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Environmental factors may operate differently when relations are measured across different geographical locations, a phenomenon known as spatial non-stationarity. This study investigates the spatial non-stationarity effect of unhealthy food environments and green spaces on the T2DM prevalence rate at the neighborhood level in Toronto. This study also compares how the results vary between age groups, classified as all adults (20 and above), young adults (from 20 to 44), middle adulthood (from 45 to 64), and seniors (65 and above). The geographically weighted regression model is utilized to explore the impacts of spatial non-stationarity effects on the research results, which may lead to biased conclusions, which have often been ignored in past studies. The results from this study reveal that environmental variables dissimilarly affect T2DM prevalence rates among different age groups and neighborhoods in Toronto after controlling for socioeconomic factors. For example, the green space density yields positive associations with diabetes prevalence rates for elder generations but negative relationships for younger age groups in twenty-two and four neighborhoods, respectively, around Toronto East. The observed associations will provide beneficial suggestions to support government and public health authorities in designing education, prevention, and intervention programs targeting different neighborhoods to control the burden of diabetes.

Sufficient production, consistent food supply, and environmental protection in urban +settings are major global concerns for future sustainable cities. Currently, sustainable food supply is under intense pressure due to exponential population growth, expanding urban dwellings, climate change, and limited natural resources. The recent novel coronavirus 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic crisis has impacted sustainable fresh food supply, and has disrupted the food supply chain and prices significantly. Under these circumstances, urban horticulture and crop cultivation have emerged as potential ways to expand to new locations through urban green infrastructure. Therefore, the objective of this study is to review the salient features of contemporary urban horticulture, in addition to illustrating traditional and innovative developments occurring in urban environments. Current urban cropping systems, such as home gardening, community gardens, edible landscape, and indoor planting systems, can be enhanced with new techniques, such as vertical gardening, hydroponics, aeroponics, aquaponics, and rooftop gardening. These modern techniques are ecofriendly, energy- saving, and promise food security through steady supplies of fresh fruits and vegetables to urban neighborhoods. There is a need, in this modern era, to integrate information technology tools in urban horticulture, which could help in maintaining consistent food supply during (and after) a pandemic, as well as make agriculture more sustainable.

Rural environmental protection has received increasing attention in recent years. The economic development and population growth of rural areas results in many problems, such as environmental pollution, land degradation, resource depletion, biodiversity loss, income loss, and public health risks. Although much progress has been made, many major challenges to rural environmental management remain to be addressed. The question of how to deal with these problems through sustainable approaches has become an urgent issue in rural areas. This Special Issue, “Rural Sustainable Environmental Management”, was dedicated to the perception of rural, sustainable environmental management based on the integration of economic, environmental, and social considerations. The Special Issue covered the topics about the rural land management and planning, sustainable rural water resources management, integrated simulation and optimization, rural environmental risk assessment and vulnerability analysis, rural water and wastewater treatment, rural environmental policy analysis, rural ecosystem protection and biodiversity recovery, and the characterization of emerging rural environmental problems and related solutions. A total of 24 high-quality papers were accepted after strict and rigorous review. These accepted papers focused on various perspectives of rural sustainable environmental management.

Fruits are commonly used, fresh or processed, to prepare different industrial products with superior nutritional and health-promoting properties. Currently, the demand for processed fruit products has motivated the rapid growth of the fruit processing industries, persuading them to produce an enormous amount of by-products with less utilization. Furthermore, people's shifting dietary habits and lack of awareness of nutritional properties result in an avoidable load of fruit by-products. The knowledge of the value of by-products urges exploration with proper documentation, emphasizing the health benefits of some such products. Hence, this review is prepared by carefully analyzing the recent literature on industrial applications of fruit by-products and their nutritional and health-promoting properties. The use of fruit by-products in food industries for various purposes has been reported in the past and has been reviewed and described here. Fruit by-products are a good source of nutrients and bioactive components, including polyphenols, dietary fibers, and vitamins, implying that they could have an important role for novel, value-added functional food properties. Furthermore, fruit by-products are used as the substrate for the production of organic acids, essential oils, enzymes, fuel, biodegradable packaging materials, and preservatives.

