• Energy Research
• Open Access close
• Open Source close
• Embargo close
• other engineering and technologies close
• 12. Responsible consumption close

Nitrocellulose is a cellulose derivative that has many potential applications. Nitrocellulose can bemade through nitration reactions by reacting cellulose and nitric acid at low temperatures. Cellulose can be obtained from lignocellulose biomass such as palm oil empty fruit bunches (POEFBs). In this study, techno-economic evaluation of nitrocellulose production from POEFBs was investigated with various types of alkaline and acid pretreatments. Pretreatment of POEFBs with alkaline and acid was used to purify cellulose fraction as raw material for nitrocellulose. The combination process of POEFBs pretreatment with alkaline and acid can be classified into 4 process routes such as ammonium hydroxide and sulfuric acid pretreatment (Route-1), ammonium hydroxide and acetic acid pretreatment (Route-2), sodium hydroxide and sulfuric acid pretreatment (Route-3), and sodium hydroxide and acetic acid pretreatment (Route-4). The results showed that ammonium hydroxide and sulfuric acid pretreatment (Route-1) was the most profitable route to produce nitrocellulose. Economic parameter values such as return of investment (ROI), payback period (PBP), net present value (NPV) and internal rate of return (IRR) from ammonium hydroxide and sulfuric acid pretreatment (Route-1) were 11.49%, 5.85 years, US$ 442,427 and 13.35%.

A metafrontier slack-based efficiency measure is presented to measure environmental efficiency for various regions in China. The objective of the new approach is to investigate the change of environmental efficiency while incorporating group heterogeneities and all variable slack and environmental pollutants into environmental efficiency analysis. Global production technology is used to improve the discriminating power of environmental efficiency measurement. An empirical analysis of regional environmental efficiency is carried out incorporating sulfur dioxide emissions and the chemical oxygen demand (COD) of China’s regions from 2000–2011. Results indicate that excessive emissions pollution is the major cause of environmental inefficiency. Most of the regions return environmental efficiency values. Significant regional technology gaps in environmental efficiency are found between the east, central, and west areas. Finally, some policy implications are presented from the empirical results.

AbstractThis paper is about to quantify the effect of China's urbanization on greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions by separating the part driven by the economic growth from the whole effect. In order to be accurate to estimate unknown parameters, this paper follows the method of Blanchard & Quah (1989), in which identifying conditions are set by assuming some shocks have no long-term effect on corresponding explained variables. We conclude that 1) Urbanization shock has an inverted hump-shaped effect on GHG emissions, in other words, nowadays the process of China's urbanization has been accompanied with saving energy and reducing emissions; 2) The growth rate of GHG emissions, owning to the GDP shock, can be raised by almost 1.53% annually and the urbanization level approximately contributes to 18% of the change of CO2 emissions based on empirical results; 3) China's emission reductions, in the short run, are actualy in expense of decreasing economic growth and delaying the p rocess of its urbanization.

The "solid-liquid" leakage and low thermal conductivity of organic phase change materials limit their wide range of applications. In this paper, a novel carbon fiber/boron nitride (CF/BN)-based nested structure was constructed, and then, a series of poly(ethylene glycol) (PEG)-based phase change composites (PCCs) with high thermal conductivity and mechanical strength were prepared via the simple vacuum adsorption technology by employing the CF/BN nested structure as the heat conduction path and supporting material and the in situ obtained cross-linking epoxy resin as another supporting material. The thermal conductivity of the obtained PCC is as high as 0.81 W/m K, which is 7.4 times higher than that sample without the CF/BN nested structure. The support of the double skeletons confers the obtained PCCs with excellent mechanical strength. Surprisingly, there is not any deformation for PCCs under the pressure of 128.5 times its own weight during the phase change process. In addition, the phase change enthalpy of the obtained PCC is as high as 107.9 J/g. All the results indicate that the obtained PEG-based PCCs possess huge application potential in the field of industrial waste heat recovery.

The growing interest in sustainable development is reflected in both the market’s sensitivity to environmental and social issues and companies’ interest in the opportunities that sustainable development objectives provide. SMEs, which account for most of the world’s pollution, have significant resource constraints for a sustainable development. Sharing their scarce resources can help them to overcome these constraints and to gain agility and organisational resilience against uncertainties, but the distrust inherent in belonging to different companies prevents them from sharing the necessary information for coordination purposes. This paper presents a coordination mechanism proposal with information asymmetry to allow independent companies’ resources to be sustainably shared as a technological driver. The proposed distributed coordination mechanism is compared to both a decentralised–uncoordinated and a centralised situation. The interest of the proposal is evaluated by a computer simulation experiment employing mathematical programming models with independent objectives in the Generic Materials and Operations Planning formulation with a rolling horizon procedure in different demand, uncertainty and product scenarios. Competitive improvement is identified for all members for their excess capacity use and their operations planning.

To foster the implementation of Industrial Symbiosis, several support tools have been developed to facilitate the dissemination of Industrial Symbiosis (IS) and the engagement of stakeholders; the establishment of exchanges between companies, the so-called synergies; and the assessment of impacts and benefits. Despite this, it has been found that stakeholders still do not have a clear envisioning of the required steps to the technical implementation of synergies and there are no facilitating tools, such as methodologies, frameworks, modelling tools, and databases, among others, that aid to technically support decision-making of synergy implementation. Thus, the goal of this paper is to present a dedicated framework that provides a set of guidelines and defines a technical viability analysis to support the implementation of potential synergies, which can be used and replicated by any IS practitioner. It comprehends a methodological approach to assess the compliance of a given synergy opportunity; its characterization concerning the definition of the necessary intermediary steps for the technical implementation; and an assessment of the technical feasibility of the synergy. The implementation of the framework allowed the successful technical validation of the studied synergy opportunities, providing a final technical viability assessment that can support decision-making of technology selection and synergy implementation.

Understanding the global environmental impacts of local consumption is an area of growing interest among policymakers and consumers. By knowing what products comprise urban consumption “hotspots,” municipalities and consumers alike could take deliberate actions to target and discourage consumption of high-impact products. In this paper, a new method for identifying environmental hotspots of consumption is presented. The main methodological advances are the following: i) material flow analysis of urban areas and life cycle assessment are combined; ii) a 16-year time-series of urban consumption data is used for selection of the most suitable representative products and for trend analysis; iii) representative products are selected systematically from consumption data of 1000 product types; iv) representative products are scaled up to represent consumption of the product groups; v) hotspots are identified by simultaneously evaluating six environmental impacts - acidification, climate change, eutrophication (marine and freshwater), photochemical ozone formation, and resource use; vi) for the case study, hotspots are connected to the city's profiles. The method was applied to the Swedish cities Stockholm, Gothenburg and Malmo and to Sweden in total. Electronics is a hotspot for all the studied areas and all the studied impacts and should be a prioritized product group for action. Fuel is a hotspot shared by all the areas while vehicles is a hotspot in Gothenburg. Meat is a nationwide hotspot, but not for the cities investigated. Gothenburg and Stockholm could collaborate to find effective measures for their common hotspot machinery. Thus, the method can be used to identify hotspots and find which product types could be part of national versus local programs.