- Email: [email protected]
Guaranteed clean environment
Volume 2 2 / N u m b e r 3/March 1991
The new Protoc on-line water analyser.
samples to monitor contamination levels present, PROTOC can easily be installed on line where COD or BOD standard tests are normally performed and is said to offer exceptionally accurate analysis of samples within 4 minutes. British designed and built, the system utilises an ultra-violet promoted persulphate oxidation chemistry with infra-red detection, enabling it to monitor CO2 levels in a variable range from 0-500 ppb to 10 000 ppm. TOC values detected can then be used to assess pollution levels, warn of organic spills which could potentially overwhelm treatment systems or enable the
diversion of contaminated streams which could damage expensive plant such as boilers, catalyst columns or RO systems. The analyser, which is housed in a rugged GRP case weatherproofed to IO65, can be safely positioned within 'dirty' areas and features automatic zeroing and recalibration without the need for laboratory facilities. The unit's measurement parameters can be changed, quickly and simply, to suit individual monitoring requirements. The analyser is controlled and monitored by a separate Central Processing Unit. The CPU can be positioned in a laboratory, process control room or wherever required up to several hundred metres away from the analyser, connected by multicore cable. Controlling and monitoring the operation of the analyser, it will also display results on and LCD display and provide hard copy print out of sample data from its integral thermal printer. PROTOC's central processor can be linked up to a PC or datalogger via an integral RS232 interface to disl~lay information in more sophisticated forms, such as graphs or charts, and to store information on floppy disc. The new system is said to be suitable for a wide variety of industries including water, chemical, pharmaceutical, food processing, paper, and textiles. PPM, who are based in Sevenoaks, Kent specialize in pollution monitoring instrumentation and are able to offer systems customized to meet individual company and industry requirements.
Guaranteed Clean Environment Unistrut (UK) Limited, in conjunction with clients have developed a unique application for their Unistrut Metal Hi-Tech,
................................................... ,,dern manufacturing procedures. Developed by Unistrut (UK) Ltd.
157
Marine Pollution Bulletin
Clean Room Industry. Their customer, Clean Air Environments Limited developed the design and commissioned Unistrut to manufacture the framework after identifying a market for a new, low-cost clean air enclosure suitable for modern manufacturing procedures. Complete Clean Environments claim the major benefits of the Unitstrut metal framing to be the ability to create modular structures through shorter manufacturing times, significantly reducing the time required to design individual enclosures and perhaps more importantly, drastically cutting installation times. An additional benefit to the user is the choice of many different skin types which can be replaced on any
Never Such Innocence Again The End of Nature. Bill McKibben. Penguin, London, 1990. 212 pp. £4.99• ISBN: 0-14-012306-7• O f all the books I have reviewed, this is the one I most urge you to read, for this alone gets somewhere near the heart of the greatest matter: how are we to live? It is splendidly prejudiced, grandly rhetorical. A n elegy for the natural world untouched by man, that we were the last generation to see, it laments and pleads. Like Philip Larkin's poetry (particularly 'Going, Going', who's fears it fulfils), it tells us the truth about ourselves and 'our' world, and the truth is unbearable. However, this is not a 'doomsday book'; it is never strident, seldom hyperbolic• But it is about d o o m all the same. D o o m s d a y is not just around the corner• The end is not nigh. It was yesterday, and we didn't notice because we were too busy buying, driving, washing, heating or cooling something. The book is principally about global warming, but truly about the nature of man and man's place in nature. Let McKibben present some of his own points. "To declare . . . that the warming has not yet appeared and therefore the theory is in doubt, is like arguing that a woman has not yet given birth and is therefore not pregnant." " . . . around 2020 . . . weU be expecting the trees from a hundred miles south to start arriving. They won't . . . The trees outside my window will still be there--its just that they'll be dead or dying." "By changing the weather, we make every spot on the earth man-made and artificial . . . one can . . . argue that the current crisis too is 'natural' . . . we are nature, and nothing we can do would be 'unnatural' . . . ]but] . . . H o w will we feel at the end of nature . . . ? . . . its loss means sadness . . . What is the sadness about? In the first place, merely the knowledge that we screwed it up . . . I don't think that this separation [of man from 158
enclosure within minutes. User confidence is further boosted through the reinforcement of British Standards product testing to Class 1, BS5295 (unmanned), and Class 2, BS5295 (manned), providing a technical excellent structure, unique in its portability and the speed at which it can be erected or broken down. The enclosure is ideally suited to the micro-electronics and pharmaceutical industries, optical, medical and biotechnical fields, operating theatre enclosures, factory clean zones, mobile clain air enclosures and pressure containment enclosures. It costs a fraction of the alternative, conventional clean room facility, can be tailor made to suit any installation and required little in the way of maintenance.
