Division Leadership and Service Award Presented to

Dr. Seshadri Ramkumar

 

Dr. Seshadri Ramkumar received the 2020 Nonwovens Engineers & Technologists Division’s Leadership and Service Award from the Technical Association of Pulp and Paper Industry (TAPPI). TAPPI is a leading professional organization and is over 100 years old.

Texas Tech Decontamination Wipe Finds New Use Helping Animals

GLENYS YOUNG, JANUARY 27, 2021

 

FiberTectTM was conceived for military applications but has since expanded into oil spills and, now, animal operations.

 

Anyone with a dog knows what happens when the animal gets wet: the big shake that throws water all over everyone and everything nearby. But what happens if the dog is covered in something more hazardous than water?

It also gets thrown all over everyone and everything nearby.

Two years ago, Brett Huff, an animal decontamination specialist, was looking for a better solution than the diluted-dish-soap-and-water method he was using to clean animals. It was messy, distressing to the animals – even in warm weather, let alone the freezing temperatures of winter – and, when it was all over, he had a huge amount of contaminated water to dispose of, which had to be done safely.

 

That's when a member of the U.S. Army's Special Forces asked if he'd heard of FiberTectTM.

 

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The Meat of the Matter: Environmental Dissemination of Beef Cattle Agrochemicals

14 January 2021|Categories: 2021, Science and Publications, Volume 22 Issue 1

 

A recent Point of Reference, “The meat of the matter: Environmental dissemination of beef cattle agrochemicals,” published in Environmental Toxicology and Chemistry addresses synthetic chemical cocktails being emitted from cattle feed yards into the environment and how they can impact our ecosystem and our health.

 

Industrial meat production facilities have a bad reputation for their impact on the environment. Concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs) are known to release greenhouse gases related to global warming and for discharge of manure to watersheds, which affects water quality. A less publicized impact of modern beef production is the excessive use of pharmaceuticals and pesticides, which end up in the environment. The animal production agriculture sector holds the record as the single greatest consumer of antimicrobials. Dust from feed yards typically contains antibiotics, synthetic steroids (growth hormones) and pesticides. At a time when honeybee population decline is a hot topic, it is curious that the dust emitted each day from feed yards in the U.S. alone theoretically contains enough permethrin to kill more than a billion honeybees per day.

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