a greater chance of dying then girls.

From birth to one (for every 1000 births) 4.7 boys died compared to 4.1 girls. 1999 was a particularly bad year for boys with 6.3 boys dying compared to 4.9 girls.

After the first birthday, up until about 14 years, the death rates for girls and boys are about the same. But then the figures start to show boys once again dying at a greater rate. This is often three times higher than for girls.

Death Rates (per 1000 within each age category):

Boys:       1999 2007 Girls: 1999 2007

10-14        0.2     0.1                 0.1     0.1

15-19        0.8     0.5                 0.3     0.2

20-24        1.3     0.8                 0.4     0.3

25-29        1.4     0.9                 0.4     0.3

The chances of males dying continues to be greater throughout life. While women's death rates are about half to three quarters the rate for men.

See ABS Catalogue No. 3302.0 - Death, Australia 2007 (See Downloads) Death rates, summary, Australia, states and territories, 1997 to 2007. http://www.abs.gov.au/

Electronic devices such as mobile phones, computers, printers, photocopiers, televisions and calculators rely on sensitive low voltages and currents. Tiny amounts of water and air corrode many metals and interfere with the transmission of currents. Gold however does not corrode.

The average mobile phone contains about 24mg of gold, 250mg of silver, 9,000mg of copper, 3,800mg of cobalt, nine mg of palladium and a long list of other metals, chemicals and plastics. In Australia this equals about 80 eighty cents for gold, one and a half cents for silver and six cents for copper. (*) Then there is the scrap income from the basket of other metals and plastics.

Each Australian mobile phone customer usually buys a new phone every 18 months. There are about 21 million mobile phone accounts in Australia.

So that’s potentially a lot of gold, silver and copper as well as indium, platinum, nickel, zinc, cobalt, aluminium, iron, cobalt and palladium.

Yet, in Australia, about ninety percent of household mobile phones and electronic waste lie about in people’s drawers and garages or end up in landfill.

Strangely enough this is because there’s not much profit in the legal recycling of e-waste at the moment. So collection is rather half-hearted and haphazard.

Legitimate recyclers often have to pay for transportation, disassembly, separation, shredding, refining of fragments; along with state of the art capital intensive processes which use wind, magnets, lasers, heat, water, shredders, vibrators and weights to sort through e-waste fragments. It’s a very expensive process.

Their criminal competitors, on the other hand, see the same materials processed at a fraction of the cost. Their profits are high…if they can collect, sort and smuggle the e-waste without being caught.

These shadowy illegal recyclers have minimal labour, health and safety, infrastructure, technology and landfill costs. Their biggest expenses are collection, basic disassembly, shipping and bribery.

The main reason for this is the high cost of safe recycling.

This is because e-waste is hazardous. Mixed up with the valuable metals are some very troublesome ingredients like lead, mercury, cadmium and flame-retardants.

Lead can damage the brain, nerves, heart, bones, reproductive system, kidneys, and intestines; mercury poisoning can cause loss of hair, teeth and fingernails, sweating, rapid heart beats, memory loss, fat lips and red, itching and flaking skin; cadmium poisoning causes muscle wasting, kidney shrinkage, lung disease, gout, brittle bones, loss of smell and arthritis

Up until the early 1990s e-waste was simply shipped to poor countries that had weak environmental and work laws.

Then in 1992 the United Nations’ Basel Convention on the Control of Transboundary Movements of Hazardous Wastes and their Disposal, known in short as the Basel Convention, came into force.

Although not approved by every country (most notably the US) the Basel Convention has made it harder, but not impossible, to ship hazardous waste to developing countries.

Australia for instance does not allow the shipment of hazardous waste to developing countries. It can be exported legally but only to developed countries such as the UK, Belgium, Japan and Korea, which have the technology to responsibly process the waste.

The problem is its still possible to ship e-waste to poorer countries. It’s just illegal for those countries that have adopted the Basel Convention. (The US through its Environment Protection Agency (EPA) has other laws controlling e-waste export.)

Consequently the Basel Convention and tougher controls have provided a new dawn of opportunities for unscrupulous businesses, organized crime and (according to the UN) even illegal arms trade.

