Assessing the carry-over effects of both human capital and organizational forgetting on sustainability performance using dynamic data envelopment analysis

Many studies have documented that human capital, which is a result of professional knowledge accumulation, continuously improves sustainability performance over time. Organizational forgetting is the loss of such professional knowledge, and it results in lower sustainability performance. Thus, human capital and organizational forgetting can be respectively treated as good and bad carry-overs. Both human capital and organizational forgetting may reflect business cycle fluctuations. The data envelopment analysis model has not been employed to examine the impact of either human capital or organizational forgetting on sustainability performance in multi-stages. The aim of this study is to develop a three-stage approach to incorporate the carry-over effects of both human capital and organizational forgetting and the effects of business cycle fluctuations on overall and term sustainability performance using data from Taiwan’s 16 major industrial sectors. The study finds that the carry-over effects of human capital and organizational forgetting lead to accurate estimations of sustainability performance and illustrates that the development of the industrial economy is a critical factor for adjusting human capital. Governments should implement economic stabilization policies and increase investment in education and safe capital to improve human capital accumulation and enhance sustainability performance

Der Einsatz der Data Envelopment Analysis zur Effizienzmessung im Bereich Abfallwirtschaft: ein systematischer Literaturüberblick

Ziel des vorliegenden Arbeitsberichts war es, einen systematischen Literaturüberblick zur Verwendung der DEA im Bereich Abfallwirtschaft zu geben

Towards a Sustainable Future - Life Cycle Management

This open access book includes a selection of contributions from the Life Cycle Management 2019 Conference (LCM) held in Poznań, Poland, and presents different examples of scientific and practical contributions, showing an incorporation of life cycle approach into the decision processes on strategic and operational level. Special attention is drawn to applications of LCM to target, organize, analyze and manage product-related information and activities towards continuous improvement, along the different products life cycle. The selection of case studies presents LCM as a business management approach that can be used by all types of businesses and organizations in order to improve their sustainability performance. This book provides a cross-sectoral, current picture of LCM issues. The structure of the book is based on five-theme lines. The themes represent different objects that are focused on sustainability and LCM practices mainly related to: products, technologies, organizations, markets and policy issues as well as methodological solutions. The book brings together presentations from the world of science and the world of enterprises as well as institutions supporting economic development

Sustainability in China: Bridging Global Knowledge with Local Action

China’s road to sustainability has attracted global attention. Since the “Reform & Opening Up” policy, China’s rapid pace of both urbanization and industrialization has made its being the second largest economy but meantime a heavy environmental price has been paid over the past few decades for addressing the economic developmental target. Today, as the biggest developing country, China needs to take more responsibilities for constructing its local ecological-civilization society as well as for addressing the global challenges such as climate change, resources scary and human beings well-fare; therefore, we need to have deeper understandings into China’s way to sustainability at very different levels, both spatially and structurally, concerns ranging from generating sustainable household livelihoods to global climate change, from developing technological applications to generate institutional changes. In this spirit, this publication, “Sustainability in China: Bridging Global Knowledge with Local Action” aims to investigate the intended and spontaneous issues concerning China’s road to sustainability in a combined top-down and bottom-up manner, linking international knowledge to local-based studies

Prevention of Waste in the Circular Economy: Analysis of Strategies and Identification of Sustainable Targets - The food waste example

