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This paper aims to show that a simplified surface fitting model can be efficient in determining the energy consumption during milk cooling by an on-farm direct expansion bulk milk cooler (DXBMC). The study reveals that milk volume and the temperature gradient between the room and the final milk temperature can effectively be used for predicting the energy consumption within 95% confidence bounds.

A data acquisition system comprised a Landis and Gyr E650 power meter, TMC6-HE temperature sensors, and HOBO UX120-006M 4-channel analog data logger was designed and built for monitoring of the DXBMC. The room temperature where the DXBMC is housed was measured using a TMC6-HE temperature sensor, connected to a Hobo UX120-006M four-channel analog data logger which was configured to log at one-minute intervals. The electrical energy consumed by the DXBMC was measured using a Landis and Gyr E650 meter while the volume of milk was extracted from on the farm records.

The results showed that the developed model can predict the electrical energy consumption of the DXBMC within an acceptable accuracy since 80% of the variation in the electrical energy consumption by the DXBMC was explained by the mathematical model. Also, milk volume and the temperature gradient between the room and final milk temperature in the BMC are primary and secondary contributors, respectively, to electrical energy consumption by the DXBMC. Based on the system that has been monitored the findings reveal that the DXBMC was operating within the expected efficiency level as evidenced by the optimized electrical energy consumption (EEC) closely mirroring the modelled EEC with a determination coefficient of 0.95.

Only one system was monitored due to unavailability of funding to deploy several data acquisition systems across the country. The milk blending temperatures, effects of the insulation of the DXBMC, were not taken into account in this study.

The developed model is simple to use, cost effective and can be applied in real-time on the dairy farm which will enable the farmer to quickly identify an increase in the cooling energy per unit of milk cooled.

The developed easy to use model can be used by dairy farmers on similar on-farm DXBMC; hence, they can devise ways to manage their energy consumption on the farm during the cooling of milk and foster some energy efficiency initiatives.

The implementation of the developed model can be useful to dairy farmers in South Africa. Through energy optimization, the maintenance of the DXBMC can be determined and scheduled accordingly.

Drawing on the theory of contingency, the aim of this work is to understand how supply chain-related contingencies, arising from climate change, are related to changes in the organisational structure of firms. Further, the authors explore how this relationship influences the perception of sustainability managers on the adoption of low-carbon operations management practices and their related benefits.

To achieve this goal, this research uses NVivo software to gather evidence from interviews conducted with ten high-level managers in sustainability and related areas from seven leading companies located in Brazil.

The authors present four primary results: a proposal of an original framework to understand the relationship between contingency theory, changes in organisational structure to embrace low-carbon management, adoption of low-carbon operations practices and benefits from this process; the discovery that an adequate low-carbon management structure is vital to improve the organisations’ perceptions of potential benefits from a low-carbon strategy; low-carbon management initiatives tend to emerge from an organisation’s existing environmental management systems; and controlling and monitoring climate contingencies at the supply chain level should be permanent and systematic.

Based on the knowledge of the authors, to date, this work is the first piece of research that deals with the complexity of putting together contingency theory, climate-change contingencies at the supply chain level, organisational structure for low-carbon management and low-carbon operations management practices and benefits. This research also highlights evidence from an emerging economy and registers future research propositions.

‘THE most interesting years of my industrial life’ is the way the writer of this column would describe the three and a half years of office as editor of Time and Motion Study.

With the drastically changed pattern of the retail food trade in recent years in which the retailer's role has become little more than that of a provider of shelves for commodities, processed, prepared, packed and weighed by manufacturers, the defence afforded by the provisions of Section 113, Food and Drugs Act, 1955 has really come into its own. Nowadays it is undoubtedly the most commonly pleaded statutory defence. Because this pattern of trade would seem to offer scope for the use of the warranty defence (Sect. 115) in food prosecutions it is a little strange that this defence is not used more often.