In fact due to poor enforcement, of the Basel Convention and US controls, the shipment of e-waste to the developing and third worlds has increased.

Shadowy e-waste operators have recognized it is not just metals and plastics which are valuable, so too are the personal information, bank and identity records on computer hard-drives. Despite assurances made by recyclers that hard-drive memories are erased or destroyed, very often the information remains. This e-waste is therefore a mountainous resource for cyber criminals.

Illegal e-waste businesses often use environmentally friendly names. This normally includes use of the word recycle along with assurances that they are committed to reducing the dumping of e-waste to landfill; the recovery of valuable resources and responsible environmental recycling.

A classic example of this is the US company EarthEcycle. In June this year the EPA charged EarthEcycle with illegally exporting e-waste to Hong Kong.

The recycling of e-waste is a booming industry. The main destination is China, followed by Pakistan, India and Nigeria.

Even the UN has noted that much of the world’s E-waste seems to disappear into a black hole.

The trade into China is remarkable as China has not only agreed to the Basel Convention but has very precise laws prohibiting the import of e-waste. Yet stacked up in the backyards, streets, streams and fields of Guiyu in Guangdong (the world’s biggest e-waste dump) are computer, printer and mobile phone parts which have clearly been imported into China from developed countries all over the world, including Australia.

Typically an illegal recycling organisation works like this.

Businesses (for instance with five or more computers) pay a fee to the e-waste recycler to take their old phones, computers etc. (First income point).

The recycler might then take out and sell the easy-to-remove metals and plastics. These are sold on the local market (Second income point).

The remaining waste is exported using false shipping documents. The waste is often described as “donated electronics” or “non faulty used electronics”. Customs agents are then employed by the recycler to bribe government officials once the waste arrives at the importing country. The waste is then cleared by customs and sold at a per kilo rate to waste wholesalers. (Third income point)

These wholesalers then resell the waste onto small backyard and household businesses that tear apart, chisel at and heat the components to gain metals, glass and plastics for resale. What is not used is dumped.

Occasionally e-waste recyclers may have an “investment or joint venture” in a smelter. Here metals are scraped out and heated at very high temperatures by workers who are paid between five to eight dollars a day; working in appalling conditions. This smelting investment gives the recyclers a share of the profits from the sale of circuit board precious metals. (Fourth income point).

(*) Prices are based on figures for October 2009.

http://www.preciousmetals.umicore.com , Publications, Recovering special metals.

http://www.goldipedia.gold.org/

http://www.lme.co.uk/

http://www.ban.org

http://www.step-initiative.org

http://www.preciousmetals.umicore.com/publications/articles_by_umicore/electronic_scrap/show_greenRecyclingOfEEE.pdf

http://www.ban.org/Library/Features/081109_following_the_trail.html

http://www.ban.org/Library/PittsburghScam.pdf

http://www.docstoc.com/docs/7204639/Earthecycle-EPA-Complaint)

http://www.basel.int/pub/simp-guide.pdf

http://www.step-initiative.org/pdf/Annual_Report_2008.pdf p21

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ACXwo6MntpA (Part 2 of Digital Dumping Ground)

The Bible's Ten Plagues (or pestilences) were all due to natural disasters. The ancient Egyptians lived in fear of floods, pus filled sores, mosquitoes, famine, days of blanketing darkness and hailstones which smelt of rotten eggs.

So what were the ten plagues and pestilences described in the Book of Exodus (7.1 - 10.29) and what caused them?

1) The Nile turns to blood. This was the flooding of the River Nile which stirred up the river's muddy red silt thereby creating a favourable environment for a toxic red algal bloom. This bloom starved the river of oxygen causing the death of fish. The result a stinking toxic liquid red mess.

2)The second disaster was the plague of frogs onto the land and into the villages. The smelly, toxic red river saw a mass exodus of frogs, the natural predators of flying biting insects.

3 & 4) The flying biting insects included flies, mosquitoes and lice (gnats). Since the Nile was empty of frogs the population of flies, mosquitoes and gnats swarmed and soared. These were the third and fourth plagues.

