3,005 research outputs found

    Plants on duty – phytotechnologies and phytoremediation at a glance

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    Phytotechnologies are plant based technologies of remediation and containment of pollutions. Many advantages of phytotechnologies such as control of water and biogeochemical cycles, positive impact on soil characteristics and lowering the risk of erosion, contaminant immobilization and destruction, habitat restoration, low costs of implementation, and high public acceptance, decide that in more and more cases it is a preferred and recommended method of rehabilitation. Vegetation selected to the particular site conditions and having required characteristics will shape other biotic communities. It is thus immensely important to gather detailed knowledge about all the elements and processes occurring at the place of interest, before employing adequate phytotechnology application.Wykorzystanie fitotechnologii ograniczone jest stężeniami zanieczyszczeń, których rośliny mogą nie przetrwać oraz warunkami klimatycznymi i sezonowymi, a także koniecznością poświęcenia dużego obszaru pod uprawę. Ponadto zabiegi wykorzystujące rośliny są stosunkowo nowymi rozwiązaniami i jeszcze nie wszystko wiadomo o ich możliwościach i konsekwencjach użycia

    Climate Adaptive Stormwater Management: A comperativ study of Oslo and Helsinki

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    The world is facing the consequences of climate change and needs to adapt. The increasing temperature is a central change and with it comes several consequences. One of these is an increase in precipitation, and therefore an increase in stormwater. In cities where the natural water cycle is disrupted, stormwater management is becoming a challenge. The main increase in precipitation will be during the winter. This will increase the amount of snow, meltwater and ice formation. Helsinki and Oslo are both cities that are having to adapt to the increase in rain, snow, ice and meltwater. The thesis will be focused on comparing these two cities' stormwater management. To understand in which degree the cities are adapting to this challenge, documents in three different levels were analyzed. The documents covered the overall municipalities plan, the climate adaptive plan and the concrete stormwater plan. By analyzing these documents, an opportunity to see the overview from overall to specific measure was achieved. It is important that the consistency from climate adaptation to local measures hold up, and that it is emphasized that this is a global situation which needs local action. The discussion proved that the main research question: To which extent is climate adaptation part of planning for the increasing challenge of stormwater management in Oslo and Helsinki? should be answered in three distinct aspects: * Managing and adapting to the general increase of precipitation during spring, summer, and fall. * Handle the heavy rain expected during the summer months. * Managing the increase in precipitation during the winter together with the changing climate conditions. * Managing and adapting to the general increase of precipitation during spring, summer, and fall. Both cities have adapted quite well to the general increase, with blue- green infrastructure and a goal of purifying the stormwater before it meets the sea or larger rivers. * Handle the heavy rain expected during the summer months. A bit more complex, both cities have this as a priority, but Oslo has included it in its strategy while Helsinki is working on it through pilot projects. The change here is due to differences in ownership in the respective municipalities. * Managing the increase in precipitation during the winter together with the changing climate conditions. Helsinki is one step ahead of Oslo here due to its very thorough weather and climate change risk report, and the Nasta strategy which brings up the issue of weather effects on traffic. Other than this strategy, Helsinki has, same as Oslo, no specific measures in place to handle stormwater management during the winter months. Both Helsinki and Oslo have included climate adaptation measures in their planning to address the challenges of stormwater management. The two cities differ in the level of detail in stormwater management, and where the focus lies. The largest weakness they both have is the lack of specific measures in the winter. This is a crucial and significant part of stormwater management where there is little to no climate adaptive measures taken

    Smart Meters for Accounting Smart Solid Waste Mangement for Smart Cities in India

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    Rapid urbanization along with increases in population has led to the deterioration of physical environment in India. Effective Solid Waste Management is one of the major challenges faced by the local authorities. High volumes of waste generation, inefficient collection and transportation system and limited disposal options are continuously impacting the health, environment and quality of life in the area. A number of technologies are being proposed for management and disposal of garbage in general for different city or towns but so far no technology has been shortlisted as the one which would be viable not only from the environment angle but also in terms of the cost involved for unanimously in urban local body in India. During the last century urban population of India increased ten folds from 27 million to 270 million. India produces 48.0 MT of MSW annually at present. Central Pollution Control Board, India (2009) said that by the year 2021, the urban population is expected to represent 41% of the overall population and subsequently MSW is expected to increase to 300 MT per year, by the year 2047 (490 g to 945 g per capita). Due to an increase in population and subsequently increase in waste generation, landfills could become a major source of atmospheric pollution. Cities which are not clean do not exhibit a smart character. Cities which are clean are perceived to be smart, providing a healthier environment and a better quality of life. Therefore, they attract people – both people who want to live and work in the city and those who want to invest in the city. It is in this context that the Government has decided on developing 100 “Smart Cities” in the country. It includes one satellite city of each of the cities with a population of 4 million people or more comprises of 9 cities, most of the cities in the population range of 1 – 4 million people about 35 out of 44 cities, all State/UT Capitals, even if they have a population of less than one million including17 cities, Cities of tourist, religious and economic importance not included 10 cities and Cities in the 0.2 to 1.0 million population ranging 25 cities. Smart city meters segregation of recyclable and non-recyclable waste as well as wet and dry waste at the source so that there can be 100 percent recycling of solid waste. Appropriate technology should be adopted for treatment of waste at decentralized locations, put in place an effective collection and disposal system, encourage use of products based on recycling of solid waste especially – power, compost, building material (based on cycling of debris & construction materials). Now the question is how to make it smart mechanism. What are the parameters to account the smartness of solid waste mnagement process including smart storage, smart collection mechanism, smart transportation, smart process and smart disposal. This paper has attempted to frame out web based automatic database mechanism to account the the process metering of solid waste mangement for 100 smart cities in India

    Italy (Year in Review)