The Hot Spot Analysis developed by the Wuppertal Institute is a screening tool focussing on the demand of reliable sustainability‐oriented decision‐making processes in complex value chains identifying high priority areas (“hot spots”) for effective measures in companies. This paper aims to focus on this tool.

The Hot Spot Analysis is a qualitative method following a cradle‐to‐cradle approach. With the examples of coffee and cream cheese hot spots of sustainability indicators throughout the entire life cycle are identified and evaluated with data from literature reviews and expert consultations or stakeholder statements. This paper focuses on the indicator resource efficiency as an example of how the methodology works.

The identified hot spots for coffee are the raw material procurement phase in terms of abiotic material, water and energy consumption, the production phase concerning biotic material and the energy consumption in the use phase. For cream cheese relevant hot spots appear in the raw material procurement phase in terms of biotic materials and water as well as biotic materials and energy consumption during the production phase.

Life cycle analyses connected to indicators like resource efficiency need to be applied as consequent steps of a Hot Spot Analysis if a deeper level of analysis is eventually aimed at which is more cost and time intensive in the short term. The Hot Spot Analysis can be combined with other sustainability management instruments.

Research and management can be directed to hot spots of sustainability potential quickly which pays off in the long term.

The paper shows that companies can address sustainability potentials relatively cost moderately.

This is indeed the age of revolution, when timeless attitudes are changing and new ways of living being born. To most it is a bewildering complex, with uneasy forbodirtgs of the outcome. Improvement and change, there must always be—although change is not necessarily progress—but with unrest in the schools, universities and industry, one naturally questions if this is the right time for such sweeping reorganization as now seems certain to take place in local government and in the structure of the national health service. These services have so far escaped the destructive influences working havoc in other spheres. Area health boards to administer all branches of the national health service, including those which the National Health Service Act, 1946 allowed local health authorities to retain, were recommended by the Porritt Committee a number of years ago, when it reviewed the working of the service.

It is not necessary to trouble you here with the nature or names of the many amino acids which make up the molecule of a protein. Let me mention at random just two among them which, like several more, have been shown to be absolutely essential for the growth of the body and in smaller amount for its maintenance. I will choose cystine, which is an amino‐acid containing sulphur, and tryptophane, which is an indol derivative. Suppose at a particular period of its history the human body in order to grow and function normally demands half a gramme a day of cystine. Now of a protein containing 1 per cent. of that amino acid 50 grammes a day satisfies that particular demand, but of another protein containing less cystine a proportionately greater amount will be required, and it is always possible for a deficiency in cystine to become the factor which limits the flesh‐forming value of a protein. But, again, suppose the body at the same time requires 1 gramme of tryptophane a day. Now the protein of which 50 grammes gave an adequate supply of cystine might contain say 1 per cent. only of tryptophane. The latter amino acid would now become a limiting factor for the value of the protein, and 100 grammes instead of 50 will after all be required. This, however, would supply twice as much cystine as is necessary and probably excess of other amino acids. This excess cannot be used for the growth or maintenance of the tissues, but can only share in the less specific functions of fats and carbohydrates by supplying energy on oxidation. These considerations will perhaps make it clear that the food proteins which can be used with the greatest economy in the body are those which contain all the essential amino acids in such relative proportions as will correspond most nearly with the proportions required by the living tissues of the consumer. These are the proteins of so‐called high biological value; they are the “first‐class proteins” which nowadays, as I have said, receive mention whenever diets are evaluated. That different proteins have different values in this sense has been abundantly proved by controlled experiments on animals and to a less extent by experiments on humans. It will be easily understood that it is animal proteins which in general have the highest value. It was long accepted that a man doing average work required a daily ration of 100 grammes of protein. More recently we have come to believe that this figure is too high. I can testify as a result of experiments in practical classes involving estimations of the daily excretions of nitrogen, that the average consumption of Cambridge undergraduates (those in training doubtless excepted) is not above some 80 grammes. But in this the proportion of first‐class protein is probably higher than the average.

