Incentive initiatives on energy-efficient renovation of existing buildings towards carbon–neutral blueprints in China: Advancements, challenges and prospects

Under China's national strategy of carbon neutrality by 2060, it is urgently necessary and challenging for the governments to proactively explore policy tools to facilitate energy-efficient renovation of existing buildings. Currently, a considerable number of studies have been conducted on building energy-efficient renovation and its derivative topics, however, a comprehensive overview on incentive initiatives related to existing renovation practices in China is still scarce, such as a lack of critical correlation analysis between national and local initiatives, a lack of the synthesis and critique towards the latest policies and related achievements, and inadequate generalization of the diverse and multi-layered barriers and challenges in building energy-efficient renovation practices. To address these issues, this paper adopts a diversified policy segmentation approach to deeply analyze the dynamic evolution of the incentive initiatives from both national and local level perspectives, as well as to establish the related network of policy linkages between national to local, and between different localities. In addition, this paper presents a critical analysis on representative initiatives in two batches of pilot cities, and proposes good practices and valuable experiences for building energy-efficient renovation. Finally, this paper further summarizes and discusses the barriers to building energy-efficient renovation from four perspectives: governments, householders, enterprises and research institutions, and proposes a series of targeted and feasible pathways and strategies. This study can provide theoretical guidance and targeted recommendations for the formulation of policies, standards and regulations for building energy-efficient renovation in China.Green Open Access added to TU Delft Institutional Repository 'You share, we take care!' - Taverne project https://www.openaccess.nl/en/you-share-we-take-care. Otherwise as indicated in the copyright section: the publisher is the copyright holder of this work and the author uses the Dutch legislation to make this work public.Design & Construction Managemen

Sorption and degradation of triclosan in sediments and its effect on microbes

Sorption and degradation behavior of triclosan (TCS) and its effect on microbes were studied in three sediments spiked at different concentration levels (1, 10, and 100 mu g g(-1)). TCS showed a strong affiliation to all the sediments with linear adsorption coefficients (K-d) that varied from 220 to 1092 L g(-1), and the adsorption capacity is related to the total organic carbon (TOC) contents of the sediments. The half-lives of TCS varied from 55 to 239 days, and were longer in sediment with higher Kd. TCS showed minor effect on the activities of fluorescein diacetate hydrolase, dehydrogenase, alkaline phosphatase, and urease in the 1 mu g g(-1) treatment, but at higher levels, a short-term effect was observed followed by a rapid recovery except the urease activity in sediment with the lowest adsorption capacity. PCA plots of phospholipid fatty acid showed that the phenotypic community in sediments with low TOC were more sensitive to TCS. A positive relation between bacterial biomass and total microbial biomass suggests that changes of bacteria biomass were responsible for changes of total microbial biomass in treatments. Denaturing gradient gel electrophoresis analysis of the 16 S rDNA showed that the bacterial community structure deviated further away from the control at higher TCS concentration levels, with similarity coefficients in Un-weighted Pair Group Mathematics Average clustering between control and 100 mu g g(-1) treatment varied from 038 to 0.73. Both degradation rate and toxic effects of TCS decreased in sediment with higher sorption capacity, which can be attributed to a reduced bioavailablity. (C) 2015 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved