The sustainable development of the European logistics industry: an analytic approach at micro and macroeconomic levels

A large re-structuring process is running in the European logistics market. The main driving forces come from the globalisation of the Economy, encouraged by the decrease of the unit transportation costs and by the contemporaneous upgrading of the labour level costs and the legal environmental costs. So, a good logistics system has become a must for the competition at both micro and macro-economic levels. Given the effectiveness of the single deliveries of goods, the main problem is to increase efficiency of the logistics services. From the micro-economic point of view, the problem consists in minimising the costs of the production processes of goods management services. In Europe, in particular, we are watching a large re-organisation of the logistics enterprises and of their territorial networks to achieve the best scale and scope economies of production. At the macroeconomic level, the problem is to estimate the rate of the logistics services on the GDP. In this paper we investigate the European logistics market transformations both from microeconomics and macroeconomics points of view. Thus, we will analyse the investments of the logistics sector as well as the logistics supply value as a component of GDP and its contribution to the International balance of commerce. Moreover, the infrastructures system quality (railways, roads, telecommunication, ports, airports, etc.) will be considered as a base asset for the reduction of the private costs of service production and as a territorial resource for the sustainable vehicles circulation.

After Rain

Amidst climate chaos, words gather as a tipping point in after-affect. On January 4, 2020, the massive Currowan bushfire in New South Wales crossed the Shoalhaven River and raced into the Wingecarribee district of the Illawarra region south of Sydney. After two weeks of emergency warnings, a new preternatural “catastrophic” danger rating, watch and act alerts, and heatwave temperatures, the fire front arrived on a blunt southerly gale in the evening. Climate breakdown had delivered locally and personally. The next day, light rain, more drizzle than shower, visited the home fireground

The indirect effects of manufacturing internationalization on logistics - Evidence from the Italian districts

The aim of the paper is to investigate the indirect impact of internationalisation process, undertaken by the district firms located in Veneto region (north-eastern Italy), on the logistics’ employment change within the same industrial districts. The results of the empirical analysis have showed that within the districts there is not a clear positive relationship between internationalisation and the employment growth in the logistics sector. This might be due, either to a strong insourcing of logistics activities by district firms, or to a trend of outsourcing such activities to logistics suppliers located outside the industrial districts. The paper is organised into five sections. An introduction is followed by a literary review on the direct and indirect effects of manufacturing internationalisation on the home country, with a specific focus on logistics. The sample and the methodology are described in section three, section four presents the empirical results. Conclusions and further research questions follow.internationalisation, industrial districts, logistics sector, indirect effects.

Circular economy in the fashion industry : turning waste into resources

O objetivo desta tese consiste em investigar como as empresas de moda podem redefinir os processos produtivos delas, ao fim de aplicar a Economia Circular para reduzir a produção de resíduos. Um enquadramento teórico mostra as características mais relevantes da Responsabilidade Social das Empresas e as razões subjacentes a necessidade de um business com base na circularidade. Seis exemplos de empresas virtuosas no cenário italiano, diversas em tamanho, legado e âmbito de aplicação, mas que partilham um interesse comum na sustentabilidade, revelam como superar o sistema linear tradicional em todas as partes da cadeia de valor. Os atores industriais fornecem um esquema claro de como a Economia Circular pode ser integrada nos modelos de gestão e consegue desafiar o sistema industrial atual. O comportamento irresponsável retratado pelas empresas focadas unicamente em incrementar as vendas e em cortar as despesas, e os consumidores que desperdiçam os recursos estão a causar consequências graves pelo ambiente e pela sociedade. Mais do que algumas tentativas foram feitas para ultrapassar o sistema linear e alcançar atividades totalmente sustentáveis, mas os investimentos necessários em matéria de dinheiro, tempo ou estruturas organizativas não estão ao alcance de todos. Por causa do crescimento demográfico previsto, uma gestão hábil do desperdício será imprescindível para evitar a acumulação dos resíduos e recuperar inputs valiosos. Mediante a aplicação de uma visão a longo prazo para novos processos produtivos, o atual nível de riqueza e bem-estar poderá ser mantido. O que é preciso criar para resolver a escassez de recursos é uma rede de empresas sustentáveis – fornecedores, produtores e comerciantes – que podem aplicar eficazmente a Economia Circular a todos os níveis da cadeia do valor.The purpose of this thesis is to investigate how fashion companies may reshape their productive processes to embrace Circular Economy to drastically reduce waste generation. A theoretical framework outlines the most relevant features of Corporate Social Responsibility and the reasoning behind the need for a business based on circularity. Six virtuous examples in the Italian landscape – different in size, heritage and scopes, but sharing a common interest in sustainability – show how to overcome the traditional linear systems throughout the value chain. The players provide a clear scheme of how Circular Economy shall be integrated in business models and may challenge the current industrial pattern. The reckless attitude portrayed by companies focused solely on pushing sales and cutting down costs, and consumers devoted to the devouring of resources are causing severe consequences on the environment and the society. More than few attempts have been made to overcome the linear approach and to achieve completely sustainable businesses, but the investments needed – in terms of money, time or organisational structures – are not within the reach of every player. With the foreseen increase in population, a clever waste management will be imperative to avoid the accumulation of garbage and to recover valuable inputs. By applying a long-term vision towards new productive processes, the current standards of wealth and well-being can be maintained. What is needed to solve the resource scarcity is the creation of a network of sustainable firms – suppliers, producers, retailers – able to master Circular Economy at every level of the value chain

