They can be rest assured that nothing that is not vegetarian would have got into the currency lest the battlers against beef in the land are beefed up for another battle. Just imagine what it will do to the environment. This may be due to the fact that gelatine comes from collagen, which is sourced from animal raw materials. If that sounds somewhat quixotic given the shift of political winds, we can mark it as a new mystery of enigmatic Indian processes. Showing a great deal of sensitivity, the Bank of England has promised to get to the bottom of the issue and eliminate the tallow even as the country readies for £20 and £10 notes by 2020. If placed end to end, the notes would go to Mars and come back. One environmentalist concern post-demonetisation of 22 billion high-value notes is about how they are to be disposed of.

Having introduced plastic £5 notes in order to make currency last longer, possibly take on fewer germs and to make life difficult for forgers, the Bank of England is now taking one step back on a bold initiative.This must be a first in the world of currency notes.Everyone, including the blind, knows the colour of money, they say. Would that be laundered money or white money, is subject to interpretation.Right now, Indians are gathering notes from reluctant ATMs and are too busy to wish to know what the new notes are made of. Or, maybe, they simply wanted to change things around as the Americans did to everything British, including driving on the left. But then tallow is common in soap and candles. India would ideally wish to push more people into higher density plastic in the age of credit, debit, loyalty and pay cards in its most ambitious digital revolution than leap into the era of plastic currency. But it’s here in India that we denominate notes as black or white rather than describe them by the pale green and light blue standard of the `100 note. There is another point that the inventor of plastic notes makes and that has to do with hygiene — “It’s more hygienic than a paper note by a long way,” Professor David Solomon says. But the colour that is soon to become popular, at least with future hoarders, will be pink. There is a bit of tallow — a substance that comes from animal fat, either beef or mutton — in the polymer pellets that go into the notes.

“The new STG5 notes contain animal fat in the form of tallow. What else but landfills would suffice as burning the notes would make the whole of Indian air as breathable as that of its capital, now rated the most polluted city in the world end-of Tags: currency notes, bank of england, vegetarians. The reason – vegans and vegetarians objected in numbers enough to cause a bit of brouhaha over the presence of traces of animal fat in the new notes.

If piled up, they would be the equivalent of 300 Mount Everests, according to one estimate. Another advantage for those who tend to forget where they keep their money is that plastic notes can survive the washing machine.Imagine such a problem creeping up in India whose currency notes do not contain much more than paper and ink and no polymers. Of course, that is another point the Australian inventor of plastic notes (the country printed 10 bills as early as in 1988) makes about the new money not destroying the forests for security paper.Cotton paper — sometimes mixed with linen China plastic sleeves manufacturers or other fibres is infused with polyvinyl alcohol instead of water to give it extra strength — is the raw material most used in currency notes. The father of the nation will still be staring out of the `2,000 note, but looking to his left rather than to his right. India does not infuse gelatine in the processing, according to an official who used to work in the printing press in Mysuru. This is unacceptable to millions of vegans, vegetarians, Hindus, Sikhs, Jains in the UK,” a petition signed by over one lakh people stated

Satellite data is provided free from the European Space Agency (ESA) and hours after the overpass targets should be detected from the Sentinel-2 plastic pouches manufacturers satellite."The main advantage is that we are using existing tools," which brings down costs and makes it easier to scale up, says Dimitris Papageorgiou, one of the 60 undergraduate and postgraduate students who worked on the experiment.The project acts as a calibration and validation exercise on the detection capabilities of the satellites. end-of Tags: marine pollution, plastic pollution, global problems.Holding in plastic bags and bottles, four of the 5 metre-by-5-metre (16 foot-by-16-foot) frames is part of an experiment to determine if seaborne litter can be detected with EU satellites and drones.

