Guidelines for the Creation of a Program for Type III Environmental Declarations in the United States

Abstract There currently exists a demand in the United States for information about the environmental impacts of consumer products, but there is no consistent system for providing this information. This project proposes guidelines for the creation of a Type III environmental declaration program which will provide objective information about the environmental impacts of products based on life cycle assessment (LCA)methods. To more easily convey complicated information to consumers, the use of an original data presentation format, the “radar area graph”, was selected based on the results of a consumer survey. Because printed labels do not allow convenient product comparisons, a model internet website was created to demonstrate the potential of interactive product data. One original recommendation is an interactive personal database that allows consumers to track the impacts of their activities, thus making data more interesting and useful to consumers. Because evaluating products using LCA can be time consuming, we created a method of efficiently and consistently calculating environmental impacts. It includes guidelines for defining system boundaries and functional units, and for characterizing environmental impacts. Ten environmental impact category indicators were selected, and original methods were developed for characterizing land use and water depletion using spatial data. A spreadsheet calculator was created for determining human and ecological toxicity indicators. Finally, original software was developed to demonstrate the proposal for a common database of process and material parameters. To guide an administrator during the creation of a new Type III program, recommendations are provided for organizational structure, product registration procedures, and budget management for continued operation and growth.Master of ScienceNatural Resources and EnvironmentUniversity of Michigan, School of Natural Resources and Environmenthttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/35333/2/Guidelines for Type III Declarations - Full Report - by Bolo.pd

Emerging Informatics

The book on emerging informatics brings together the new concepts and applications that will help define and outline problem solving methods and features in designing business and human systems. It covers international aspects of information systems design in which many relevant technologies are introduced for the welfare of human and business systems. This initiative can be viewed as an emergent area of informatics that helps better conceptualise and design new world-class solutions. The book provides four flexible sections that accommodate total of fourteen chapters. The section specifies learning contexts in emerging fields. Each chapter presents a clear basis through the problem conception and its applicable technological solutions. I hope this will help further exploration of knowledge in the informatics discipline