nature] was an inevitable divorce, the genetically programmed growth of a child. I think that it was a mistake, and that consciously or unconsciously, many of us realize it was a mistake . . . Our sadness is almost an aesthetic response--appropriate because we have marred a great, mad, profligate work of art, taken a hammer to the most perfectly proportioned of sculptures." "We still rely on the earth's basic integrity and equanimity to give us a safe and stable context . . . and in particular we rely on the seasons• The recurring cycles of the year are not simply entertaining phenome n a . . , but s i g n s . . , that we remain in something larger and more reliable than our own short-lived enthusiasms But what will happen--this summer or next summer or some summer soon--as that certainty falters?•.• even the men who make the general climate models admit that their projections are crude at the global level, and fantastically uncertain at any lesser level. We are left with a vast collection of 'mights', and only one certainty: we have changed the world, and therefore some of the 'mights' are i n e v i t a b l e . . . We are not necessarily d o o m e d to some cataclysm• But we can't count on not being so d o o m e d . . . if all the liberals and all the conservatives in all the countries of the world had cooperated a decade ago and done all the most dramatic things they could think of, it still wouldn't have been enough to prevent . . . terrible changes . . . Carbon dioxide and the other greenhouse gases come from everywhere, so they can be fixed only by fixing everyt h i n g . . . The choice of doing n o t h i n g . . , is not a choice it will lead us, if not straight to hell, then straight to a place with a similar temperature." But McKibben recognizes the intransigence of the human species' view of itself and 'its' world• It may be 'undeniably selfish to act as if each person represented one unit of importance and nothing else was of any importance. Nevertheless . . . it is the only tenable position . . . No other . . . corresponds to the way most people really think and act . . . As the British writer Brian Stableford declares in his celebratory book 'Future Man', genetic engineering 'will eventually enable •
.
.
•
.
.
The new Protoc on-line water analyser.
samples to monitor contamination levels present, PROTOC can easily be installed on line where COD or BOD standard tests are normally performed and is said to offer exceptionally accurate analysis of samples within 4 minutes. British designed and built, the system utilises an ultra-violet promoted persulphate oxidation chemistry with infra-red detection, enabling it to monitor CO2 levels in a variable range from 0-500 ppb to 10 000 ppm. TOC values detected can then be used to assess pollution levels, warn of organic spills which could potentially overwhelm treatment systems or enable the
diversion of contaminated streams which could damage expensive plant such as boilers, catalyst columns or RO systems. The analyser, which is housed in a rugged GRP case weatherproofed to IO65, can be safely positioned within 'dirty' areas and features automatic zeroing and recalibration without the need for laboratory facilities. The unit's measurement parameters can be changed, quickly and simply, to suit individual monitoring requirements. The analyser is controlled and monitored by a separate Central Processing Unit. The CPU can be positioned in a laboratory, process control room or wherever required up to several hundred metres away from the analyser, connected by multicore cable. Controlling and monitoring the operation of the analyser, it will also display results on and LCD display and provide hard copy print out of sample data from its integral thermal printer. PROTOC's central processor can be linked up to a PC or datalogger via an integral RS232 interface to disl~lay information in more sophisticated forms, such as graphs or charts, and to store information on floppy disc. The new system is said to be suitable for a wide variety of industries including water, chemical, pharmaceutical, food processing, paper, and textiles. PPM, who are based in Sevenoaks, Kent specialize in pollution monitoring instrumentation and are able to offer systems customized to meet individual company and industry requirements.
Guaranteed Clean Environment Unistrut (UK) Limited, in conjunction with clients have developed a unique application for their Unistrut Metal Hi-Tech,
................................................... ,,dern manufacturing procedures. Developed by Unistrut (UK) Ltd.