5) Uncontrolled they attacked and spread diseases such as scabies and Bluetongue and therefore the fifth pestilence, dead animals.

6) The unchecked, adventurous flies carried bacteria which caused scabies and glanders. Glanders causes weeping, pus filled sores. It is a highly infectious disease which attacks horses and mules but can also infect other animals and humans. Thus the sixth pestilence sores.

7) The ferocious clash of desert hot and cold winds occasionally caused storms with large hailstones. These balls of ice damaged crops, livestock and mud homes. Sometimes these hailstones were mixed with sulphur (brimstone) which smelt of rotten eggs. These foul yellow hailstones came from airborne volcanic ash which swept over from volcanoes in the Aegean and Mediterranean. These hailstones were the seventh pestilence.

8) The ancient Egyptians also fell victim to roaring, dark clouds of locusts. Up to 80 million locusts per square kilometre would swarm through fruit and grain farms, devouring all plant life. The weight of tens of thousands of perching locusts caused trees to topple over. Then when they had finished eating every plant, the locusts poohed all over the ground; leaving the fields covered with up two centimetres of excrement. Locusts were the eighth plague.

9) Saharan sandstorms, clouds of locusts and the violent rain storms caused by volcanoes plunged the region into periods of darkness. The sandstorms (or khamsin) sometimes lasted for three days. During this time villages were shrouded in sand stinging haze. Such darkness was the ninth pestilence.

10) The final or tenth pestilence was the death of a newborn caused by the other pestilences and plagues. Babies were still born or died as infants due to starvation or disease. (No wonder)

see http://www.publications.steveplatt.net/tenplagues.htm

Books/Articles: The Miracles of Exodus: A Scientists's Discovery of the Extraordinary Natural Causes of the Biblical Stories. Colin J Humphries. Harper Collins, 2004

An Epidemiological Analysis of the Ten Plagues of Egypt. Marr JS and Malloy CD, Caduceus 1996 Spring; 12(1)7-24

The problem...

Cost of home espresso machine bought from chain department store = $227.

Number of months used until it became faulty = 14 months.

Length of guarantee against faulty workmanship = 12 months.

Cost of quoted repairs (including two quotes) = $110.

Amount of time estimated for sourcing of repair quotes = 4 hours.

Amount of time estimated for drive to and pick up of espresso machine once repaired = 1 hour.

(Total time for quote and pick up = 5 hours)

Hours of operation for repair business = 8am to 6pm Monday to Friday. (Saturday 9am to 12noon)

Hourly pay rate of espresso machine owner = $18/hr.

Total work hours lost if repairs proceed = 5 hours.

Work hours of espresso machine owner = 7am to 6pm Monday to Friday (including travel)

Saturday household and family duties on weekend make Saturday inconvenient.

The outcome...

Coffee machine stored in garage = 6 months.

Put into council clean-up bin after end of that period.

Brand new and improved machine (with 12 month guarantee against faulty workmanship) bought for Christmas.

1. 1) Hanford Nuclear Waste Site, Washington, USA contains approx 2, 100 tonnes of spent nuclear fuel and 8 tonnes of plutonium. The site is about 1518 square kilometres.
2. 2) Murmansk, Murmansk, Russia. Undisclosed tonnage. The port holding the former Soviet Union's aging nuclear submarines.
3. 3) Kola Peninsula, Murmansk, Russia. Undisclosed tonnage. Highest concentration of active and derelict nuclear reactors in the world.
4. 4) Mayak, Chelyabinsk, Russia

1) Sudokwon, Incheon, South Korea 16,000 to 18,000 tonnes per day. (Principal landfill for cities of Seoul and Incheon and Kyonggi province. Population of areas served about 21 million)

2) Bordo Poniente, Nezahualcoyotl, Mexico City, Mexico 11,000 tonnes per day. (Principal landfill for greater Mexico city. Population about 20 million)

3) Apex, Las Vegas, Nevada, USA 9,500 tonnes per day. (Principal landfill for Las Vegas. Population about 1.8 million)

4) Puente Hills, Whittier, Los Angeles, California, USA 9,300 tonnes per day. (Principal landfill for Los Angeles counties, but not Los Angeles city. Population about 5.3 million.)