Wal-Mart Stores, Inc. Strategic Corporate Research Report

[Excerpt] Wal-Mart Stores, Inc. (hereinafter Wal-Mart) is the second-largest company in the world. It has more annual revenue than the GDP of Switzerland. It sells more DVDs, magazines, books, CDs, dog food, diapers, bicycles, toys, toothpaste, jewelry, and groceries than any other retailer does worldwide. It is the largest retailer in the United States, Mexico, and Canada, the second-largest in the United Kingdom, and the third largest in Brazil, With its partners, it is the largest retailer in Central America. Wal-Mart is also the largest private employer in the United States, Mexico, and Canada, and it has 1.8 million employees around the globe. Wal-Mart is so huge that it effectively sets the terms for large swaths of the global economy, from retail wages to apparel prices to transoceanic shipping rates to the location of toy factories. Indeed, if there is one single aspect to understand about the company, it is the fact that Wal-Mart is transforming the relations of production in virtually every product category it sells, through its relationships with suppliers. But its influence goes far beyond the economy. It sets social policy by refusing to sell certain types of birth control. Its construction of supercenters molds the landscape, shapes traffic patterns, and alters the local commercial mix. The retail goliath shapes culture by selling the music of patriotic country singer Garth Brooks but not the critical (and hilarious) The Daily Show with Jon Stewart Presents America (the Book): A Citizen’s Guide to Democracy Inaction. It influences politics by donating millions to conservative politicians and think tanks. Wal-Mart is, in short, one of the most powerful entities in the world. Not surprisingly, Wal-Mart has developed a long list of critics, including unions, human rights organizations, religious groups, environmental activists, community organizations, small business groups, academics, children’s rights groups, and even institutional investors. These groups have exposed the company’s illegal union-busting tactics, its many violations of overtime laws, its abuse of child labor, its egregious healthcare policies, its super-exploitation of immigrant workers, its rampant gender discrimination, the horrific labor conditions at its suppliers’ factories, and its unlawful environmental degradation. They have also chronicled the deleterious effect Wal-Mart has on the public coffers and the quality of community life. New Wal-Mart stores and distribution centers often swallow up government subsidies and tax breaks, take public land, create more congestion, reduce overall wages, destroy retail variety, and increase public outlays for healthcare. To its critics, Wal-Mart represents the worst aspects of 21st-eentury capitalism. Wal-Mart usually counters any criticism with two words: low prices. It is a powerful mantra in a consumerist world. The company does make more products affordable to more people, and that is nothing to sneeze at when wages are stagnant, jobs insecure, pensions disappearing, and health coverage shrinking. With low prices, Wal-Mart helps working men and women get more from their meager paychecks, more necessities like bread, and more luxuries, like roses, too. It is a brilliant and incontrovertible argument, and Wal-Mart’s most ardent defenders take it even farther. They say its obsession with low prices makes the entire economy more efficient and more productive. Suppliers and competitors have to produce more and better products with the same resources, and that redounds to everyone. In the micro, it means falling prices and rising product quality. In the macro, it means economic growth, more jobs, and higher tax revenues. To its defenders, Wal-Mart represents the best aspects of 21st-century capitalism. Despite their radical opposition, critics and defenders of the world’s largest corporation agree on one thing: Wal-Mart represents 21st-century capitalism. It symbolizes a system of increasing market penetration and decreasing social regulation, where more and more aspects of life around the world are subject to economic competition. Wal-Mart’s success rests upon the ongoing destruction of social power in favor of corporate power. It takes advantage of the conditions of the neo-liberal world, from the availability of instant and inexpensive global communication to the continuing collapse of agricultural employment around the world to the rapid diffusion of technological innovation to the oversupply of subjugated migrant labor in nearly every country to the continued existence of undemocratic and corporate-dominated governments. For some, this is as it should be, all part of capitalism’s natural and ultimately benign development. For the rest of us, Wal-Mart is at the heart of what is wrong with the world

Semantic discovery and reuse of business process patterns

Patterns currently play an important role in modern information systems (IS) development and their use has mainly been restricted to the design and implementation phases of the development lifecycle. Given the increasing significance of business modelling in IS development, patterns have the potential of providing a viable solution for promoting reusability of recurrent generalized models in the very early stages of development. As a statement of research-in-progress this paper focuses on business process patterns and proposes an initial methodological framework for the discovery and reuse of business process patterns within the IS development lifecycle. The framework borrows ideas from the domain engineering literature and proposes the use of semantics to drive both the discovery of patterns as well as their reuse

Design and development of novel radio frequency identification (RFID) tag structures

The objective of the proposed research is to design and develop a series of radio frequency identification (RFID) tag structures that exhibit good performance characteristics with cost optimization and can be realized on flexible substrates such as liquid crystal polymer (LCP), paper-based substrate and magnetic composite material for conformal applications. The demand for flexible RFID tags has recently increased tremendously due to the requirements of automatic identification in various areas. Several major challenges existing in today's RFID technologies need to be addressed before RFID can eventually march into everyone's daily life, such as how to design high performance tag antennas with effective impedance matching for passive RFID IC chips to optimize the power performance, how to fabricate ultra-low-cost RFID tags in order to facilitate mass production, how to integrate sensors with passive RFID tags for pervasive sensing applications, and how to realize battery-free active RFID tags in which changing battery is not longer needed. In this research, different RFID tag designs are realized on flexible substrates. The design techniques presented set the framework for answering these technical challenges for which, the focus will be on RFID tag structure design, characterization and optimization from the perspectives of both costs involved and technical constraints.Ph.D.Committee Chair: Tentzeris, Manos; Committee Member: DeJean, Gerald; Committee Member: Ingram, Mary; Committee Member: Kavadias, Stylianos; Committee Member: Laskar, Jo