157
Marine Pollution Bulletin
Clean Room Industry. Their customer, Clean Air Environments Limited developed the design and commissioned Unistrut to manufacture the framework after identifying a market for a new, low-cost clean air enclosure suitable for modern manufacturing procedures. Complete Clean Environments claim the major benefits of the Unitstrut metal framing to be the ability to create modular structures through shorter manufacturing times, significantly reducing the time required to design individual enclosures and perhaps more importantly, drastically cutting installation times. An additional benefit to the user is the choice of many different skin types which can be replaced on any
Never Such Innocence Again The End of Nature. Bill McKibben. Penguin, London, 1990. 212 pp. £4.99• ISBN: 0-14-012306-7• O f all the books I have reviewed, this is the one I most urge you to read, for this alone gets somewhere near the heart of the greatest matter: how are we to live? It is splendidly prejudiced, grandly rhetorical. A n elegy for the natural world untouched by man, that we were the last generation to see, it laments and pleads. Like Philip Larkin's poetry (particularly 'Going, Going', who's fears it fulfils), it tells us the truth about ourselves and 'our' world, and the truth is unbearable. However, this is not a 'doomsday book'; it is never strident, seldom hyperbolic• But it is about d o o m all the same. D o o m s d a y is not just around the corner• The end is not nigh. It was yesterday, and we didn't notice because we were too busy buying, driving, washing, heating or cooling something. The book is principally about global warming, but truly about the nature of man and man's place in nature. Let McKibben present some of his own points. "To declare . . . that the warming has not yet appeared and therefore the theory is in doubt, is like arguing that a woman has not yet given birth and is therefore not pregnant." " . . . around 2020 . . . weU be expecting the trees from a hundred miles south to start arriving. They won't . . . The trees outside my window will still be there--its just that they'll be dead or dying." "By changing the weather, we make every spot on the earth man-made and artificial . . . one can . . . argue that the current crisis too is 'natural' . . . we are nature, and nothing we can do would be 'unnatural' . . . ]but] . . . H o w will we feel at the end of nature . . . ? . . . its loss means sadness . . . What is the sadness about? In the first place, merely the knowledge that we screwed it up . . . I don't think that this separation [of man from 158
enclosure within minutes. User confidence is further boosted through the reinforcement of British Standards product testing to Class 1, BS5295 (unmanned), and Class 2, BS5295 (manned), providing a technical excellent structure, unique in its portability and the speed at which it can be erected or broken down. The enclosure is ideally suited to the micro-electronics and pharmaceutical industries, optical, medical and biotechnical fields, operating theatre enclosures, factory clean zones, mobile clain air enclosures and pressure containment enclosures. It costs a fraction of the alternative, conventional clean room facility, can be tailor made to suit any installation and required little in the way of maintenance.
nature] was an inevitable divorce, the genetically programmed growth of a child. I think that it was a mistake, and that consciously or unconsciously, many of us realize it was a mistake . . . Our sadness is almost an aesthetic response--appropriate because we have marred a great, mad, profligate work of art, taken a hammer to the most perfectly proportioned of sculptures." "We still rely on the earth's basic integrity and equanimity to give us a safe and stable context . . . and in particular we rely on the seasons• The recurring cycles of the year are not simply entertaining phenome n a . . , but s i g n s . . , that we remain in something larger and more reliable than our own short-lived enthusiasms But what will happen--this summer or next summer or some summer soon--as that certainty falters?•.• even the men who make the general climate models admit that their projections are crude at the global level, and fantastically uncertain at any lesser level. We are left with a vast collection of 'mights', and only one certainty: we have changed the world, and therefore some of the 'mights' are i n e v i t a b l e . . . We are not necessarily d o o m e d to some cataclysm• But we can't count on not being so d o o m e d . . . if all the liberals and all the conservatives in all the countries of the world had cooperated a decade ago and done all the most dramatic things they could think of, it still wouldn't have been enough to prevent . . . terrible changes . . . Carbon dioxide and the other greenhouse gases come from everywhere, so they can be fixed only by fixing everyt h i n g . . . The choice of doing n o t h i n g . . , is not a choice it will lead us, if not straight to hell, then straight to a place with a similar temperature." But McKibben recognizes the intransigence of the human species' view of itself and 'its' world• It may be 'undeniably selfish to act as if each person represented one unit of importance and nothing else was of any importance. Nevertheless . . . it is the only tenable position . . . No other . . . corresponds to the way most people really think and act . . . As the British writer Brian Stableford declares in his celebratory book 'Future Man', genetic engineering 'will eventually enable •
.
.
•
.
.