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Air gasification tests have been carried out in a pilot scale bubbling fluidized bed gasifier, able to treat up to 100 kg/h of Eucalyptus wood chips, and operated, under chemical and thermal steady-state conditions, at different values of equivalence ratio. The results are reported in terms of the main process performance parameters and transfer coefficients, which indicate the fate of carbon in the different output streams (syngas, fines, tars). The results can be transferred to commercial scale reactors and confirm the technical feasibility of the air gasification of the biomass in the range 0.25–0.34 of equivalence ratio, yielding a good quality syngas, with a low heating value between 5000 and 6000 kJ/m3N,syngas. The measured axial syngas composition profiles along the reactor indicate a monotonic reduction of methane and carbon dioxide concentrations and an increase of that of hydrogen. This suggests that water gas shift and steam and dry reforming reactions play a significant role, together with a limited contribution of tar cracking reactions, probably enhanced by alkali and alkaline earth metallic species contained in the inorganic fraction of elutriated fines. Results can support the implementation of reliable numerical models of bubbling fluidized bed gasifiers and the optimisation of design/operating criteria.

BACKGROUND AND AIMS. In an age of globalization that is seeing movements of large groups of people across vast distances, immigrants must adapt to their new home across multiple dimensions. Immigrant groups moving to a new country with a different dominant language tend to maintain their heritage language(s) as part of their cultural identity, while at the same time they must acquire and use the language of the host country for everyday communication. The focus of this study is how people negotiate between their home language(s) and their new language even at the level of the fine-grained features of their speech in each. Specifically we will address: 1) the extent to which fine-grained details of their mother tongue(s) may continue to provide unique markers of their linguistic origins; 2) if, in the constant interaction between the native linguistic repertoires (Auer, 2005) and the new language, any of their linguistic repertoires shows evidence of phonetic drift and, if it does, in which direction. As for the latter question, we ask whether, with respect to L3-English, the local dialect as L1 will show more resistance to attrition than Italian as L2; whether both L1 and L2 drift towards English and, if they do, whether they show the same type of drift. With respect to L1-dialect and L2-Italian, we ask whether any convergence has emerged, resulting from dialectization of Italian and/or italianization of dialect (Cerruti & Regis, 2011). To this aim, we tested whether Italian emigrants who settled in Australia maintained, lost or changed specific phonological and phonetic features of their Italian after five decades of living in the new country. Italian-Australians constitute a trilingual community of speakers: the local dialect as L1 coexists with Italian as L2 (usually learned at school in Italy) and English as L3, learned at their arrival in the host country. Among a corpus of Italian-Australians we have been collecting during the past years, we selected for the present analysis four first generation speakers: speakers who emigrated to the area of “Greater Sydney” as young adults during the second mass immigration wave (1947-1976). The phonetic features of their dialect have been the topic of a previous study of ours; in the present study we focus on their second heritage language: the regional variety of Italian spoken in Veneto. We will discuss the maintenance/change/loss of a given set of phonetic and phonological properties of their regional Italian comparing the results with what we already know about the conservation of the the detailed speech characteristics in their native Dialect. METHOD. Our subjects are 2 males and 2 females originating from Veneto, who have a similar number of years of experience of English (50-57). Two of them (one male and one female) are native speakers of the Northeastern Veneto dialect (centered on the towns of Belluno, Treviso, Feltre) and the other two are speakers of the Central Veneto dialect (centered on the towns of Padova, Vicenza, Rovigo). The two sub-systems of the Veneto dialect have been selected because they show interesting differences in the phonetic properties of the class of coronal obstruent consonants. These consonants are especially useful for examining interlanguage effects in immigrant groups, as they show a wide range of variation in fine-grained details across languages and regional accents and, relatedly, tend to undergo phonetic shifts over time and distance (language change). The Northeastern Veneto system presents the following class of coronal obstruents: /t, d, θ, ð, s, z, ʧ, ʤ/; the Central Veneto system has /t, d, s̪, s, z, ʧ, ʤ/ (Trumper, 1972; Mioni & Trumper, 1977; Zamboni, 1988); in both systems the coronal stops are dental, as in Standard Italian. Notably, in neither phonological inventory are dental affricates present, while they are part of the inventory of SI; conversely, in SI (inter)dental fricatives do not occur. English lacks dental affricates too (even if they can be produced as result of phrasal-level phonological processes), and presents voiced and unvoiced interdental fricatives. Our corpus amounts to 619 occurrences of stop, fricative and affricate coronals spontaneously produced in Veneto Italian by the speakers. The set of coronals that are the object of our analisysis is: /t, d, ʦ, ʣ s, z, ʧ, ʤ/. The speakers, recorded in Australia, were shown on a computer screen a set of images. Their task was to describe the images and freely comment on their use and/or narrate any memories they had related to them. As the referent of each picture is designated by a name with the desired coronals, the speakers were solicited to spontaneously produce several repetitions of a target word. This task is part of an interview in which the speaker is guided through different steps. After a phase of attunement to the local dialect via the presentation of speech excerpts of Veneto monolingual speakers and an interview in Veneto dialect, the speakers were presented on a computer screen the set of images depicting the target words. Their first task was to describe them in dialect. In the second step, the same images (in a different random order) were presented again, but the task was to describe and comment them in Italian. This step was preceded by an attunement phase to Italian. Each occurrence of the target words was segmented at phone level using Praat, and each target consonant was IPA transcribed and acoustically analysed. For the class of fricatives and for the fricative release of the affricates we measured duration, RMS, and the four spectral moments. RESULTS. Results indicate that the process by which intervocalic dental stops get lenited to dental fricatives or approximants in dialect is not transferred to Italian by any of our speakers: neither [ð] nor [ð̞̞] occur in our corpus. Italian appears to be resistant to a potential drift toward dental fricatives that both the local dialect and English could exert, given that in both phonological inventories such phones do exist. As for [θ] and [s̪], the two coronal fricatives that act as identity marks of Northeastern and Central Veneto dialect respectively, our data show only 1 occurrence of [θ] attested for each of the 2 Northeastern Veneto speakers and 3 occurrences of [s̪], attested for one of the 2 Central Veneto speakers. However, the Italian speech of all speakers shows signs of marked variability in the set of dental affricates: out of 52 cases of expected affricates in Standard Italian, only 24 are realizes as such, while 28 tokens are realized as fricatives. Among those, Northeastern speakers use [θ, s, z], Central speakers use [s̪, s, z]. Such a strong variability restricted to this specific set of consonants opens up to different explanations. It can be seen as conservation of Veneto Italian, where deaffrication of [ʦ, ʣ] is attested as one of the possible realizations of such consononants, on a par with their production as a stop-fricative sequence [t-s; d-z] (Canepari, 1984). Alternatively, it could be interpreted as a selective attrition exerted by L3-English that enhances and reinforces the allophonic tendency of Veneto Italian. Moreover, we will present data on spectral properties of the regional Italian fricatives; referring to spectral moment values, we will compare the Veneto Italian coronals with those produced by our speakers in dialect. The comparison will allow to discuss whether fine-grained details of the informant’s speech in their mother tongue(s) continue to provide unique markers of linguistic origins.

