Oregon and Washington will be considering legislation to implement Cap & Trade. Your facility in Oregon or Washington will be impacted by Cap & Trade even if you are not mandated to buy carbon allowances. Your natural gas supplier and your gasoline and diesel suppliers must buy allowances and they will pass their costs on to you. To help you understand what these cost impacts may be, Food Northwest has developed a cost calculator. Enter your annual natural gas cost and fuel use to find out the impact to your business. Food Northwest and its lobbyists are actively engaged in this legislation at both state legislatures on your behalf. For more information, contact Craig Smith.
Reminder: Food Traceability Survey Closes This Week
--> Here's a reminder to fill out Food Northwest's short survey on traceability in your supply chain. This short survey closes tomorrow!
One of the pillars of FDA’s New Era of Smarter Food Safety is developing better traceability and transparency across the supply chain using digital technologies. In response to FDA’s announcement, Food Northwest is proactively developing a Smart Traceability* Initiative to assist industry with enhancing and streamlining their traceability systems.
In order to best asses the needs of the industry and to secure funding for free or low-cost education and resources, Food Northwest is conducting a survey. This short survey is intended to gather baseline data on the Northwest food & beverage industry’s ability to track product and ingredients across the supply chain. Your responses will be compiled with others and will remain anonymous. Information from this survey will be used to help determine what education, programs, and resources need to be made available to assist the industry with implementation of digital traceability systems. The survey can be found here. For questions about the survey or the initiative contact Jamie.
*Traceability is the systematic ability to trace the path of food ingredients and/or finished products throughout their entire lifecycle, using previously captured and stored records.
Is the USMCA Moving in Congress?
Mexico’s Deputy Foreign Minister for North America said last Friday that he believes U.S. lawmakers will begin the process of approving the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Trade Agreement (USMCA) soon. He believes it will move forward in the U.S. Congress now that Mexican President Obrador has vowed to increase wages and funding for labor reforms.
However, the House Democrats are now trying to add a “sweetener” to the deal that is causing many Republicans to cry foul. Democrats are proposing to add a provision to the bill, the Butch Lewis Act, that would shore up union pension funds through the sale of Treasury bonds. Former US Trade Representative Henry Broadman, who served both the Clinton and Bush administrations, called the request “over the top.”
All sides agree that the window for passage of what many call NAFTA 2.0 is getting very narrow. Congress will have to move the bill in the next couple weeks if they are to meet the goal of passing the new trade deal by the end of the year.
FREE Environmental Monitoring and Hygienic Design Hybrid Workshop
Don’t miss out on this great opportunity for your food safety team! Understanding the Relationship Between EMPs and Hygienic Design Principles is a half-day, team workshop intended to bring inter-disciplinary teams together to understand how hygienic design of equipment relates to pathogen control.. The workshop consists of four learning sections:
- Case studies based on product and/or equipment sampling
- Building the EMP to support data of operating as intended
- How to establish programs based on collected data and facility and equipment priorities
- How to tie it all together to meet company budgets and expectations
We encourage you to register an inter-disciplinary team of 3-4 people, at varying levels within your organization, to get the most out of the workshop. Departments that could be represented include food safety, quality assurance, procurement, operations, maintenance, and sanitation. This workshop is free to all attendees. Register now to secure your spot!
MIT Scientists Develop CO2 Capture Technology
Engineers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have developed a “revolutionary” new technique of pulling carbon dioxide (CO2) from the air (or a gas stream) and turning it into usable carbon.
In a research paper published in the journal Energy and Environmental Science titled “Faradaic electro-swing reactive adsorption for CO2 capture”, Sahag Voskian and T. Alan Hatton detail a “compact electrochemical device for CO2 capture” that is cheaper, more efficient, and more versatile than existing methods.
The device is essentially a battery with a stack of electrodes coated with polyanthraquinone, through which gases containing CO2 can be passed. The coating allows the capture of carbon dioxide at any level of concentration, be it from the air or from flue gas streams of the kind found in power plants, using a process known as Electro-Swing Adsorption. This capture takes place during the charging cycle of the battery, while the discharge cycle creates a stream of pure CO2—which can be utilized in commercial applications like the carbonation of drinks or the enrichment of crops in greenhouses.
Read the full article in “The Week”
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