Being exposed to air pollutants in the womb and during the first eight and a half years of life alters the structural connectivity of the child’s brain, month by month. In particular, the greatest changes occur the greater the contamination received in the first five years. This is the conclusion reached by the ISGlobal study, […]
The evolution of the livestock sector in Spain in recent years has made it essential to draw up a new standard that includes different environmental and animal welfare aspects.
Its articles 10 and 11, Royal Decree 306/2020 of February 11, and the European Directive 2016/2284 on emission reduction require an immediate reduction of ammonia emissions, as well as the registration of the best available techniques that have been used to achieve said reduction.
Both articles are in effect.
As of January, the farms must carry out exhaustive control so as not to exceed the maximum levels of ammonia established (20ppm). The effects of ammonia at levels higher than 20 ppm can have irritating effects on mucous membranes and cause respiratory, digestive, eye, and skin diseases, and also cause a decrease in the productivity of livestock farms.
How to reduce ammonia levels on the farm?
THE QLAYER SYSTEM IS THE DEFINITIVE SOLUTION FOR THE ELIMINATION OF AMMONIA ON FARMS
THE QLAYER SYSTEM IS CAPABLE OF REDUCING THE AMMONIA CONCENTRATION BY UP TO 85%.
Our technology, effective, innovative, and easy to apply, is based on the photo-oxidation of ammonia (NH3), through the application of a coating, PureLayer+, based on mineral semiconductors, combined with the action of our PureLight LED lights.
The Qlayer system, consisting of the joint action of a coating and LED lights, is a revolutionary innovation that improves biosecurity and animal welfare in intensive poultry and pig farms, currently being the BEST AVAILABLE TECHNIQUE on the market (MTD ).
Actually, no, it’s not new. The macro farms began to be installed in the decade of the sixties. We have been consuming animal products that come from macro-farms for many years. But for you to understand what has happened recently and why they are being talked about now, I have to explain to you, first, what they are.
These are very intensive production systems. That means there is a high density of animals on each of these farms, from thousands of pigs and cows to tens of thousands of poultry. In addition, they are highly genetically selected animals so they give a very high production. This entails some environmental problems such as soil contamination by feces and air pollution by the emission of CO₂, ammonia, and, in the case of cows, also methane.
Ammonia comes from animal feces and urine; the CO₂ from their breath and the methane is expelled by ruminants through their mouths, not by farts, as is often said, due to the fermentation of food in their rumen, which is one of the parts of the digestive system of ruminants.
The problem is that these gases are polluting and negatively affect climate change. And at the same time, the enormous amount of feces produced by macro farms is detrimental to the soil because there are not enough plants that take advantage of it as nutrients.
And why have macro-farms now become a problem when they seemed fine to us before? The reason is that these intensive systems were used in very few countries, only in industrialized ones. In the rest of the countries, a much more vegetarian diet continued to be eaten because meat and animal products were a luxury. But when large countries like China, India, South Africa, or Brazil have begun to consume more products of animal origin produced in the same way, it has become an unsustainable system for the environment.
The metropolitan area of Barcelona and El Vallès are the hot spots for pollution. A large part of the polluting gases is generated there. In these environments, the majority of polluting agents come from industrial activity and traffic by land, sea, and air.
But each summer with the arrival of heat, another problem is added to the already fragile balance of air quality in the city and its metropolitan area. Or more worrisome than industrial pollution is the pollution generated in the area of the Vic plain, where the high levels of tropospheric ozone reached by livestock activity in these hottest months, even have an impact on the already fragile quality of the air of the Catalan capital and his metropolitan area.
If we put together the levels of ammonia, with all the pollution generated by the port, industrial activity, airport, and traffic, we find ourselves with an explosive cocktail that is expanding more and more.
The Public Health Agency of Barcelona has detected that part of the polluting particles that remain in the city’s air corresponds to ammonia from the pig farms in the Vic plain and the rest of Catalonia.
Much has been said, measured, and warned about the contamination of the aquifers by slurry suffered by the areas of Catalonia where pig farms are concentrated. But the contamination that this mixture of urine with excrement causes in the atmosphere is not so well known, due to the elimination of nitrogen in the form of ammonia, mainly through urine. In six years, air pollution from slurry emissions has doubled (from 9,500 tons in 2012 to 21,000 in 2018, according to the official PRTR pollutant register). An alarming fact, and more when the rest of the emissions are reduced.