 Millions of tonnes of plastic end up in the oceans, affecting marine wildlife all along the food chain. But even if relatively small patches of plastic garbage can be spotted from orbiting satellites, the problem of how to remove it from the sea remains."Marine litter is a global problem that affects all the oceans of the world," Topouzelis told AFP. "All the targets were carried into the sea, the satellites passed by and we're ready to fill out the first report.To prepare, the team gathered some 2,000 plastic bottles and lashed them to the frames.In 2018, a first phase in the experiment was able to detect large targets of around 100 square metres from space."We knew that the European satellite system passes at regular intervals with a spatial resolution of 10 metres."This was the first big day," says project supervisor Konstantinos Topuzelis, an assistant professor at the University of the Aegean Department of Marine Sciences, said of the scene from last week.Washington: Knee-deep in the water on a picture-postcard Lesbos island beach, a team of Greek university students gently deposits a wall-sized PVC frame on the surface before divers moor it at sea.Last year, a giant floating barrier five years in the making was launched off the coast of San Francisco, as part of a 20-million project to clean up a swirling island of rubbish between California and Hawaii. This yearexperiment uses targets a quarter that size to test the smallest detectable area under various weather conditions." In theory, then, the satellites should be able to detect the floating rafts of plastic the team pushed out to sea. Other targets were crafted with plastic bags, as these are even harder to spot in the water and usually constitute the deadliest threat to Aegean marine life such as dolphins, turtles and seals.

"Modern techniques are necessary to detect and quantify marine plastics in seawater," Topouzelis added, noting that space agencies have already been looking into how drones and satellites can help with the clean-up. "It was a crazy idea," laughs Topouzelis.The University of the Aegean is working on the project with Universidad de Cadiz in Spain, CNR-Ismar in Italy and UK environmental consultants Argans Ltd.But the slow speed of the solar-powered barrier prevents it from holding onto the plastic after it scoops it up."The results of the experiment, "Satellite Testing and Drone Mapping for Marine Plastics on the Aegean Sea", by the universityMarine Remote Sensing Group will be presented at a European Space Agency symposium in Milan in May

We are generating the list from each ward, so that shopkeepers can access information in a click,” said Nidhi Chaudhari, deputy municipal commissioner, working on the planning process of implementation of plastic ban in the city. As such we will be releasing the list of manufacturers, who could supply cloth bags, paper bags, jute bags and even biodegradable plastic bags. “At some instances, it has been found that even the segregated waste collected from societies is dumped at the landfill sites by the cleaning workers.Mumbai: Shopkeepers in the city are facing a challenge in finding alternative carry bags following the plastic ban.What is banned

Products manufactured from plastic and thermocol (polystyrene) like disposable dish or bowl, cups, plates, glasses, fork, spoons, containers, straw, non-woven polypropene bags, pouches, all of which are commonly used for packaging food items including liquids and food grains.Following the state government’s notification to the municipal corporations last Friday, in which it directed local bodies to come up with implementation plans for the plastic ban and for disposing the existing stock of ban items, the BMC has decided to install collection points in market areas of all wards, including the BMC markets.

“The full list of the sites will be finalised this week, however we have zeroed in on famous market places like Crawford, Colaba, the Linking Road, Chembur, Mulund and Borivali market among others.“We have been communicated that the shopkeepers are facing the problem of alternatives to plastic bags. In its bid to help shopkeepers, the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) will be uploading a list of manufacturers of paper bags, jute bags and biodegradable plastic for each ward. BMC officials stated that within two days, around 100 manufacturers of alternative bags have approached them and the civic body is expecting more manufacturers in the coming week. end-of Tags: bmc, paper bags, jute bags. We will also be conducting awareness drives in these areas.

BMC officials stated that it was also giving shopkeepers a month’s time for getting rid of all the banned items, after which it will start checking the shops and markets. As such, it is important that there should be a strict and proper disposal of the plastic items collected. The civic bodies should also make the recycling plans public so that NGOs or other organisations who are working on the waste recycling could come forward and contact them,” said Rohit Joshi, a Thane based activist. As such, there will be at least one collection point in each ward,” added Ms Chaudhari.What is not bannedPlastic material used for packaging medicines and drugs have been exempted from this ban. Plastic bags for packaging milk, bags of thickness less than 50 microns have been permitted to remain in use.Meanwhile activists have highlighted concerns over the recycling process post the disposal of China easy peel lidding film existing stock by shopkeepers and customers