Concentration of protein in bovine milk is one of the most significant milk quality parameters, to a large extent determining the price for milk to the producer. Mastitis is a common disease among dairy cows, negatively affecting not only milk yield but also milk protein composition. Milk from mastitic cows tends to have lower cheese yield, negatively affected processability properties and sensory quality, due to changed protein quality and composition. Poorer milk protein quality would have an economically negative impact on dairy industry. Only few studies have investigated the short term effects of mastitis on milk protein composition.

Biogas is a renewable fuel that can be extracted from anaerobic digestion of many differentsubstrates, for example biological household waste. An alternative handling of the waste is tomix it with other wastes and incinerate it in a combined heat and power (CHP) plant. Thisstudy uses life cycle assessment to investigate which type of waste handling that is betterfrom an environmental point of view, anaerobic digestion with biogas production orincineration. The results are based on a case study of a biogas production plant owned by thecompany Ragn-Sells in Vänersborg. The alternative is incineration at a CHP plant inGothenburg.

The management of water resources and waste water varies between the countries of the EU. For many years, a large part of the water in Europe has been contaminated by, among other things, insufficiently treated waste water and emissions from agriculture. The EU Water Framework Directive 2000/60/EC and the Urban Waste Water Directive 91/271/EEC are intended to harmonize fresh-water management and waste water management within the whole EU, aiming at safeguarding drinking water of good quality and a high quality of all water within the EU today and in the future. There are however some problems concerning the waste-water directive. One problem is the huge investment needed in Slovakia to fulfil the demands of the waste-water directive for waste-water management in larger communities (with more than 2000 inhabitants).

This report describes the work of developing a specification of requirements for Waste Heat Recovery Units. The main part of the paper describes how the work with the specification of requirements has been performed. One specific question to be answered is:What are the customer?s demands in case of properties for the Waste Heat Recovery Units and how is that information collected as an order documentation to suit the business area Oil & Gas?The report begins with a description of the assignment and continues with the aim and background. A theoretical part describes the different areas and methods that have been important during the process.

In Sweden, there are limits to how much leachable substances waste must contain in order to be deposited as hazardous waste. Fly ash from waste incineration often end up over the limit, mainly due to the chloride content. Fly ash is therefore often deposited abroad. The purpose of this study was to investigate the possibility to handle fly ash locally. To clarify how the law is applied, environmental reports and permit documents from ten waste sites with permission to deposit fly ash were studied.

All over the world the waste from human society is causing problems. In developing countries, large cities are polluted through huge amounts of wastes and people are forced to live very close to open deposits. Lima, capital of Peru, is no exception. The countryside in Peru has also a great challenge to face concerning the waste issue. Children and adults suffer from infectious diseases and contamination of the nature occurs as well. One solution to handle organic waste is to compost, which means a controlled decomposition of organic waste under aerobic conditions at certain temperatures.

Högbytorp is Ragn-Sells? largest waste facility and it is located north of Stockholm. There is an old landfill still in use, but at the end of this year it will be closed. The waste deposited on the landfill can, through decomposition, give rise to a large amount of methane gas, which is an energy rich gas that can be used for heat and electricity production. To receive a relatively large amount of gas, the decomposition requires a high moisture content in the waste.

Heat stress negatively influences the performance of dairy cattle such as lactation and reproduction. Heat stress can cause production losses as well as welfare problems. Years of research have shown that heat stress is a huge problem for dairy cattle in both the tropics and temperate zones but no such research have so far been done in northern European countries. It seems like shade is an important tool when improving pasture conditions and therefore deserves more attention. The aim with this study was to investigate whether there is a need of providing shade for grazing dairy cows during the summer in Sweden. Two groups of lactating Swedish Red dairy cows (n=15 per group) were kept on pasture.