5) Laogang, Nanhui, Shanghai, China 9,100 tonnes per day. (Principal landfill for Shanghai. Population about 18 million)

6) Lagos, Nigeria 8,200 tonnes per day. (Principal landfill for Lagos. Population about 17.5 million. )

7) Xingfeng, Baiyuan, Guangzhou, China 7,200 tonnes per day. (Principal landfill for Guangzhou. Population about 12 million.)

8) Sao Paulo, Brazil 6,400 tonnes per day. (Principal landfill for Sao Paulo. Population about 22 million.)

9) West New Territories, Nim Wan, Tuen Mun, Hong Kong 5,700 tonnes per day. (Principal landfill for Hong Kong and New Territories. Population about 7 million.)

10) Deonar, Mumbai, India 4,000 tonnes per day. (Principal landfill for Mumbai. Population about 13.7 million.)

11) Guiyu E-waste, Shantou, Guangdong, China 3,800 tonnes per day. (Population about 132,000. This waste site is for imported e-waste.)

12) Malagrotta, Lazio, Rome, Italy 3,700 tonnes per day. (Principal landfill for Rome. Population about 3.7 million.)

13) Gazipur, Delhi, India 2,500 tonnes per day. (Principal landfill for Delhi National Capital Territory. Population about 14 million.)

14) Dandora, Nairobi, Kenya 1,900 tonnes per day. (Principal landfill for Nairbobi. Population about 3.5 million.)

by Stavros Mouslopoulos and Anastasia Joyce

What's pigeon pooh got to do with the birth of the universe?

In 1965 two US based radio-astronomers from Bell Laboratories, New Jersey were attempting to use microwaves to map spaces between galaxies. The efforts of the two scientists, Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson, kept on being held up by "static" noises interfering with signals to their antenna.

The source of the noise, they thought, were the pigeons roosting on the antenna and leaving droppings. So the two young radio-astronomers spent hours searching for and cleaning up pigeon pooh. The result a clean antenna but the noise stayed.

They finally discovered the faint static backgound noise they had heard was actually cosmic in origin. Now called Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) radiation this discovery earnt them the Nobel Prize for Physics (1978).

CMB is a remnant of the Big Bang. It is perhaps the most precious, though useless object within the Cosmos. It is a form of electromagnetic radiation which fills up every spot in the universe. However it seems to have no relationship to any star, galaxy or other object.

This radiation from the Big Bang is a cosmic soup travelling constantly in all directions of the universe. Its temperature, which produces microwaves, is a measure of the size and age of the universe. Currently it is 2.725 K (K = Kelvin) or -270 degrees Celsius. As the universe expands the temperature lowers. Therefore its temperature is a measure of the size and age of the universe.

CMB is not visible to the naked eye. However...

If you turn on a traditional analog TV (not digital), have an antenna and no other environmental electromagentic noise (computer, power line, electric motor interference etc) you might be able watch the Big Bang on the TV as it ripples through the universe. CMB radiation appears as that useless snow or fuzz in between channels, or when the channel is "off air". You may however be unable to pick up CMB. In which case you'll have to contend with watching the interaction of the solar wind with the earth's magnetic field. It also looks fuzzy and useless.

"The trail leading to the Unified Field Theory is littered with the wreckage of failed expeditions and dreams..." (Dr Michio Kaku. Theoretical physicist, futurist and author.)

A common joke within the theoretical physics community is that 90 percent of theories published will be, at some time, proved to be wrong.

Albert Einstein unsuccessfully spent years looking for the tail of the lion. The theory that would finally lead to the roar of a perfect Grand Unification Theory (GUT).

Einstein's GUT attempt is one of many by physicists. There is Trinification, Flipped SU(5), Flipped SO(10), the left-right model, the Georgi-Glashow model and so on and so forth. All have attempted to unite the electromagnetic, weak nuclear and strong nuclear forces into one field of space and time.

In so doing they have wrought havoc on accepted and respected beliefs such as the stability of protons. That one has been tossed out by some in favour of the partial instability of protons. (Thus more wreckage and litter on the way to GUT.)

