The Transportation – Production Tradeoff in the Regional Environmental Impact of Industrial Systems: A Case Study in the Paper Sector

2000 ◽  
Vol 32 (5) ◽  
pp. 817-832 ◽  
Author(s):  
Francis M Vanek

The author presents a methodology which is used first to model a product-manufacturing-and-distribution system, and then to predict the resulting changes in environmental impact from changes either in taxation or in costs of inputs. A case study of the paper sector in the eastern and central United States is developed, derived from the 1993 US Commodity Flow Survey. From an analysis of five scenarios, two central findings arise: (1) the model is found to be unresponsive to even large changes in transport taxation, so an environmental policy which considers both transportation and production aspects at the same time is favored, and (2) fluctuations in raw-material costs can have an influence on environmental impact as great as or greater than that of changes in taxation levels.

Energies ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 138 ◽  
Author(s):  
Allen H. Hu ◽  
Chia-Hsiang Chen ◽  
Lance Hongwei Huang ◽  
Ming-Hsiu Chung ◽  
Yi-Chen Lan ◽  
...  

Climate change is an important global environmental threat. Agriculture aggravates climate change by increasing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, and in response, climate change reduces agricultural productivity. Consequently, the modern agricultural development mode has progressively transformed into a kind of sustainable development mode. This study aimed to determine the environmental impact and carbon footprint of Dongshan tea from Yilan County. Environmental impact was assessed with use of SimaPro version 8.0.2 and IMPACT2002+. Results showed that climate change has the largest impact upon it in general, followed by human health, natural resources, and ecosystem quality. Furthermore, with use of the IPCC 2007 100a method for carbon footprint of products (CFP), conventional tea was found to have a CFP of 7.035 kgCO2-e, and its main contributors are the raw material (35.15%) and consumer use (45.58%) phases. From this case study, we found that the hotspots of the life cycle of environmental impact of Taiwanese tea mainly come from fertilizer input during the raw material phase, electricity use during manufacturing, and electricity use during water boiling in the consumer use phase (which contributes the largest impact). We propose the ways for consumers to use of highly efficient boiling water facilities and heating preservation, and the government must market the use of organic fertilizers in the national policy subsidies, and farmers have to prudent use of fertilizers and promote the use of local raw fertilizers, and engagement in direct sales for reducing the environmental impacts and costs of agricultural products and thus advancing sustainable agriculture development.


2015 ◽  
Vol 7 (3) ◽  
pp. 1360-1371
Author(s):  
Olen Dias ◽  
Alexander Vaninsky

This paper applies the Generalized Divisia Index to decompose the CO2 emissions into eight components and uses the Factor Analysis to determine their clusters - the combinations of related components that play the leading role. Economic analysis of these clusters allows for the determination of the main  drivers of the CO2 emissions. As a case study, we used the data of the United States from 1950 through 2040 separated into three periods: 1950 - 1980; 1981 -  2012, and 2013 - 2040, each characterized by a specific type of socioeconomic development: industrial, post-industrial, and information, respectively. Data for the last period are projections. As a result, we got an insight into the typology of the CO2 emissions and obtained recommendations on environmental policy aimed at their mitigation.


2018 ◽  
Vol 19 (12) ◽  
pp. 2007-2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jiaying Zhang ◽  
Liao-Fan Lin ◽  
Rafael L. Bras

Abstract Hydrological applications rely on the availability and quality of precipitation products, especially model- and satellite-based products for use in areas without ground measurements. It is known that the quality of model- and satellite-based precipitation products is complementary: model-based products exhibit high quality during cold seasons while satellite-based products are better during warm seasons. To explore the complementary behavior of the quality of the precipitation products, this study uses 2-m air temperature as auxiliary information to evaluate high-resolution (0.1°/hourly) precipitation estimates from the Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) Model and from the version 5 Integrated Multisatellite Retrievals for GPM (IMERG) algorithm (i.e., early and final runs). The products are evaluated relative to the reference NCEP Stage IV precipitation estimates over the central United States during August 2015–July 2017. Results show that the IMERG final-run estimates are nearly unbiased, while the IMERG early-run and the WRF estimates are positively biased. The WRF estimates exhibit high correlations with the reference data when the temperature falls below 280 K. The IMERG estimates, both early and final runs, do so when the temperature exceeds 280 K. Moreover, the complementary behavior of the WRF and the IMERG products conditioned on air temperature does not vary with either season or location.


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