A new management scheme of plastics from waste of electrical and electronic equipment (WEEE), which includes novel treatments of sorting, dissolution/precipitation, extrusion, catalytic pyrolysis, and plastic upgrading, is proposed. Its environmental performances are quantified by an attributional Life Cycle Assessment and compared with those of European currently adopted schemes, which include conventional mechanical recycling and thermal treatments as well as improper options of dumping and open burning, largely applied to WEEE plastics exported to developing countries. The proposed innovative scheme greatly enhances the environmental sustainability of WEEE plastics management, by increasing the annual amounts of polymers sent to recycling (from 390 kt/y up to 530 kt/y), decreasing residues to be sent to combustion (from 360 kt/y up to 60 kt/y), and reducing the potential impacts of all the midpoint categories under analysis (up to 580% for that of Global Warming). These results are mainly related to the adoption of a dissolution/precipitation process, which allows recovering target polymers such as ABS, HIPS and PC, with improvements in terms of Global Warming, Non-Carcinogens, and Carcinogens equal to 246%, 69% and 35%, even when the stages of polymer upgrading and catalytic pyrolysis are not included in the analysis. The sensitivity analysis shows that advantages of the new approach substantially disappear if the awful contributions of exportation outside Europe are taken into account. This clearly indicates that the first step to enhance the sustainability of WEEE plastics management is a strong limitation of improper treatments applied to exported wastes. A new management scheme of plastics from waste of electrical and electronic equipment (WEEE), which includes novel treatments of sorting, dissolution/precipitation, extrusion, catalytic pyrolysis, and plastic upgrading, is proposed. Its environmental performances are quantified by an attributional Life Cycle Assessment and compared with those of European currently adopted schemes, which include conventional mechanical recycling and thermal treatments as well as improper options of dumping and open burning, largely applied to WEEE plastics exported to developing countries. The proposed innovative scheme greatly enhances the environmental sustainability of WEEE plastics management, by increasing the annual amounts of polymers sent to recycling (from 390 kt/y up to 530 kt/y), decreasing residues to be sent to combustion (from 360 kt/y up to 60 kt/y), and reducing the potential impacts of all the midpoint categories under analysis (up to 580% for that of Global Warming). These results are mainly related to the adoption of a dissolution/precipitation process, which allows recovering target polymers such as ABS, HIPS and PC, with improvements in terms of Global Warming, Non-Carcinogens, and Carcinogens equal to 246%, 69% and 35%, even when the stages of polymer upgrading and catalytic pyrolysis are not included in the analysis. The sensitivity analysis shows that advantages of the new approach substantially disappear if the awful contributions of exportation outside Europe are taken into account. This clearly indicates that the first step to enhance the sustainability of WEEE plastics management is a strong limitation of improper treatments applied to exported wastes.