The lack of academic attention that home food gardening has received in Canada and the United States is surprising, given the many demonstrated benefits of community gardening programs, including increased community cohesion and resilience. The aim of the exploratory study is to explore the current surge in home food gardening and its relationship to the COVID-19 pandemic. A national survey was conducted, consisting of 43 main questions, asking respondents about their home life and food provisioning during COVID-19, the physical characteristics of their food gardens, and their attitudes and beliefs concerning home food production. Survey results show that 51% of respondents grow at least one type of fruit or vegetable in a home garden. Of those, 17.4% started growing food at home in 2020 during COVID-19 pandemic. To gain more insight into just how significant a cause the pandemic lockdown was on home food gardening, follow-up surveys and policy recommendations are suggested.

Given the growing ecological footprint of anthropomorphic activities, considering the environmental impacts of any process is becoming increasingly important. This is especially true for the healthcare industry, whose objective of maintaining human health standards is impeded by its own unsustainable practices. To this end, life cycle analysis is particularly helpful. There have not been many life cycle analyses performed on a healthcare device or on medical procedures. Many medical devices are single use, which leads to a significant waste management problem, particularly as plastic is widely used in their composition. The objective of this study is to present a life-cycle-thinking-based approach to compare the environmental impacts associated with single-use electrophysiological catheters with the sterilization of reusable electrophysiological catheters using hydrogen peroxide, ethylene oxide, and peracetic acid. A life cycle assessment was conducted considering different use, disinfection, and disposal scenarios for electrophysiological catheters, using ReCiPe midpoint and endpoint analysis with the SimaPro software. The findings indicate that using single-use disposable electrophysiological catheters, instead of sterilizing a single catheter using either ETO or hydrogen peroxide and reusing multiple times, is preferable from a purely environmental perspective. However, the costs reduce drastically when equipment is sterilized and reused instead of disposing them after using one time. This in turn illustrates that depending on the process, sanitizing and reusing medical devices may not always be more resource-efficient than single device usage. From a cost perspective, ETO sterilization has the lowest costs, and yet it leads to an aggregate environmental impact of over 20 times compared to the single-use scenario, mainly due to the required detoxification process. The outcomes of this research will assist the health care industry in identifying the most suitable operational procedures considering patient safety, economics, and environmental stewardship, and in developing policies and guidelines for a more sustainable healthcare sector.

The objective of this study was to analyze the early COVID-19 crisis management practices implemented in organizations based on a scoping review of relevant business articles published on this issue in newspapers and magazines between March and May 2020. In total, after applying inclusion and exclusion criteria on 2707 potentially relevant articles, 246 articles describing organizational initiatives to manage COVID-19 were selected and analyzed in detail. The results of this study highlight the opportunities and threats arising from the pandemic as well as the most innovative measures put in place, particularly in the areas of health, human resources management (HRM), work organization, social and environmental responsibility, and crisis management. The description of the main practices identified and their illustration through various examples show the importance of corporate sustainability in managing the pandemic and demonstrate the cross-cutting nature of this crisis, which affects most corporate functions simultaneously. This study also makes it possible to identify certain leaders’ approaches that can be considered exemplary or, in contrast, that should be avoided, while highlighting the paradoxes and difficulties of assessing corporate social responsibility in times of crisis.

Decisions regarding project definition have a significant impact on client value generation. However, although this phase is of utmost importance, traditional management practices are inadequate, as the focus is rather on budget and technical aspects leaving aside the functional ones. Neglecting the functional aspects could have serious consequences on the operation and thus quality of workspace, especially in complex projects including hospitals that involve multiple clients and with a high degree of uncertainty of change. The Lean-led Design approach provides a participative solution which involves the main project clients, namely the users (doctors, patients, etc.), project managers, and the government, with the intention of delivering facilities with a better fit for purpose and use. The main objective of the paper is to develop a framework that summarizes the steps leading to the implementation of such an approach during the project definition of a new hospital. The methodology chosen is a case study and the main contribution is to develop theoretical knowledge regarding its implementation. This may support managers in their decisions when coordinating project definitions.