The goals of this Bachelors? Thesis were to establish the production loss through the VTIS1 Pasteur at Arla Foods Linköping dairy and then suggest simple but effective solutions to minimize the losses for each production run. If the timeframe allowed it, some of the solutions would be implemented and tested in full production to determine their impact on economic and environmental savings.The very first step of this project was to establish the statistics over what losses there is in the production pipeline through VTIS1, from milk and powders in mixer tanks to finished and packed products in cold storage. Then, when knowing how much product was actually lost and where, those bottlenecks could be pinpointed and examined more closely. At this stage the focus was switched, from the otherwise complicated and broad manufacturing process, to the VTIS1-aggregate, since early data indicated there were quite substantial losses there.In conjunction with this project Arla Foods purchased an absorption photometer-measuring device (OPTEK AS16) that could be inserted straight into the product stream out of VTIS1, allowing real time measurements of its optical density.

In modern dairy production the milking frequency is increased in some herds due to introducing of automatic milking systems or the farmers decision to milk high producing dairy cows more than two times a day. With more frequent milkings the milk yield increases while the content of fat and protein decreases. However, how the composition of protein is influenced is not fully evaluated. The purpose of this study was therefore to see if a higher milking frequency had any impact on the milk production and especially on the protein composition. This study was conducted as a half udder experiment.

The relatively poor economy in European dairy farming might be improved from efficient feeding systems and dietary management. Increasing herd sizes and transition to loose housing systems in Sweden, increases the possibilities for other feeding systems than separate feeding that is the traditional feeding system in Sweden. Other possible feeding systems are partial mixed ration (PMR) and total mixed ration (TMR), where the TMR system sometimes is associated with overfeeding and thereby increased environmental impact and high feed cost. Diets providing nutrients above or below animal requirements are considered as unbalanced, which in turn are associated with reductions in health, fertility and milk production. On the other hand, a balanced feed ration improves feed efficiency, nitrogen utilization and profitability.

This master?s thesis was performed during the fall of 2006 at Cloetta Fazer AB in Ljungsbro. Cloetta Fazer is the market leader in Scandinavia of manufacturing confectionary and chocolates. The purpose of the project has been to identify causes that impact the quantity of waste in production as well as a cost/benefit analysis of the solutions that can reduce the problem of production waste.The work includes four production lines that are individually designed depending on what kind of product that are produced on the line. By using qualitative and quantitative methods such as focus groups, interviews and observations data has been collected.

The goal of this master thesis project was to develop computer models of some plausiblepretreatment techniques and to assess the potential benefits/costs of using pretreatment andanaerobic digestion for waste management of organic waste from a system perspective. Forthis purpose a computer program called ORWARE has been used. ORWARE (organic wasteresearch) is a program for making life cycle assessments of waste management. As the mainpart of the project work the ORWARE system has been provided with three new models ofpretreatment techniques. The additions consist of: One model of pretreatment with ultrasound,one model of thermal hydrolysis and one model of a screw press.

Emissions of insufficiently treated wastewater, mainly blackwater (i.e. wastewater from toilets), contributes to the eutrophication of lakes and seas. At the same time, blackwater is a fraction with a low content of heavy metals and, after sanitization, it can recirculate plant nutrients to arable land using the liquid composting treatment method. Liquid composting means that organic material is degraded under aerobic conditions. For sanitization, the blackwater needs to be treated together with energy-rich complementary material.

Investment costs for eight different type housing systems for dairy cows has been calculated in order to compare the building costs as a function of herd size, shelter type and automatization. A commercial calculation programme for building was used and complemented with prices of equipments specific for dairy cow building. Herd sizes were 120, 250 and 400 cows. The milking equipments were automatic milking system (AMS), parallel parlour with 32 stalls (2x16) and rotary parlour with 24 stalls. Shelter was either insulated equipped with automatic cable driven scrapers on solid alleys, automatic feed wagon on rails, or uninsulated with manual manure handling and a tractor driven mobile mixer wagon on a drive-through feeding table. Building cost per cow or per kg milk was calculated using an average life time and 6 % interest rate and annual milk yield is 9 500 kg/cow and year. Structure effect 3-4 % higher for an insulated structure than in an uninsulated for 400 and 120 herd respectively. This is much lower compared to what is normally argued.