At a meeting of the Section of Epidemiology and State Medicine of the Royal Society of Medicine on March 8th, Captain M. Greenwood, of the Lister Institute, and Miss Cecily M. Thompson reported the results of an epidemiological study of the food problem. In an introductory account of the present state of physiological knowledge it was pointed out that, although certain matters—such, for instance, as the precise significance of the specific dynamic energy of foodstuffs —were still obscure, “ the real difficulty of the subject is not so much uncertainty respecting the justice of the physiologists' conclusions as the quantitative application of principles themselves clearly established.” In the second section of the paper the problem of muscular efficiency was discussed, and it was shown that existing knowledge is insufficient for the formulation of general rules, that each class of work must be specially considered with particular reference to the external conditions under which it is carried out. In the third section of the paper the statistics of consumption were reviewed, and it was shown that in them the relation between energy used and surface was not so close as might be expected on general grounds ; the authors concluded that the necessary uncertainty attaching to such data explained the lack of close concordance. They then gave a minute analysis of some data due to Amar with reference to muscular work, which they showed were fully concordant with physiological expectation. Standard tables giving the probable energy need for workers of different weights and doing different amounts of work had been calculated. A table containing Lefèvre's results on the heat loss of a clothed man exposed to different temperatures and air velocities was also exhibited ; the importance of this aspect of the matter and the value of Hill's investigations upon rates of cooling in connexion with rationing were emphasized. In the concluding section of the paper the effects of food shortage were discussed, and it was pointed out that a majority of the recorded famine sicknesses were not pure hunger effects, shortage of fuel and antecedent or coincident epidemic disease being chiefly responsible. The siege of Paris in 1870, that of Kut‐el‐Amara in 1915, and the historical outbreak of disease at the Millbank penitentiary mentioned recently although not pure famine effects, approximated more nearly to such a condition than any others recorded. From a study of the sequence of events in these cases in relation with the energy value of the diets consumed, it appeared that in each case the onset of sickness was gradual, and that its form depended upon local epidemiological considerations. The authors held that there was no one disease which stood in a peculiarly close relation to inanition ; that there was a general and gradual lowering of resistance to all forms of infection.

Few will complain that 1974 has not been an eventful year; in a number of significant respects, it has made history. Local Government and National Health Services reorganizations are such events. This is indeed the day of the extra‐large authority, massive monoliths for central administration, metropolitan conurbations for regional control, district councils corresponding to the large authorities of other days; and in a sense, it is not local government any more. As in other fields, the “big batallions” acquire greater collective power than the total sum of the smaller units, can wield it more effectively, even ruthlessly, but rarely appearing to take into account the masses of little people, the quiet people, who cannot make themselves heard. As expected, new names of authorities are replacing the old; new titles for departments and officers, ambitious and high‐sounding; a little grandiose for the tongues of ordinary folk. Another history‐making event of 1974, in the nature of a departmental transfer but highly significant for the course of future events as far as work in the field is concerned, was handing over of the personal health services—health of expectant mothers, babies, children, domiciliary midwifery, the school health services and their mainly medical and nursing personnel—from local health authorities to the newly created area health authorities. The public health departments over fifty years and more had created them, built them up into the highly efficient services they are. If anything can be learned from the past, new authorities are always more expensive than those they replace; they spend freely and are lavish with their accommodation and furnishings. In their first few months of existence, the new bodies have proved they are no exception. News of their meetings and activities in many areas is now scanty; even local newspapers which usually thrive on Council news—or quarrels—seem to have been caught on the wrong foot, especially in the small towns now merged into larger units. The public are relatively uninformed, but this doubtless will soon be rectified.

The Food Hygiene (General) Regulations, 1970, when they first appeared, seem to have attracted more notice in the daily press than in the specialist journals, although, while re‐enacting much that was in the 1960 regulations, which they repeal, the new measures break new and important ground, as well as introducing a number of amending provisions, which experience has shown were needed. We tend to associate hygiene needs of food and drink with the thronging streets of the city and town, the hidden backrooms of restaurants, the bustling market and the mobile food van, which, in this motorized age, has ousted the bawling backstreet hucksterer.