RFID Technology in Intelligent Tracking Systems in Construction Waste Logistics Using Optimisation Techniques

Construction waste disposal is an urgent issue for protecting our environment. This paper proposes a waste management system and illustrates the work process using plasterboard waste as an example, which creates a hazardous gas when land filled with household waste, and for which the recycling rate is less than 10% in the UK. The proposed system integrates RFID technology, Rule-Based Reasoning, Ant Colony optimization and knowledge technology for auditing and tracking plasterboard waste, guiding the operation staff, arranging vehicles, schedule planning, and also provides evidence to verify its disposal. It h relies on RFID equipment for collecting logistical data and uses digital imaging equipment to give further evidence; the reasoning core in the third layer is responsible for generating schedules and route plans and guidance, and the last layer delivers the result to inform users. The paper firstly introduces the current plasterboard disposal situation and addresses the logistical problem that is now the main barrier to a higher recycling rate, followed by discussion of the proposed system in terms of both system level structure and process structure. And finally, an example scenario will be given to illustrate the system’s utilization

Capacitive coupled RFID tag using a new dielectric droplet encapsulation approach

Radio frequency identification (RFID) is a well-known and fast-growing technology used to identify people, animals and products. RFID tags are used to replace bar codes in a wide range of applications, to mention just a few, retail, transportation, logistics and healthcare. The two main driving aspects for most of research and development projects concerning RFID tags are the reduction of assembly costs and the downsizing of microchips. In that respect and considering an Industry 4.0 scenario, the study of a new assembly approach for passive and high frequency RFID tags has been proposed and studied in this thesis. In this new approach, which is based on the inkjet printing technology, a specifically designed radio frequency integrated circuit (RFIC) will be delivered, inside a liquid dielectric droplet, onto the antenna and no longer placed and oriented precisely as it happens nowadays with pick-and-place and flip chip machines. After a landing phase, the liquid droplet (with the encapsulated chip) will self-aligns with respect to the contact thanks to capillary forces driven by specifically designed wetting conditions on the substrate of the antenna. Finally, with few additional steps, the complete RFID tag is created. This research project brings to light a considerable simplification and a very high potential of parallelization, compatible with large volume manufacturing methods, in comparison to nowadays existing technologies. This may substantially drive down the fabrication costs. An in-depth analysis of electrical performances have been carefully undertaken and compliance with the ISO/IEC 144443 standard has been verified. Mathematical models have been developed showing fundamental limits for the maximum tag reading range and power requirements of the RFID reader

Dense and long-term monitoring of Earth surface processes with passive RFID -- a review

Billions of Radio-Frequency Identification (RFID) passive tags are produced yearly to identify goods remotely. New research and business applications are continuously arising, including recently localization and sensing to monitor earth surface processes. Indeed, passive tags can cost 10 to 100 times less than wireless sensors networks and require little maintenance, facilitating years-long monitoring with ten's to thousands of tags. This study reviews the existing and potential applications of RFID in geosciences. The most mature application today is the study of coarse sediment transport in rivers or coastal environments, using tags placed into pebbles. More recently, tag localization was used to monitor landslide displacement, with a centimetric accuracy. Sensing tags were used to detect a displacement threshold on unstable rocks, to monitor the soil moisture or temperature, and to monitor the snowpack temperature and snow water equivalent. RFID sensors, available today, could monitor other parameters, such as the vibration of structures, the tilt of unstable boulders, the strain of a material, or the salinity of water. Key challenges for using RFID monitoring more broadly in geosciences include the use of ground and aerial vehicles to collect data or localize tags, the increase in reading range and duration, the ability to use tags placed under ground, snow, water or vegetation, and the optimization of economical and environmental cost. As a pattern, passive RFID could fill a gap between wireless sensor networks and manual measurements, to collect data efficiently over large areas, during several years, at high spatial density and moderate cost.Comment: Invited paper for Earth Science Reviews. 50 pages without references. 31 figures. 8 table