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    Incorporating local sustainability indicators into structures of local governance: a review of the literature

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    Too often studies about sustainability indicators focus either on the science that goes into indicator development seeking to make them rational and relevant or on the soft impacts such as social capital, community empowerment or capacity building that are outcomes of their use. When attention is turned to what effect they have on policy, it is often difficult to discern any link between their use and policy change. This paper seeks to address this problem by consolidating current thinking on indicators and asking the question: How far have notions of governance been incorporated into current research into indicators? The answer to this question has implications for the continuing utility of indicators as policy tools, not only in so far as they are able to aid the evaluation of policy, but also, and arguably more importantly, in how they are able to facilitate relationships between actors and act a catalyst around which various contested meanings of sustainability can be evaluated

    Mitigation of Greenhouse Gas Emissions from Urban Environmental Infrastructures

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    The world’s population will increase to 9.4 billion people by 2050 and 70% of whom will be living in urban areas. Such urbanization with population growth and industrial development demands in turn create a need for the planning, design, and construction of environmental infrastuctures (e.g., water and wastewater treatment plants: WTPs and WWTPs). The environmental infrastructures are essential to provide cities and towns with water supply, waste disposal, and pollution control services. During the operation of WTPs and WWTPs, massive amount of energy, fuels, and chemicals are consumed. Therefore, they could be major contributors to urban greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions (i.e., 17% of GHGs are generated from water and sewer sector in urban area). To make cities resilient and sustainable, the emission of GHGs from WTPs and WWTPs should be estimated as accurately as possible and effective mangement plans should be set up as soon as possible. A comprehensive model was developed to quantitatively estimate on-site and off-site GHGs generated from WTPs and WWTPs. The model was applied to an advanced WTP (treating 200,000 m³/d of raw water with micro-filtration membrane) and a hybrid WWTP (treating 5,500 m³/d of municipal wastewater with five-stage Bardenpho processes). The overall on-site and off-site GHG emissions from the advanced WTP and hybrid WWTP were 0.193 and 2.337 kgCO2e/d*m3. The major source of GHG generation in the advanced WTP was off-site GHG emissions (98.6%: production of chemicals consumed for on-site use and electricity consumed for unit-process operation). On the other hand, on-site GHG emissions related to biochemical reactions (64%) was the main GHG source of the hybrid WWTP. Reducing electricity consumption in advanced WTPs could be the best option for generating less GHG emissions and acquiring better water quality. Various options (CO2 capture and conversion to other useful materials, recovery and reused of CH4, and operation of WWTPs at optimal conditions) could significanlty reduce the total amount of GHG emissions in hybrid WWTPs. The results could be applied to the development of green and sustainable technology, leading to a change in paradigm of urban environmental infrastructure

    Third way urban policy and the new moral politics of community: a comparative analysis of Ballymun in Dublin and the Gorbals in Glasgow

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    Whilst Third Way Urban Policy (TWUP) often associates itself with a kind of anarchic vision of self-regulating and self-reproducing local communities, it can in fact be thought of as a thinly veiled moral crusade targeted towards vulnerable residents in disadvantaged neighbourhoods. Sustainable communities are defined as those who can stand on their own two feet within the terms set down by neo-liberal market economics. When these morally charged crusades fail to connect locally, they have the potential to stir local conflict over who has the authority to judge forms of community life. As third way urban regeneration rolls out across capitalist cities, mapping and accounting for the uneven development of moral conflicts over community is a pressing concern. Focusing upon the ongoing regeneration of two of Europe's most famous social housing estates- Ballymun in north Dublin and the Gorbals in central Glasgow - this paper presents a comparative analysis of the different ways in which moral disputes over community have surfaced in these two neighbourhoods. On the bases of an analyses of both the localisation of TWUP and the prior biographies of both estates, the nature of conflict is shown to be contingent upon who has ownership of the local social capital agenda

    The Role of the Mangement Sciences in Research on Personalization

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    We present a review of research studies that deal with personalization. We synthesize current knowledge about these areas, and identify issues that we envision will be of interest to researchers working in the management sciences. We take an interdisciplinary approach that spans the areas of economics, marketing, information technology, and operations. We present an overarching framework for personalization that allows us to identify key players in the personalization process, as well as, the key stages of personalization. The framework enables us to examine the strategic role of personalization in the interactions between a firm and other key players in the firm's value system. We review extant literature in the strategic behavior of firms, and discuss opportunities for analytical and empirical research in this regard. Next, we examine how a firm can learn a customer's preferences, which is one of the key components of the personalization process. We use a utility-based approach to formalize such preference functions, and to understand how these preference functions could be learnt based on a customer's interactions with a firm. We identify well-established techniques in management sciences that can be gainfully employed in future research on personalization.CRM, Persoanlization, Marketing, e-commerce,

    Subdivisions in Iskandar Malaysia: do their designs encourage increase in travel carbon emissions?

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    This study looks into the travel impact of distribution of housing densities within a subdivision on local travel patterns within neighbourhoods of Iskandar Malaysia. The goal of this study is to investigate the relationship between these distributions of housing densities and travel carbon emission in Iskandar Malaysia. It attempts to show how the location of various housing densities (high density, medium density and low density) with respect to commercial centres affects the residents’ travels, thus affecting carbon emission too. This study involves over three hundred subdivisions in Iskandar Malaysia. The housing densities were determined through ArcGis software while CommunityViz software was used to determine the amount of travel carbon emission. The findings indicate that most of Iskandar Malaysia’s subdivisions do not meet the preferred design standards for carbon reduction and can contribute to higher carbon emission. The design of these subdivisions focuses more on its aesthetic aspects rather than being functional and sustainable. However, this is only looking at the travel minimisation aspect of the design though it is not a minimal aspect itself
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