This report continues and further advances the work conducted by the JRC in the field of sustainable management of food waste, which resulted in the publication of the 2015 report “Improving Sustainability and Circularity of European Food Waste Management with a Life Cycle Approach”. It focuses on the broad European waste management context and, in particular, provides insight and analysis on the sustainability of food waste prevention strategies. Among other municipal waste streams, food waste gained prominence in the political debate in light of the recent Circular Economy (CE) package. In fact, the CE Action Plan included food waste within the so-called “priority areas”, i.e. areas that should be carefully considered to strengthen the circularity of the European economy. Against this background, this report analyses and evaluates the efficacy of some selected strategies for food waste prevention implemented at Member States’ and regional levels. A streamlined ‘stakeholder analysis’ is also developed in order to identify the most relevant stakeholders along the food supply chain and analyse their influence/relation with the mechanisms that lead to food wastage. Moreover, the report presents a novel and straightforward life cycle based methodology that helps identifying sustainable targets for food waste prevention in different contexts. The analysis of food waste prevention strategies being implemented by Member States and presented in this report seems to indicate that reducing food waste generation is a very complex to achieve in practice. The key reasons for this are the complexity of the food supply chain and the fact that a variety of integrated and well-coordinated measures that involve all stakeholders along the food supply chain need to be adopted to effectively tackle the problem. Moreover, sometimes the lack of reliable and coherent data is posing a threat to the successful identification of the most appropriate measures. It is also noted that food waste prevention measures are often set without considering how their implementation will influence the sustainability performance of food waste management. On the other hand, this report stresses that the definition of food waste prevention targets should follow the definition of the desired improvement of the overall sustainability performance. Towards this goal, the methodology presented in this report tries to identify environmentally sustainable targets for food waste prevention that allows achieving a given reduction of the environmental impacts along the food supply chain.JRC.D.3-Land Resource

Stakeholder cooperation in circular economy adoption for municipal solid waste management

The current global pattern of systematic use and disposal of resources, combined with the evergrowing urban population increasingly demanding more goods and services, has resulted in vast amounts of resources being extracted and waste generated. A circular economy aims to capture the remaining value in waste through several disruptive actions such as reuse, recycle, recover and regenerate. However, stakeholders in this transition often find themselves in conflict due to their different objectives and priorities. Cooperation is a critical feature in the circular economy implementation, but in practice it is not easily achieved. There is a shortfall of studies and tools that attempt to facilitate stakeholder cooperation in developing a circular economy. This doctoral research addresses this gap by establishing an instrument as a questionnaire to analyse the cooperation features in stakeholders, and by developing a Game Theory-hybrid tool that can help to induce cooperation or to make discord clear. Such a methodology consists of six steps: 1) define stakeholders, scope and objectives; 2) select indicators and construct future scenarios for municipal solid waste management; 3) survey stakeholders on cooperation features and to rank the evaluation indicators; 4) determine the weightings for the scenarios criteria; 5) reveal the preference order of the scenarios; and 6) analyse the preferences to study cooperation. The questionnaire was sent to stakeholder groups of the circular economy with interest in the adoption in the municipal solid waste management of Birmingham, UK. The cohorts consisted of 101 MSc students and 27 businesses. The efficiency of the proposed game theory method was tested using a case study with 14 stakeholder responses: The Tyseley Energy Park, a major energy-from-waste facility that currently treats over two-thirds of the municipal solid waste of Birmingham in the United Kingdom. The results of the questionnaire and Game Theory-hybrid tool are compared and contrasted with existing literature to reveal their commonalities and differences. The findings allowed conclusions to be drawn that circular economy awareness and cooperation readiness from stakeholders are high, but their practices do not sufficiently align with this. However, the study revealed a range of encouraging and optimistic thoughts from stakeholders surrounding the development of a circular economy, despite (as repeatedly mentioned) benefits and costs not always being evident to all participants. Finally, the supporting decision-making process suggests mechanisms to embed cooperation in circular economy adoption so that decisions are made optimally (as a collective) and are acceptable to all the stakeholders

Avaliação do desempenho das entidades gestoras dos serviços de resíduos urbanos em Portugal

