Population projection by age, sex, and educational attainment in rural and urban regions of 35 provinces of India, 2011-2101: Technical report on projecting the regionally explicit socioeconomic heterogeneity in India

This working paper documents and explains our methodological approaches and technical details about how we conducted subnational population projections for India. This research is motivated by two research questions: (1) How does the accounting of socioeconomic heterogeneity, measured by educational attainment, improve population projections for India?, and (2) How will changing patterns in urbanization affect the population projections, depending on the spatial scale (national vs. subnational) considered in the projections? Projections at national and subnational level can provide essential information for planning and implementing government policies, including the allocation of budget and resources. In a country like India national projections ignoring spatial and socioeconomic heterogeneity would be too short-sighted considering its sheer population size of 1.2 billion in 2011. It was surprising to see that our population projections for India with baseline scenario were consistent with the UN medium variant and Wittgenstein Centre SSP2 until 2070. We found that while our fertility assumptions are lower, our mortality assumptions were also lower and compensated for the lower number of births (and no international migration) with higher number of survivors. The results show that the overall fertility for India is lower than estimated/assumed by UN and Wittgenstein Centre due to lower starting values in our projection as well as due to explicit consideration of education in the model. This results in a rapid TFR decline to about 1.85 children per woman in the next two decades and stabilization for the rest of the century. The projection resulted in slower rate of urbanization in India from 31% in 2011 to 40% in 2051, compared to the UN urbanization projection and we presented several explanations for that

Future Population and Human Capital in Heterogeneous India

Within the next decade India is expected to surpass China as the world’s most populous country due to still higher fertility and a younger population. Around 2025 each country will be home to around 1.5 billion people. India is demographically very heterogeneous with some rural illiterate populations still having more than four children on average while educated urban women have fewer than 1.5 children and with great differences between states. We show that the population outlook greatly depends on the degree to which this heterogeneity is explicitly incorporated into the population projection model used. The conventional projection model, considering only the age and sex structures of the population at the national level, results in a lower projected population than the same model applied at the level of states because over time the high-fertility states gain more weight, thus applying the higher rates to more people. The opposite outcome results from an explicit consideration of education differentials because over time the proportion of more educated women with lower fertility increases, thus leading to lower predicted growth than in the conventional model. To comprehensively address this issue, we develop a five-dimensional model of India’s population by state, rural/urban place of residence, age, sex, and level of education and show the impacts of different degrees of aggregation. We also provide human capital scenarios for all Indian states that suggest that India will rapidly catch up with other more developed countries in Asia if the recent pace of education expansion is maintained

Evaluation of pyrolysis processes and biochar quality in the operation of flame curtain pyrolysis kiln for sustainable biochar production

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Diverted from Landfill: Reuse of Single-Use Plastic Packaging Waste

Low-density polyethylene (LDPE) based packaging films mostly end up in landfill after single-use as they are not commonly recycled due to their flexible nature, low strength and low cost. Additionally, the necessity to separate and sort different plastic waste streams is the most costly step in plastics recycling, and is a major barrier to increasing recycling rates. This cost can be reduced through using waste mixed plastics (wMP) as a raw material. This research investigates the properties of PE-based wMP coming from film packaging wastes that constitutes different grades of PE with traces of polypropylene (PP). Their properties are compared with segregated individual recycled polyolefins and virgin LDPE. The plastic plaques are produced directly from the wMP shreds as well as after extruding the wMP shreds into a more uniform material. The effect of different material forms and processing conditions on the mechanical properties are investigated. The results of the investigation show that measured properties of the wMP fall well within the range of properties of various grades of virgin polyethylene, indicating the maximum possible variations between different batches. Addition of an intermediate processing step of extrusion before compression moulding is found to have no effect on the tensile properties but results in a noticeably different failure behaviour. The wMP does not show any thermal degradation during processing that was confirmed by thermogravimetric analysis. The results give a scientific insight into the adoption of wMP in real world products that can divert them from landfill creating a more circular economy

Thermal reshaping as a route for reuse of end-of-life glass fibre-reinforced acrylic composites

Thermal reshaping has been employed to simulate the end-of-life reuse of liquid-resin-infused thermoplastic acrylic composite laminates, and the associated effects on matrix-dominated mechanical performance and microstructure have been studied. L-shaped laminates were infused at room temperature and subjected to 1 or 4 hot-press flattening cycles (25 min at 120 °C; 11 bar). Compared to the original references, up to 13% higher transverse flexural strengths were measured for the reprocessed laminates. Such a scheme may be readily implemented for high-value reuse without sacrificing fibre length scales, and with minimal cumulative mass loss over successive reheating cycles (10 cycles: 2% and 15 cycles: 2.6%). This study provides important insights to foster a greater understanding of the performance limits of hot-press reprocessing to inform the practical reuse and re-application of sustainable composites in a circular economy

Compact and Loosely Bound Structures in Light Nuclei

A role of different components in the wave function of the weakly bound light nuclei states was studied within the framework of the cluster model, taking into account of orbitals "polarization". It was shown that a limited number of structures associated with the different modes of nucleon motion can be of great importance for such systems. Examples of simple and quite flexible trial wave functions are given for the nuclei $^8$Be, $^6$He. Expressions for the microscopic wave functions of these nuclei were found and used for the calculation of basic nuclear characteristics, using well known central-exchange nucleon-nucleon potentials.Comment: 19 pages, 3 ps figure