There are two species of voles that cause damage in Swedish fruit production: the water vole (Arvicola terrestris) and the field vole (Microtus agrestis). Both species make the most damage during the winter season. The water vole makes subterranean burrows and cause serious damage by gnawing on the tree roots. The field vole seldom makes burrows and gnaws the bark at the base of the tree trunk. In recent years there have been several reports about increasing vole damage.

This master thesis has been performed at the department of Machine Design at KTH, The Royal Institute of Technology. The thesis has been a part of a global development project in collaboration with Luleå University of Technology, Lund Faculty of Engineering and Stanford University. Corporate liaison and sponsor has been Immerse Global Inc. The project was also performed on sponsorship from the Product Innovation Engineering Program, PIEp. The thesis is a representation of some of the contributions made by the authors.The lack of clean drinking water is one of the key issues facing the world today.

Cultural objects may become wet by deliberate water cleaning, water disaster or watersoaked for other reasons. Air drying textile objects and even other organic materials from awater wet state, involves many problems depending on the strong capillarity action of water.Damages and changes such as bleeding of dyes, stains or lines of impurities from watermovement, shrinking or stiffness can occur. Freeze-drying as an alternative drying methodhas often been used for wet archaeological and marine objects, but more seldom for historicalmaterials.This bachelor thesis addresses the issue of whether freeze-drying can be an alternative controlleddrying method for historic costumes. Costumes and related objects are often compositeobjects, consisting of multiple materials, as well as being three dimensional, all of whichwill complicate drying. The purpose of this study was to investigate whether it is possible tohandle costume objects after wet cleaning for drying by freeze-drying, and if damages due tosurface tension of water, can be avoided in this way.

Discharge of untreated wastewater leads to unnaturally high levels of nitrogen and phosphorus in rivers, lakes and the sea, which results in unbalanced ecosystems with eutrophication and lack of oxygen. Part of the phosphorus in surface waters is coming from on-site wastewater treatment from scattered households with unsatisfactory purification. Blast furnace slag is a by-product from iron production, and has in laboratory trials showed good phosphorus binding capacity. To test blast furnace slag as a reactive filter media for phosphorus separation in a full scale experiment, a wastewater treatment plant has been built behind the picnic area at Ångersjön alongside the road E4 in central-eastern Sweden. The plant contains two parallel lines, one with blast furnaces slag and the other with Filtralite-P as phosphorus sorbent. Both filters have showed decreasing phosphorus purification effect with time in spite of a low wastewater load.

This paper aims to clarify how four customer magazines and digital versions of the magazines are being used by their target group. It focuses on the Ikea customer magazine specifically. After the analysis the conclusion is that out of the four companies customer magazines only one, Ikeas Live magazine, fully re-used the editorial content from the printed magazines on their digital platform. The interviewees were six readers of Ikeas customer magazine Live and two experts from a Stockholm based content firm. After the conducted interviews it became clear that none of the interviewees read the digital version of Ikeas magazine Live.

Lake Bornsjön is situated 30 km southwest of Stockholm in a rift valley lake and consist three basins outstretched in northwest-southeast direction. The surface area is 6,7 km2 with a maximum depth of 18,3 meters, a mean depth of 9,8 meters and a retention time of the water of 6,5 years. The drainage area is 42 km2 and consists mainly of arable land (ca 1000 ha) and productive forestry land (2500 ha), but in the drainage area there are also restored and fairly newly constructed wetlands.Today the Stockholm area receives its drinking water from Lake Mälaren, but if there would be any pollution of this source, Lake Bornsjön would act as the water source. The area surrounding the lake was bought already in 1899 by Stockholm Stad for protection of the lake and was taken over 1993 by Stockholm Vatten AB. It has been a water protection area from 1988 and it was also accepted as a nature reserve in 1995.

Aquaponics is a food production system consisting of a consecutive cultivation of plants and aquatic animals, fish or shellfish, in recirculating water. The plants feed on the nutritious effluents from the fish tank and bacteria converts ammonia from the fish tank into nitrate that is absorbed by the plants. The plants receive nutrition and the fish gain purified water. The environmental impact of the production of fish meal and fish oil used in conventional fish feed includes a large consumption of fossil fuels with subsequent carbon dioxide emission. The aquaponic system can be made environmentally sustainable and self-supporting if supplemented with a vermicompost/vermiculture for the production of worm protein as a fish feed. Vegetable waste from the hydroponic part of the system can be reused as worm feed in the compost and the protein rich worms can be harvested, dried and grinded and brought back to the aquaculture as fish feed. As a first step in this direction, I have investigated the effect of recycling of vegetable waste in vermicomposts on the growth and number of earthworms (this was evaluated after harvesting). The hypotheses were that earthworms can be cultivated in the vegetable waste and that by adding manure to the vermicompost it is possible to obtain a nutrient content adequate to support a continuous worm harvest, in other words create a vermiculture. Eisenia fetida and Dendrobaena veneta were grown in 20 L bins containing peat mixed with either poultry or cattle manure. The proportions were 70% peat and 30 % manure. Discarded plant parts from lettuce cultivation was added to the vermicomposts (35 g per week) and water was supplied with 0.8 L per week.

