The gift card -- often viewed as the little, plastic solution for keeping friends and family out of the return lines -- doesn't always serve as the ideal present. Responding to consumers who don't want to buy themselves another sweater, or will take a pass on a fancy steak dinner, Internet businesses have sprung up allowing people to sell or swap unwanted gift cards."Isn't it great?" asked Mike Kelly, vice president of SwapAGift.com. "The market will create exactly the mechanism it needs to correct any problem."
An Iranian researcher for the first time in the world came up with a new technique for refining the wastewater resulted from paper industries by making use of the minerals, news reports said on December 29th, 2004.By the method, organic pollutants in the sewages of the paper producing industries that are considered to be among the most pollutant sewages, would be refined by up to 75 percent and the associated paint combinations would be bleached by up to 98 percent, Ramin Mohammad Ali Tehrani, the inventor and also a lecturer at the Islamic Azad University of Shahr-e Rey told Iranian Students’ News Agency (ISNA) on Wednesday.
The method that is based on utilization of the domestically produced minerals in the refinement process is more efficient and less costly than the most advocated existing methods that also have side effects, added Tehrani.
The wastewater resulting from the paper pulp and paper industry contains an organic pollutant mixture called lignin that is a highly stable chemical that could not be refined by the use of the common physical and biological methods. Infiltration of the pollutant to water supplies would lead to the absorption of the soluble oxygen in the water and as a result would threaten the lives of the fish and other living aquatic resources. Lignin in combination with metals produces stable complexes that could not by refined.