Waste with high biomass content generated in cities in developing countries is sent to landfills or open dumps. This research aims to degrade biomass content in urban waste through cultivation, at pilot scale, of the edible mushroom Pleurotus ostreatus. First, the number of diapers used by one baby per week was measured with a survey in day care facilities. Then, cellulose content of diapers wa...

The experiment was conducted to study the effect of treatment of rice straw with urea and a urease containing midden soil on the chemical composition of treated rice straw, feed intake of the animals, nutrients digestibility, body weight gain, feed conversion efficiency and overall economy of feeding for a period of 105 days. Twelve indigenous growing cattle (live weight 130.00±1.67 kg) were se...

Bacillus subtilis, locally isolated, produced significant level of xylanase activity in the presence of different carbon sources. However, B. subtilis performed well when grown on pretreated natural substrates such as rice straw, wheat straw, bagasse, wheat bran and kraft pulp at 2% concentration. The organism produced higher level of xylanasse activity when bagasse was used as a carbon source ...

Two field experiments were conducted for two years with the aim of studying the effects of deep tillage and straw returning on soil microorganism and enzyme activity in clay and loam soil. Three treatments, (1) conventional tillage (CT), shallow tillage and straw returning; (2) deep tillage (DT), deep tillage and straw returning; and (3) deep tillage with no straw returning (DNT), were carried ...

PM2.5 inventories have been developed inmajor Chinese cities to quantify the contributions from various sources based on annual emissions. This approach, however, could substantially underestimate the contribution fromopen straw burning during the harvest or other active burning periods. This study examines this issue by estimatingmonthly and annual straw-burning PM2.5 emissions in China and co...

The effects of fat source (0.7 kg of fatty acids from extruded soybeans or palmitic acid), of sodium bicarbonate (0.3 kg) plus straw (1 kg) and the interaction of these treatments on the content of conjugated linoleic acid (CLA) in the milk of dairy cows were examined. During nine weeks a group of 10 cows received a ration with palmitic acid and bicarbonate plus straw (ration PAB). During three...

We investigated the feasibility of anaerobic codigestion of sewage sludge and rice straw. Laboratory-scale mesophilic and thermophilic digesters were operated with hydraulic retention times of 20 and 15 days, respectively. The feeding ratio of sewage sludge and rice straw was 1:0.5 based on the total solids (TS). Before digestion, the rice straw was ground to ca. 5 mm in length (grinding pretre...

Differences in the composition of a bacterial community engaged in decomposing wheat straw in a fluvo-aquic soil at 15 °C, 25 °C, and 35 °C were identified using barcode pyrosequencing. Functional carbon groups in the decomposing wheat straw were evaluated by (13)C-NMR (nuclear magnetic resonance). Actinobacteria and Firmicutes were more abundant, whereas Alphaproteobacteria and Bacteroidetes w...

Free standing and vertically aligned silicon rice-straw- like array emitters were fabricated by modified electroless metal deposition (EMD), using HF-H(2)O(2) as an etching solution to reduce the emitter density and to make the emitter end of the formed silicon rice-straw arrays shaper than those formed by conventional EMD. These silicon rice-straw array emitters can be turned on at E(0) = 4.7 ...