The aim of this project was to improve taste of a liquid food product, comprising extremelybitter and unpalatable amino acids and one unrevealed ingredient. The amino acids were Lleucine,L-isoleucine, L-valine, L-threonine and L-lysine monohydrochloride. Experimentaldesign was set up as a screening of water solutions comprising these ingredients (called BCAAsolutions) and added ingredients with potential to improve flavour. BCAA solution withingredients that were potential bitterness suppressors were evaluated in flavour, bitternessand/or palatability. Solutions of separate amino acids were also studied.

Biogas is increasingly used for fuel in for example vehicles and it´s produced in a biogas processconsisting of the steps of pretreatment, digestion and gas cleaning. The pretreatment is a method usedto increase the gas production and / or destroy pathogens. The digestion is the stage when anaerobicmicroorganisms convert bio-mass of a substrate to a raw gas containing about 65% of methane. Thegas cleaning is used to increase the methane content to about 97% so the gas can be used for motors invehicles. The biogas part of the Ekeby sewage plant in Eskilstuna is using multiple substrates.

Agricultural land could be polluted by radioactive substances after a fallout. We would then need information about the level of contamination to decide whether the crops could be utilized as food under these circumstances. In an experiment carried out during the 1990ies the retention of 134Cs in potato haulm and the transfer to the tubers were studied. The experiment was carried out during three consecutive years. The plants were cultivated in pots under field conditions and the artificial deposition was sprayed directly onto the potato haulm at different times during the growing season.

In October 2010 it was discovered that leach water had been released from a waste deposit directly into a ditch during a period from March until October 2010. The river Dalhemsån runs close to the waste deposit, just about 10 meters from the ditch. By studying the benthic fauna it was discovered that the environmental status of Dalhemsån is bad in this part of the river, but the discharges of leachate from the waste deposit does not seem to have deteriorated the water further since May 2010..

The river Göta Älv reaches between Vänern and Gothenburg and is the main raw water source for Gothenburg that supplies about 700 000 people with water. To protect and maintain a high water quality, continuously samples and water analyses are made throughout the river. In 1998 a protection area was founded between surte and Lärjeholm where the raw water intake is. This was made to increase the awareness of the importance to protect the water. However, there is a lot of contribution of untreated stormwater to Göta Älv within the protection area.Göteborg Water and Sewage Works commissioned this thesis where two areas, Tagene industrial area and Kärra residential area, with untreated stormwater outlets within the protection area are studied.

This study investigated potato growing in beds as an alternative to conventional ridges.It was based on results from field trials on bed-grown potatoes carried out by Halland Rural Economy and Agricultural Society in 2007, studies of literature and interviews with farmers with experience of bed growing of potatoes. Due to their shallow root system, potatoes are one of the most drought-sensitive crops. Potatoes are often grown on sandy soils with poor water-holding capacity. Factors such as total yield, tuber size distribution and quality defects are negatively affected when water becomes insufficient. Wide beds have a more flat top which leads to more uniform water infiltration. Further on, beds have lower soil surface area due to its shape, and therefore, retain water more efficient. In the field trials, which were carried out at the Stjärnarp Estate near Halmstad, potatoes were grown in beds alongside a conventional ridge-grown crop.

Bath has been a part of human history for a long time. Today bathing/swimming inmunicipal pools is for people of all ages and it is possible to take swimming courses,exercise or enjoy recreation. The municipal indoor pool of Hogdalen in Sweden wasbuild in the sixties and has had problems with high levels of heterotrophic bacteria. Thefacility has two larger pools, one adventure park for young kids, two smaller bath tubsand a jacuzzi. To improve water quality UV light and coal filter were installed inOctober 2009 to the already existing purification system.

An excessive input of nutrients to lakes and other water bodies has created a problem with eutrophication in Sweden. Untreated, or partially treated, domestic sewage is a major source for discharge of phosphorus (P), which is the nutrient most frequently responsible for eutrophication of most fresh waters and the Baltic Sea. The waste water can be cleaned by filter materials, which have a high P-retention ability and which after saturation may be used as fertilizers. Four potentially suitable filter materials were tested in batch- and column experiments in this study. In the batch experiments, the following materials were shaken with waste water in time series ranging from 5 seconds to 60 minutes: coarse (1-4 mm) and fine (0-2 mm) Polonite® (heated bedrock from Poland); Filtralite® (light expanded clay aggregates with limestone added before burning); water cooled blast furnace slag (BF-slag) and BF-slag mixed with 10% burned limestone.