Suchergebnisse

This paper reviews the sector of waste-to-energy looking at the main processes and feedstock involved. Within this, incineration, gasification, pyrolysis, anaerobic digestion and hydrothermal liquefaction are named and discussed. Through the discussions and scrutiny, manure is highlighted as a significant source of ammonia, methane, and nitrogen oxides emission, estimated to be 40%, 22.5% and 28% respectively of the total UK's anthropogenic emissions. Manure, and indeed the pollution it poses, are shown to remain largely ignored. In waste to energy processing, manure is capable of providing biogas for a number of pathways including electricity generation. Anaerobic digestion is highlighted as a suitable process with the crucial capability of drastically reducing the pollution potential of manure and slurry compared to no processing, with up to 90% reduction in methane and 50% reduction in nitrogen oxide emissions. If the majority of the 90 million tonnes of manure and slurry in the UK were to be processed through biogas harvesting, this could have the potential of producing more than 1.615 TWh of electricity. As such, the economics and legislation surrounding the implementation of anaerobic digestion for manure and slurry are discussed. In the end, restraining factors that limit the implementation of anaerobic digesters on farms in the UK are discussed. These are found to be mainly capital costs, lack of grants, insufficiently high tariff systems, rather than low gas yields from manure and slurry.

Manufacturing businesses have been contributing to energy consumption, pollution and resources consumption. Alongside governmental legislations, there are many drivers of Sustainable Manufacturing such as social and market pressures which are growing as awareness about environmental issues increases. These drivers have been extensively researched as evidenced in the literature. However, this study goes beyond the drivers themselves to unveil the factors that underlay each driver. For example, customer demand is a driver that depends on factors such as the importance of environmentally-friendly products to win orders and the bargaining power of customers. Thorough understanding of these factors will provide the knowledge economy with the information required to advance manufacturing and the environment. In this study we analyzed ten factors that underlay the drivers: Market pressure, Competitiveness and Supply Chain pressure. Using data collected from 36 manufacturing companies, factors were ranked based on their importance. The results show the ranking of ten factors. Further analysis of the factors revealed some interesting characteristics of Sustainable Manufacturing.

In the last decades, environmental footprint of the product manufacture has emerged as an important public concern, causing manufacturers to re-assess their product's environmental impacts. Responding to global outcry on global warming, world leaders have agreed to limit global temperature rise to less than 2°C above the temperature in pre-industrial times. As a result, governments and industrial leaders around the world have proposed a roadmap for 80% emissions reduction by 2050. The aim of this work develops a novel approach of linking Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) and Lean manufacturing to reduce the negative environmental impacts of a plastic injection moulded product. Products that use plastic as their primary source of raw materials are mainly produced by plastic injection processes. Although plastic injection moulding has many benefits such as 'high production rates', there is a lack of through investigation on the effects of this process has on the environment such as climate change, ozone depletion etc. This paper proposes a novel cross-functional mapping approach of linking lean-thinking and LCA. The implementation case study has been presented with the view to re-assess carbon footprint of an existing plastic product. The reported implementation work demonstrates that the adaptation of lean thinking and LCA could significantly minimise negative environmental impacts of a plastic injection product. A case study indicates that the overall environmental impact has been reduced by approximately 40% in climate change, human toxicity, photochemical oxidant formation, acidification and eco-toxicity.

In construction projects, some contractors will take default actions against the contracts to obtain maximum profits and damage the owners' benefits as a result. In the construction markets where effective supervision is not performed well, contractors have more opportunities to default. Surety bonds were designed to solve the default problems and promote the sustainable development of the construction markets. This paper was proposed to explore the interactions between owners and contractors and investigate the influence of surety bonds (high penalty and low penalty) on the default behavior of contractors based on a static and dynamic evolutionary game analysis model. The results showed that applying the surety bond strategy is effective at decreasing the probability of the contractors' default behavior when the credit system based on a surety bond system is well developed in the construction industry and the cost of the surety bond is low enough. Therefore, government strategies such as a better development of the credit system driven by surety bonds and the subsidies on surety bonds to reduce the cost can mitigate the contractors' default behavior and keep the sustainability of the construction markets.

AbstractMaintaining the performance of infrastructure‐dependent systems in the face of surprises and unknowable risks is a grand challenge. Addressing this issue requires a better understanding of enabling conditions orprinciplesthat promote system resilience in a universal way. In this study, a set of such principles is interpreted as a group of interrelated conditions or organizational qualities that, taken together, engender system resilience. The field of resilience engineering identifies basic system or organizational qualities (e.g., abilities for learning) that are associated with enhanced general resilience and has packaged them into a set of principles that should be fostered. However, supporting conditions that give rise to such first‐order system qualities remain elusive in the field. An integrative understanding of how such conditions co‐occur and fit together to bring about resilience, therefore, has been less clear. This article contributes to addressing this gap by identifying a potentially more comprehensive set of principles for building general resilience in infrastructure‐dependent systems. In approaching this aim, we organize scattered notions from across the literature. To reflect the partly self‐organizing nature of infrastructure‐dependent systems, we compare and synthesize two lines of research on resilience: resilience engineering and social‐ecological system resilience. Although some of the principles discussed within the two fields overlap, there are some nuanced differences. By comparing and synthesizing the knowledge developed in them, we recommend an updated set of resilience‐enhancing principles for infrastructure‐dependent systems. In addition to proposing an expanded list of principles, we illustrate how these principles can co‐occur and their interdependencies.

In this article, the modern specialist must not only have a large amount of technical knowledge, but also be technologically well-prepared, able to work creatively, methodologically literate, broad cultural outlook, successful management of complex socio-economic and political processes, a new system of social production should have social knowledge that is relevant, fully understands their professional knowledge and creative abilities.

At head fo title: 40. War Office. 1431. ; Mode of access: Internet.

To date in Cyprus, there is no dedicated "Quality Improvement" body or Public Health authority. The long-awaited general healthcare system (known as GeSy or GHS) has been completed, mid-stream of the COVID-19 pandemic. A recently proposed resilience plan in response to the lessons learnt from the pandemic was put forward by the Government of the Republic of Cyprus to strengthen the capacity of the GHS and support public health defense. The negotiator of GeSy and Health Minister 2015–2018 also provided his view that the health system needs a holistic transformation of service provision. Recognizing failures and thinking from a syndemogenesis perspective how the envisioned patient-centric healthcare delivery can be achieved, we propose that the public health response could also be linked to a politico-economic one in shielding GeSy. We make such case for a syndemic strategy (simultaneous management of COVID-19 and pre-existing epidemics on the island) and the development of the five-district model where each main district hospital is to complement the activities of the GHS through developing: 1. A training Center for training and sharing of best practices for COVID-19 and other public emergencies. 2. A public health body. 3. A quality improvement institute. 4. A commissioning center on planning and streamlining healthcare services. 5. A clinical trial platform. The rationale is based on the management literature and use of existing resources and capabilities for transforming the GeSy and generating value. ; peer-reviewed