Effects of Australian Economic Activities on Waste Generation and Treatment

Understanding the relationships between the Australian economic system and waste generation from intermediate sectors and households is a prerequisite for planning and implementing waste management strategies at a national scale. Data of waste generation accounts link to those of national economic accounts. However, in Australia, some years’ data are absent and so these links cannot be made. To rectify this data gap, this paper interpolates and extrapolates the Australian input-output table (IOT) of 2010–2011. Waste input-output (WIO) analysis is then used to assess the effects of the Australian economy on waste generation and treatment between 2009–2010 and 2010–2011. Analysis indicated that the result of interpolation was more reasonable than that of extrapolation, and the interpolation of the Australian IOT of 2010–2011 can be applicable. This comparative analysis of the time series data in WIO model has identified that: (1) per million $AUD of output of the Construction sector generated the most amount of direct and total waste during the period; (2) the relationships between the development of Australian economy and waste generation illustrate that the Australian economy is currently a traditional linear economy; (3) the effectiveness of waste-related policies are shown by the growth of the sums of direct and total effects of intermediate sectors on the Recovery sector; and (4) the amount of waste generated by households increased sharply over the two years. The physical flows of waste footprint show details of waste generation and treatment in the Australian economic system. The information provided in this paper is beneficial to formulate tailor-made policies for waste management in Australia

Recycling

The environmental problems generated by our consumer societies require immediate measures that respect the principles of long term sustainability. However, in response to the rising amount of wastes (on average, per capita arising municipal wastes increased by 26 between 1970 and the late 1980s in the OECD) various (mostly end-of-pipe) waste management strategies have been advocated, while a real questioning of what constitutes 'wastes' is still desperately needed

Recycling BiCGSTAB with an Application to Parametric Model Order Reduction

Krylov subspace recycling is a process for accelerating the convergence of sequences of linear systems. Based on this technique, the recycling BiCG algorithm has been developed recently. Here, we now generalize and extend this recycling theory to BiCGSTAB. Recycling BiCG focuses on efficiently solving sequences of dual linear systems, while the focus here is on efficiently solving sequences of single linear systems (assuming non-symmetric matrices for both recycling BiCG and recycling BiCGSTAB). As compared with other methods for solving sequences of single linear systems with non-symmetric matrices (e.g., recycling variants of GMRES), BiCG based recycling algorithms, like recycling BiCGSTAB, have the advantage that they involve a short-term recurrence, and hence, do not suffer from storage issues and are also cheaper with respect to the orthogonalizations. We modify the BiCGSTAB algorithm to use a recycle space, which is built from left and right approximate invariant subspaces. Using our algorithm for a parametric model order reduction example gives good results. We show about 40% savings in the number of matrix-vector products and about 35% savings in runtime.Comment: 18 pages, 5 figures, Extended version of Max Planck Institute report (MPIMD/13-21

Conclusions

There is good potential for sustainable localisation and recycling in rural food systems around the Baltic Sea. Localisation and recycling enhance sustainability in its ecological, economic and social dimensions. A sustainable way of localisation and recycling would be local recycling between farms and from the demand chain

End-of-life vehicle (ELV) recycling management: improving performance using an ISM approach

With booming of the automobile industry, China has become the country with increasing car ownership all over the world. However, the end-of-life vehicle (ELV) recycling industry is at infancy, and there is little systematic review on ELV recycling management, as well as low adoption amongst domestic automobile industry. This study presents a literature review and an interpretive structural modeling (ISM) approach is employed to identify the drivers towards Chinese ELV recycling business from government, recycling organizations and consumer’s perspectives, so as to improve the sustainability of automobile supply chain by providing some strategic insights. The results derived from the ISM analysis manifest that regulations on auto-factory, disassembly technique, and value mining of recycling business are the essential ingredients. It is most effective and efficient to promote ELV recycling business by improving these attributes, also the driving and dependence power analysis are deemed to provide guidance on performance improvement of ELV recycling in the Chinese market

Recycling universe

If the effective cosmological constant is non-zero, our observable universe may enter a stage of exponential expansion. In such case, regions of it may tunnel back to the false vacuum of an inflaton scalar field, and inflation with a high expansion rate may resume in those regions. An ``ideal'' eternal observer would then witness an infinite succession of cycles from false vacuum to true, and back. Within each cycle, the entire history of a hot universe would be replayed. If there were several minima of the inflaton potential, our ideal observer would visit each one of these minima with a frequency which depends on the shape of the potential. We generalize the formalism of stochastic inflation to analyze the global structure of the universe when this `recycling' process is taken into account.Comment: 43 pages, 10 figure