Dissertação de Mestrado, Gestão Empresarial, Faculdade de Economia, Universidade do Algarve, 2016O serviço de gestão de resíduos urbanos no setor do retalho, designado por sistema em baixa, reveste-se de particular importância, uma vez que se trata de um serviço público essencial, que acarreta custos elevados para os utilizadores e que, desta forma, deverá ser prestado num contexto de eficiência. A avaliação do desempenho das entidades gestoras destes serviços é pois crucial. O objetivo deste estudo consiste em realizar uma análise de benchmarking às entidades gestoras do fornecimento de serviços de resíduos urbanos em baixa. Para tal foi utilizada uma técnica não paramétrica designada de Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA), com a qual se procedeu à determinação da eficiência relativa de cada entidade gestora, no que diz respeito aos inputs consumidos e outputs gerados. A técnica de DEA apresenta inúmeras vantagens face a outras metodologias, nomeadamente por não necessitar da definição de uma função de produção, por poder utilizar múltiplos inputs e outputs, e por determinar uma fronteira de produção constituída pelos operadores mais eficientes, identificando os operadores ineficientes, e inclusivamente as origens dessa ineficiência. Os resultados obtidos com o estudo permitem evidenciar diferenças estatisticamente significativas entre a eficiência média das entidades gestoras a operar em meio urbano, comparativamente com as entidades inseridas no meio rural. A análise empírica evidenciou ainda que o meio urbano é dominado por entidades a operar em rendimentos decrescentes à escala, ao passo que no meio rural dominam as entidades gestoras a operar em rendimentos crescentes à escala. Os resultados obtidos da análise realizada permitem ainda aferir que, independentemente da natureza do meio, as entidades gestoras que recorrem ao outsourcing apresentam valores mais elevados de eficiência, apesar dessa diferença não ser estatisticamente significativa.The municipal waste management service is of particular importance, since it is an essential public service which represents high costs for users and thus should be efficiently provided. The assessment of the efficiency of the managing entities of these services is therefore extremely important. The aim of this study is to conduct a benchmarking analysis of the entities managing solid waste collection in the retail sector in Portugal, using a non-parametric technique, known as Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA). This technique is able to determine the relative efficiency of each management entity, based on the inputs consumed and outputs generated. The DEA technique has many advantages over other methods. In particular, it does not require the definition of a production function, it can handle multiple inputs and outputs, and it can determine a production frontier based on the most efficient operators. It can also identify the inefficient operators, and even the sources of this inefficiency. The results obtained from our analysis show that there are significant differences between the average efficiency of the management companies operating in urban areas, compared with the entities operating in rural territories. The empirical analysis also shows that the urban municipalities are dominated by entities operating at decreasing returns to scale, whereas in rural municipalities prevail the companies operating at increasing returns to scale. The results of our analysis also allow us to conclude that the outsourcing of the solid waste management services does not lead to significant efficiency gains

Development of a framework for sustainable management of industrial food waste

This thesis reports on the research undertaken to increase the sustainability of the management of industrial food waste. The main objective of this research is to develop a systematic framework that can be used by food manufacturers to identify and implement sustainable solutions for food waste management. The research reported in this thesis is divided into four main parts. The first part reviews the literature on ramifications and issues associated with the generation and management of food waste, available options to tackle issues related to food waste, categorisations of food waste and existing methodologies to support food waste management modelling and decision-making with regard to the management of food waste. The second part introduces a framework to identify types of food waste and link them to their most sustainable food waste management solution. The third part presents a food waste management modelling procedure and identifies attributes needed to model food waste management. The fourth part analyses relationships between attributes and provides information flowcharts and a methodology to support the modelling of food waste management systems. The applicability and usefulness of the research have been demonstrated through case studies with two UK food manufacturers: a brewery and a meat-alternative manufacturer. Although the framework presented in this thesis aims at improving food manufacturers waste management, it could be easily adapted to be used in other stages of the food supply chain. In summary, the research reported in this thesis has concluded that food manufacturers generate large amounts of food waste that are managed in a wide range of ways. A systematic framework to analyse types of food being wasted, waste management processes, food manufacturers, waste management processors and sustainability implications of food waste management provides a sound methodology to identify opportunities to improve the management of industrial food waste

A bibliographical review of research completed by Nepali students at Lincoln University, New Zealand (1956 - 2022)

Not long after the summiting of Everest in May 1953, Bidur Kumar Thapa, the first recorded Nepali student arrived at the then Lincoln Agricultural College, supported by the Colombo Plan. He graduated in 1956 with a Masters of Agricultural Science with Honours in Soil Science under the supervision of Dr Walker, and went on to publish his findings on grassland soils in the Journal of Soil Science, in 1959. Thapa’s work laid the foundation and pathway for future students from Nepal. In the following years, more than fifty Nepali research students have been recorded in the Lincoln University archives as completing a range of research-based qualifications from across the University, and in many instances going on to publish findings in scholarly journals. This annotated bibliography sets out to collate, review and curate their collective research efforts spanning almost seventy years