Analysing Port Community System Network Evolution

Ports have played an important role in facilitating exchanges among countries since the day when inland transportation was poor. As ports become hubs for global supply chain, they have to maintain their competitiveness not only by reassuring their efficiency, reliability, accessibility to hinterland, and sustainability. In addition, there is a constant challenge from all operational parties of the port to acquire needed information or to trust information received, due to multiple legacy systems and platforms that do not integrate with each other, and to the lack of real time updates. There are differing agendas between parties and, sometimes, distrust within the multi-stakeholder ecosystem leads to working in silos. This jeopardises seamless data exchange and cooperation across the port value chain, resulting in significant inefficiencies. Port community system (PCS) can enhance communication and simplify administrative process resulting economic and environmental benefit for actors in the supply chain. The invisibility of the benefit, actors’ heterogeneity and significant investment to develop the system resulting a reluctance in implementing PCS. This chapter aims to study the evolution mechanism behind the process of PCS network development using lessons learned from industrial symbiosis network development and network trajectories theory. The PCS network development follows a serendipitous and goal-oriented process that can be categorised into three stages: pre-PCS network, PCS network emergence, and PCS network expansion. This chapter contributes to the exploration of network evolution and documents lesson learned to foster PCS implementation.© 2020 Springer. This is a post-peer-review, pre-copyedit version of an article published in European Port Cities in Transition: Moving Towards More Sustainable Sea Transport Hubs. The final authenticated version is available online at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-36464-9_10fi=vertaisarvioitu|en=peerReviewed

A massive urban symbiosis:A preliminary review of the Urban Mining Pilot Bases Programme in China

Waste recycling helps to establish a circular loop of resource flow between production and consumption, achieving a certain symbiosis between the industrial and urban sector. Since more and more resources are accumulated in the urban sector, urban mining as form of waste recycling in a massive way becomes an outstanding way to achieve industrial and urban symbiosis. In 2010 China initiated a national urban mining pilot base (UMPB) programme with the objective of developing the recycling industry and relieving environmental and resource constrains. This study aims to provide policy review of the programme. We find that the UMPB programme was developed from past circular economy policies and attains legacy assurance from current laws and national plans. But this did not formulate a perfect governance context for its implementation. A multi-ministerial cross-management network led to policy conflicts, and recycling-oriented legislation remained absent. These became the main barriers for the good implementation of those urban mining pilots. Comparing with the eco-town programme in Japan, it shows that both programmes share some similarities of partial policy objectives but also show variety in the scope of urban symbiosis due to the different problems they focus on and the slightly different policy objectives under the different economic and social development phases

MAESTRI Toolkit for Industrial Symbiosis: overview, lessons learnt and implications

This paper presents a structured approach to support the development of self-organized industrial symbiosis, the Toolkit for Industrial Symbiosis. Developed within MAESTRI project, it provides a set of tools and methods to help companies gain value from wasted resources and contributes to MAESTRI goal of advancing the sustainability of European manufacturing and process industry. A participatory approach was taken for its development. The ultimate objective of this work is to encourage companies to change their attitude and consider waste as a resource and potential source for value creation

A novel knowledge repository to support industrial symbiosis

The development of tools and methods supporting the identification of Industrial Symbiosis opportunities is of utmost importance to unlock its full potential. Knowledge repositories have proven to be powerful tools in this sense, but often fail mainly due to poor contextualization of information and lack of general applicability (out of the boundaries of specific areas or projects). In this work, a novel approach to the design of knowledge repositories for Industrial Symbiosis is presented, based on the inclusion and categorization of tacit knowledge as well as on the combination of mimicking and input-output matching approaches. The results of a first usability test of the proposed tool are also illustrated

Response of different PTH assays to therapy with sevelamer or CaCO3 and active vitamin D sterols

