Faced with disruptive changes to the economic environment, only those businesses that are flexible and responsive can survive and prosper. Those not responding quickly enough will die off like the dinosaurs, but it’s getting harder to react enough in time – now you need to pre-empt change.
This article continues to illustrate the risks of not being ahead of the game so looks at investing wisely in exploiting advances in materials and technology to survive and prosper, like the birds.
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Surfactants are present in most consumer products. The most familiar examples are shampoos, hand wash products and cleaning products in general. Switching to sulfate free surfactants improves the environmental profile, but can be a challenge. Let me show you a way to this.
I will demonstrate that one can use cellulose fibrils to thicken and stabilize formulations with foam forming surfactants. The most important point to remember when preparing such formulations is to avoid foam formation during the incorporation step of surfactants with the cellulose fibrils.
What is heat of hydration, and how does it affect the settling and curing phase of the concrete? Learn more about different types of concrete cracking, why they occur - and preventative measures and repair methods for fixing it in this Topic Tuesday. Hint: there are bio-based alternatives available!
Gypsum boards (plasterboard/drywall) are a very commonly used product in the construction industry. Currently, the production of the boards is a labor-intensive, CO2 producing and energy consuming process with the need for many synthesized additives to retain the flow, strength and setting profiles. What if you could change that?
Sedimentation of solid particles in liquid materials, like paints and inks, is caused by gravitational force pulling particles of high density down. In the worst case, sedimentation can result in settling, the formation of a hard layer of solid material on the bottom of the can. How to avoid this?
The investment in change needed for high business performance in five years will compromise business performance in the short- to medium-term. The trade-off facing the Executive of any organisation is between investment in strategic goals and delivering acceptable (‘survival’) performance in the meantime. Here are 4 high-level approaches you should consider – and a hot tip from our side.
The scientific method Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) is a tool originally developed to scrutinize the environmental performance of products, product systems or services. In recent years, the LCA framework has been expanded to include all aspects of sustainability. This blog post will present what LCA is, how it has developed historically and why you should care about it.
Often the word sustainability is used to designate that something is good, without any specification of good for what or good for whom. It’s time to put some hold to the phrase ‘sustainable’. Learn more on what it means and what you need to keep in mind when talking about sustainable products or solutions.
When most people were talking about the brutal polar vortex that hit Chicago earlier this year, I am sure many were looking for ways to best protect the products they are producing, transporting, storing and using from being destroyed by freezing. In this blog post, I will briefly mention a few tips on how to make products freeze-thaw stable such that they can be used in winter harsh areas.
In China we are currently seeing a massive shift towards sustainable technologies. Many are describing China as the next green superpower, and that China is positioning itself towards a new area where the accessibility to energy is becoming very different from the current situation. This can shift the power balance towards economies which embrace the new opportunities from more sustainable solutions. Where can you find opportunities in this? And are there opportunities for novel sustainable materials like cellulose fibrils and microfibrillated cellulose (MFC)?
Over the last century, human activities have been affecting the global environment, most noticeably with the general increase in greenhouse gases, such as carbon dioxide (CO2). This rise in greenhouse gases has mainly been due to the upsurge in fossil fuel consumption over the last fifty years. This consumption has had a knock-on effect with global temperatures, with a general increase of 1°C over the last century and this is projected to rise by 2°C over the next century.1 This increase in temperature has also affected climate change by giving more extreme weather conditions. But how has this affected the construction industry? Have we been developing alternatives that could point us in a more bio-based direction?