Another problem with GUT is the absence of the smoking gun, the Higgs particle. The existence of this particle is still a theory. It is sometimes called the "God particle". If it exists it would explain how mass is given to all other particles in the universe. The thing is while physicists can measure mass, they can't explain or predict how mass should appear.

Finding Higgs would confirm something called the electroweak force (the combination of weak and electromagnetic interactions into one theory). This theory says weak forces are closely related to electromagnetic forces and have essentially equal strengths. They just appear to have different strengths because of the effect distance and mass have on the interaction of the forces. And that's the problem, without Higgs, we can't predict how mass would occur anywhere, let alone in this theory. Oh dear.

Scientific research is separated into two branches. That in which logic and consistency govern and the other which pretends or wants to be that. This second one is politely referred to as pathological science.It is otherwise known as pseudoscience, hocus-pocus or wasted, cargolcult, junk, dishonest, delusional and fraudulent science.

Examples of pathological science have included Cold Fusion (endless power out of a cup of hard water and a couple of palladium electrodes) Polywater (plastic out of water) and Breatharianism - the belief that it is possible to live only on light. ( see http://www.jasmuheen.com )

This pathological science has sometimes (but not always) been the focus of fun for Improbable Research, organisers of the annual Ig Nobel Prizes.

Just as the Nobel Prize honours extraordinary achievements in physics, medicine and chemistry, so too do the Ig Noble Prizes. These prizes selected by eminent scientists, engineers and doctors "honour achievements that make people laugh, and then make them think".

The prizes seem to fall into two types the goofy (yet sound) and the delusional (pathological) science.

Here are some samples from the 2008 Ig Noble Prize list.

Economics Prize. Geoffrey Miller, Joshua Tybur and Brent Jordan of the University of New Mexico, USA, for discovering that professional lap dancers earn higher tips when they are ovulating.

Chemistry Prize. Sharee Umpierre University of Puerto Rico, Joseph Hill the Fertility Centers of New England (USA) and Deborah Anderson Boston University School of Medicine and Harvard Medical School for discovering that Coca-Cola is an effective spermicide.

Peace Prize: The Swiss Federal Ethics Committee on Non-Human Biotechnology (ECNH) and the citizens of Switzerland for adopting the legal principle that plants have dignity.

A full list of award winners (dating back to 1991) and more bizarre science can be found at http://www.improbable.com/ig/winners/

Michelangelo's David is actually made up of debris.

The priceless statue was carved out of the left over remains of millions and millions of shellfish. These shellfish lived in the shallow tropical waters which covered much of Europe during the Jurassic period (199.6 to 145.5 million years ago). Over millions of years this sedimentary debris grew deeper and harder forming calcium carbonate (CaCO3) or limestone. Later huge tectonic forces, or movements in the earth's plates further compressed the calcium carbonate and through metamorphosis recrystallized the debris. This helped form marble.

Michelangelo's David is made from marble found in the Massa Carrara region in Tuscany, Italy.

Carrara marble is considered to be the world's most valuable marble and has been mined since 9th century BC.

The ancient and continued use of the region for mining has meant that whole sides of mountains have been carved away. Indeed licenses to carve out mountain sides have been passed through generations of families for hundreds of years.

Once sound is created within about one second it loses over 99 percent of it's intensity. It is scattered and absorbed and what's left is turned into heat.

So do the sounds we make contribute to global warming? No the heat caused is infinitesimal.

The fossil fuel industry has long been the object of criticsm.....

Crude oil derivatives are in CDs, glass coatings, computer keyboards, food flow agents, dyes, clothing, furniture, pills, medicines, cosmetics, cleaning agents. Petrol (gasoline), gas and oil drive our cars, provide energy and lubricate our machines.

It's cousin coal is used for heating and as coking coal in steel production. It's in our cars, bicycles, houses, in our pens and reading glasses.

The use of fossil fuels are almost everywhere. Its ubiquitous.

But it is a finite source. One day we will be without it. Not only that, every day countless tonnes of gases are spewed into the atmosphere as we process and use it. So have we really thought about how to replace it?

Is there a resource that can be manipulated and engineered to do what fossil fuels have done?