Amino-terminally truncated parathyroid hormone (PTH) fragments are detected to differing degrees by first- and second-generation immunometric PTH assays (PTH-IMAs), and acute changes in serum calcium affect the proportion of these fragments in circulation. However, the effect of chronic calcium changes and different vitamin D doses on these PTH measurements remains to be defined. In this study, 60 pediatric dialysis patients, aged 13.9 ± 0.7 years, with secondary hyperparathyroidism were randomized to 8 months of therapy with oral vitamin D combined with either calcium carbonate (CaCO3) or sevelamer. Serum phosphorus levels did not differ between groups. Serum calcium levels rose from 9.3 ± 0.1 to 9.7 ± 0.1 mg/dl during CaCO3 therapy (p < 0.01 from baseline) but remained unchanged during sevelamer therapy. In the CaCO3 and sevelamer groups, baseline serum PTH levels (1st PTH-IMA; Nichols Institute Diagnostics, San Clemente, CA) were 964 ± 75 and 932 ± 89 pg/ml, and levels declined to 491 ± 55 and 543 ± 59 pg/ml, respectively (nonsignificant between groups). Patients treated with sevelamer received higher doses of vitamin D than those treated with CaCO3. The PTH values obtained by first- and second-generation PTH-IMAs correlated closely throughout therapy and the response of PTH was similar to both PTH-IMAs, despite differences in serum calcium levels

The Leverage of Demographic Dynamics on Carbon Dioxide Emissions: Does Age Structure Matter?

This article provides a methodological contribution to the study of the effect of changes in population age structure on carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions. First, I propose a generalization of the IPAT equation to a multisector economy with an age-structured population and discuss the insights that can be obtained in the context of stable population theory. Second, I suggest a statistical model of household consumption as a function of household size and age structure to quantitatively evaluate the extent of economies of scale in consumption of energy-intensive goods, and to estimate age-specific profiles of consumption of energy-intensive goods and of CO2 emissions. Third, I offer an illustration of the methodologies using data for the United States. The analysis shows that per-capita CO2 emissions increase with age until the individual is in his or her 60s, and then emissions tend to decrease. Holding everything else constant, the expected change in U.S. population age distribution during the next four decades is likely to have a small, but noticeable, positive impact on CO2 emissions

Relating industrial symbiosis and circular economy to the sustainable development debate

Industrial Symbiosis (IS) is a business-focused collaborative approach oriented towards resource efficiency that has been theorised and studied mainly over the last twenty-five years. Recently, IS seems to have found a renewed impetus in the framework of the Circular Economy (CE), a novel approach to sustainability and Sustainable Development (SD) that has been rapidly gaining momentum world-wide. This opening chapter of the book provides an introduction to the concepts of IS, CE and SD, and summarizes their complex evolutionary paths, recalling the rel-evant developments and implementation challenges. In addition, the authors point out the divergences and interrelations of these concepts, both among themselves and with other related concepts and research fields, such as industrial ecology, eco-logical modernization and the green economy. Furthermore, the potential contribu-tion of IS and the CE to SD is briefly discussed, also highlighting critical issues and trade-offs, as well as gaps in research and application, especially relating to the so-cial component of sustainability. Particular attention is given to the potential role of IS in the achievement of targets connected to the Sustainable Development Goals set in the UN Agenda 2030. The recent advances in the IS and CE discussion in the context of the SD research community are further explored, with particular empha-sis on the contribution of the International Sustainable Development Research So-ciety (ISDRS) and its 24th annual conference organised in Messina, Italy, in 2018. The programme of that conference, indeed, included specific tracks on the above-mentioned themes, the contents of which are briefly commented on here, after an overview on the whole conference and the main cross-cutting concepts emerged. In the last part of the chapter, a brief description of the chapters collected in the book is presented. These contributions describe and discuss theoretical frameworks, methodological approaches and/or experiences and case studies where IS and the principles of CE are applied in different geographical context and at different scales to ultimately improve the sustainability of the current production patterns