Relationscapes of Extinction, and More Life: Zincland to Zealandia

3:20 a.m. Friday, 14 August 2020: Wildes Meadow, the Illawarra highlands, Wodi Wodi First Peoples and Yuin nation Countries, south-eastern Australia. A Boobook is calling. This sonorous guide in refrain, before and after the Ngā Tūtaki – Encounter/s: Agency, Embodiment, Exchange, Ecologies conference in Tāmaki Makaurau, some eight months later. Two days ago, the SARS-CoV-2 lockdown lifted in New South Wales. Only now can you light a match without visceral trepidation. Without a gut return to the climate crisis inferno of the 2019–2020 summer. Anthropocene-in-the-making? Yes. No. These are Viral Bushranger Times. Anything can happen now. The shadows trace of the Zincland project is one mode of more-than-human wit(h)nessing that I have introduced elsewhere from an ecology and ethos of open field practice where contemporary art and writing converges with the feminist, decolonising environmental humanities and sciences. Following the conference, I had a plan to travel south, to Pōneke/Wellington and Ōtepoti/Dunedin, to continue a linked project of engaging with naturecultures of extinction, to wit(h)ness two sites of multispecies recovery and ecological restoration. If Zincland took me to Aotearoa, I had no inkling of what I might encounter in this onward momentum of and from the shadows trace. So, let me take you there. Let me pick up this passage of wit(h)nessing and translation one day after leaving Tāmaki Makaurau.      &nbsp

Hard Data, Soft Data

Hard Data, Soft Dat

Wit(h)nessing Zincland: From the affective encounter to unfolding a shadow country in the Anthropocene-in-the-making

Melodious and unmistakable. Brolgas are overhead, crossing country. They bugle on the fly. In a Sydney gallery, Elder, eminent artist and activator Nancy Yukuwal McDinny scans the postcard I hand her. An aerial photograph of a zinc refinery on the east coast of Queensland connected to the catastrophic McArthur River Mine in her Country (Garrwa, Yanyuwa) near Borroloola in the Northern Territory, Australia. She pauses, steadies her hand, looks more closely, then speaks. This paper presents the project “Greetings from Zincland: Unfolding a Shadow Country” associated with Postcards from the Anthropocene: Unsettling the Geopolitics of Representation, an international exhibition and conference held in Edinburgh, Scotland in 2017, and recently published as a book (Cincik and Torres-Campos). Greetings from Zincland, a postcard I sent across the equator as a digital image, a recorded voice reading, and a critical text, is a dispatch from belonged-by country and its shadow places. It recalibrates vintage 1950s’ imagery of local tourist views composed in the North Queensland port city of Townsville—in Gurambilbarra Wulgurukaba and Bindal Countries—with one contemporary sighting of a twenty-first century becoming. Here, I introduce and map a scattered particular-planetary shadow country found in the glare of bleaching tropical light. With this, I unfold a wit(h)nessing story from one shadow place of unexpected connection and confrontation in the antipodean Anthropocene-in-the-making (Yusoff). If a picture postcard is a material form of encounter and exchange, an affect charged one is also an im/material dispatch. And, Auckland, you are one of my shadow places