The CSIC researcher Xavier Querol, points out that the problem of ammonia emissions from slurry “is European in scope and affects a sector that has evolved very little, while the industry has put its batteries together.”
Health confirms the first case of avian influenza in humans in Spain in a worker of a poultry farm.
Europe has suffered for a year the largest outbreak of avian influenza (H5N1) since there are records, according to a report published Monday by the European Center for Disease Control (ECDC).
The ECDC data for all of Europe brings to 2,467 outbreaks registered in poultry farms in Europe and 3,573 in wild animals. More than 48 million birds have had to be euthanized.
Check the full news here
Read the full study here.
The results suggest that European countries should further lower the fixed levels of nitrogen dioxide and particulate matter.
Avian flu is hitting farms and parks in Spain, forcing specimens to be sacrificed and parks to be closed, such as El Soto in Mostoles, where a hundred dead wild birds appeared from one day to the next.
Avian flu or avian influenza (AI) is a disease of birds that represents a global threat not only to the poultry industry but also to public health and wildlife conservation.
In recent decades, the emergence and intercontinental spread of new AI viruses (AIVs) has exposed vulnerabilities in disease prevention and control methods, especially in complex, non-biosafety production and market systems.
With the system developed together with Qlayer Solutions we have designed the ally in Biosafety policies and we are able to carry out continuous disinfection of surfaces avoiding the presence and spread of any virus and bacteria.
check the news in the following link
Learn a little more about the new variant of Avian Influenza here
Read the full piece here
A study by the World Economic Forum warns that the current consumption model will cause a 36% increase in the number of delivery vehicles on the roads of the 100 largest cities in the world by 2030 and 32% more emissions.
Earlier this year, many municipalities in the Netherlands proposed to ban fossil-fuel delivery vehicles in their cities by only admitting electric delivery vehicles; an agreement that will enter into force from 2025.
Read the full news here and learn more about clean energy and initiatives that we can implement in our day to day for a better world.
At the end of April the European Union has been studying the risk of expansion of the African Swine Fever (ASF). They wanted to know what role feed and transport play in the transmission of this virus that is beginning to enter Europe through Romania.
In this study, the EU concluded that African Swine Fever has spread more rapidly in industrial farms where there is a higher concentration of animals and the main transmission vectors detected have been mainly meat processing plants and animal transport vehicles.
Other diseases that the European Commission for Agriculture and Rural Development is closely monitoring are Porcine Reproductive and Respiratory Syndrome (PRRS)
To get an idea of the magnitude of these two conditions, since one of the most recent outbreaks of African Swine Fever was detected in China last January 2019, more than 900 thousand pigs had to be slaughtered in less than a month and in August of that same year the numbers were much more worrying, they had 5 million slaughtered swines, with the losses that this entails for the farmer, the market value of the price of meat and the industry in general.
Regarding PRRS, although the experience and research that is done on the disease, it continues to be a very costly problem for producers. In recent studies, losses due to Porcine Reproductive and Respiratory Syndrome are at 664 million dollars annually in the United States alone.
So how can we help to eradicate ASF and PRRS? With our Puretruck system, which is easily applied to animal transport trucks, we facilitate the work of disinfection and reduce the time that the driver spends working on it.
The mandatory transport disinfection protocols promoted by the Ministry of Agriculture and by the Spanish Ministry of Health are the following:
It is crucial to have a rigorous cleaning, disinfection and drying protocol for the complete disinfection of animal transport vehicles. Potential risk points in the truck cabin are (pedals, carpets …) that must be effectively disinfected by using a spray disinfectant.
As for trailers, the most critical part and where most infections occur, is where you must be more careful. All organic material (feces, food, urine …) must be eliminated on each journey, once clean, a specific disinfectant will be applied and it’s drying time must be respected. This last step is the most important to deactivate the virus and makes them waste a lot of time.
With our system we are reducing the disinfection, from each journey, to 2 or 3 times a week and it does not lose effectiveness when it encounters water, since our product is water-based.
Once our product has been applied, the light turns on, activates the coating and starts its disinfection. So the driver can forget about wasting time cleaning and disinfecting each way and worrying about if they have waited long enough for drying.
Through PureTruck we have an easy, comfortable, and effective disinfection method for carriers, which guarantees us a 100% safe journey free of viruses and bacteria and provides us with an increase in productivity.
Daoíz i Velarde 20-26 L-1
08980 Sant Feliu de Llobregat Barcelona (Spain)
Tel: + 34 93 373 41 82
sales@activacolors.com
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