SIGN-HUB is a European project involving collaborators from seven countries funded within the Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation program. The scope of the project is both socio-cultural and linguistic, as its aim is to document and preserve the culture, the history, and the languages of European Deaf communities. After a brief description of the various components of the project, we focus on the documentation of the life stories of Deaf people and the creation of a digital sign language archive.

The study reviews and compares the most utilised techniques to obtain high quality biomethane by upgrading biogas from anaerobic digestion of the organic fraction of municipal solid waste. Environmental and economic aspects of membrane separation, water scrubbing, chemical absorption with amine solvent, and pressure swing adsorption have been quantified in a life cycle perspective. An attributional environmental Life Cycle Assessment has been implemented with the support of a Material Flow Analysis and in combination with a complementary environmental Life Cycle Costing. The analyses are based on data largely obtained from Italian existing plants but they can be generalised to the whole European Union, as demonstrated by a companion sensitivity analysis. The comparative assessment of the results indicates all the examined options as fully sustainable, also identifying the “win-win” situations. In particular, the membrane separation technique appears to have the best performances, even though in some cases with limited differences. With reference to base case scenarios, this technique shows better results for the respiratory inorganics potential (up to 34%, i.e. up to 328 kgPM2.5eq/y), global warming potential (up to 7%, i.e. up to 344 tCO2eq/y), and non-renewable energy potential (up to 12%, i.e. up to 6400 GJprimary/y) as well as for life cycle costs (up to 3.4%, i.e. about 60 k€/y). The performances of the examined techniques appear anyway dependent on site-specific conditions (such as the injection pressure in the gas grid or the existence/amount of local economic incentives) and commercial strategies for the market of interest.

Air gasification tests have been carried out in a pilot scale bubbling fluidized bed gasifier, able to treat up to 100 kg/h of Eucalyptus wood chips, and operated, under chemical and thermal steady-state conditions, at different values of equivalence ratio. The results are reported in terms of the main process performance parameters and transfer coefficients, which indicate the fate of carbon in the different output streams (syngas, fines, tars). The results can be transferred to commercial scale reactors and confirm the technical feasibility of the air gasification of the biomass in the range 0.25–0.34 of equivalence ratio, yielding a good quality syngas, with a low heating value between 5000 and 6000 kJ/m3N,syngas. The measured axial syngas composition profiles along the reactor indicate a monotonic reduction of methane and carbon dioxide concentrations and an increase of that of hydrogen. This suggests that water gas shift and steam and dry reforming reactions play a significant role, together with a limited contribution of tar cracking reactions, probably enhanced by alkali and alkaline earth metallic species contained in the inorganic fraction of elutriated fines. Results can support the implementation of reliable numerical models of bubbling fluidized bed gasifiers and the optimisation of design/operating criteria.

An attributional life cycle analysis (LCA) was developed to compare the environmental performances of two waste-to-energy (WtE) units, which utilize the predominant technologies among those available for combustion and gasification processes: a moving grate combustor and a vertical shaft gasifier coupled with direct melting. The two units were assumed to be fed with the same unsorted residual municipal waste, having a composition estimated as a European average. Data from several plants in operation were processed by means of mass and energy balances, and on the basis of the flows and stocks of materials and elements inside and throughout the two units, as provided by a specific substance flow analysis. The potential life cycle environmental impacts related to the operations of the two WtE units were estimated by means of the Impact 2002+ methodology. They indicate that both the technologies have sustainable environmental performances, but those of the moving grate combustion unit are better for most of the selected impact categories. The analysis of the contributions from all the stages of each specific technology suggests where improvements in technological solutions and management criteria should be focused to obtain further and remarkable environmental improvements.

Background and aims Lower tract respiratory infections (LTRI) are very frequent in paediatric population. We collected epidemiological, etiological and clinical data and correlated them to some variables. Methods We performed an observational study of all children with a LTRI, admitted to our Paediatric Unit from February 2013 to January 2014. The population was grouped in three classes of ages (0–2yr, 3–6yr, >6yr). All patients underwent to a questionnaire focused on exposition to protective and risk factors for respiratory diseases. Results 83 children were included. We grouped them according to discharge diagnosis and analysed the distribution for ages, sex and season of onset. At the admission 18 patients had respiratory distress; O2 therapy was necessary for 11 of them, infusion therapy for 40, endovenous antibiotic therapy for 34. Swabs were positive in 1 case for Parainfluenza viruses and in 2 for S. Aureus; sierological tests were positive in 5 cases for Mycoplasma Pneumoniae, in 2 for Chlamydia Pneumoniae, in 1 for ParvovirusB19, in 1 for Coxsackievirus. In 28 patients (33%) exposition to passive smoke was observed, in 17 (20%) to aeroallergens and in 33 (40%) a personal or familiar story of atopy. Conclusions Our experience showed a higher prevalence of LTRI in males (63%), in winter (35%) and spring (33%), without a difference between preschool and school age children.