Particular Planetary Aesthetics

Particular Planetary Aesthetics is the title and theme of this Swamphen special issue. It has its origins in Ngā Tūtaki – Encounter/s: Agency, Embodiment, Exchange, Ecologies, the 2019 conference of the Art Association of Australia and New Zealand (AAANZ) held in Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland, Aotearoa. For this special cross-Tasman event, and from opposite coasts of Australia, we convened panels for participants under two invitational titles: “Affective Encounters, Shadow Traces, and Resonant Naturecultures in the Anthropocene: Particular-planetary aesthetics in the feminist ecosocial turn” and “Encounters with and within the Anthropocene: Speculating on Particular-Planetary Aesthetics.” Our project averred that the work of art in the Anthropocene was under interrogation by contemporary artists, writers, theorists and historians. Connected with this shifting ground, we argued that new energies and collaborations were emerging across the postconventional arts and ecological humanities, creating alternative critical frameworks to engage with: that the human is more-than-human and the social is an eco-social domain in a preternatural age of extinction and climate destruction. We set out to feel the pulse of what contemporary artists and researchers from Aotearoa and Australia were doing, making, speculating on, or writing about in the push and pull—the effects, affects and implications—of the Anthropocene-in-the-making. Our project’s defining call was to explore encounters in a new frame of particular planetary aesthetics: moving from the particular, bodily or affective encounter to trace, reveal or refigure planetary connections, relations and concerns. In this guest editorial note, we write in the wake of the ravages of climate crisis fires in Australia, as well as the borderless COVID-19 pandemic. We flesh out the project in its beginnings above, and introduce eleven papers and three visual portfolios of art research in practice that respond to our provocations before and after the Auckland conference. Collectively these scholarly and aesthetic works consider, trace, and respond to affective encounters of the particular and the planetary in the capricious spaces of the Anthropocene-in-the-making

Predictive Value of Cerebrospinal Fluid (CSF) Lactate Level Versus CSF/Blood Glucose Ratio for the Diagnosis of Bacterial Meningitis Following Neurosurgery

The value of cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) lactate level and CSF/blood glucose ratio for the identification of bacterial meningitis following neurosurgery was assessed in a retrospective study. During a 3-year period, 73 patients fulfilled the inclusion criteria and could be grouped by preset criteria in one of three categories: proven bacterial meningitis (n = 12), presumed bacterial meningitis (n = 14), and nonbacterial meningeal syndrome (n = 47). Of 73 patients analyzed, 45% were treated with antibiotics and 33% with steroids at the time of first lumbar puncture. CSF lactate values (cutoff, 4 mmol/L), in comparison with CSF/blood glucose ratios (cutoff, 0.4), were associated with higher sensitivity (0.88 vs. 0.77), specificity (0.98 vs. 0.87), and positive (0.96 vs. 0.77) and negative (0.94 vs. 0.87) predictive values. In conclusion, determination of the CSF lactate value is a quick, sensitive, and specific test to identify patients with bacterial meningitis after neurosurger

Predictive Value of Cerebrospinal Fluid (CSF) Lactate Level Versus CSF/Blood Glucose Ratio for the Diagnosis of Bacterial Meningitis Following Neurosurgery

The value of cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) lactate level and CSF/blood glucose ratio for the identification of bacterial meningitis following neurosurgery was assessed in a retrospective study. During a 3-year period, 73 patients fulfilled the inclusion criteria and could be grouped by preset criteria in one of three categories: proven bacterial meningitis (n = 12), presumed bacterial meningitis (n = 14), and nonbacterial meningeal syndrome (n = 47). Of 73 patients analyzed, 45% were treated with antibiotics and 33% with steroids at the time of first lumbar puncture. CSF lactate values (cutoff, 4 mmol/L), in comparison with CSF/blood glucose ratios (cutoff, 0.4), were associated with higher sensitivity (0.88 vs. 0.77), specificity (0.98 vs. 0.87), and positive (0.96 vs. 0.77) and negative (0.94 vs. 0.87) predictive values. In conclusion, determination of the CSF lactate value is a quick, sensitive, and specific test to identify patients with bacterial meningitis after neurosurger