Decentralized aerobic composting of urban solid wastes: Some lessons learned from Asian-EU cooperative research

2013 ◽  
Vol 12 (4) ◽  
pp. 343-351

Composting of organic solid wastes is gaining in importance worldwide, in the frame of integrated municipal solid waste management and, in particular, the diversion of biodegradables from landfilling. At the post-consumer stage, this can be achieved by composting practices ranging from large-scale facilities to home (or yard) composting. Increasing costs for final disposal of MSW also point towards the use of composting technology as an alternative. This paper presents some results and conclusions from various small-scale composting activities implemented in Hanoi and Manila under different socio-economic settings, as well as a case study on a larger-scale composting scheme in the Prefecture of Pieria, Greece in the frame of a 2-year joint research project. It focuses on recommendations towards the Asian partners on how to improve their composting processes, on the basis of reviewing and assessing current composting practices in Vietnam and the Philippines, as well as some remarks on cost parameters for the Hellenic case study.

2008 ◽  
Vol 2008 (1) ◽  
pp. 1163-1169
Author(s):  
Leslie J. Craig ◽  
Tom Pride

ABSTRACT The use of pilot studies can be a useful tool in determining the most appropriate location, method and design for a large scale restoration project. This paper provides a case study where Trustees implemented a small pilot project and feasibility study to determine the best approach for a large scale oyster reef creation project. While the specific case study is the result of a CERCLA settlement (Alafia River Acid Spill of 1997), this model is transferable to other instances where Trustees are scoping for the most appropriate sites and methods to conduct settlement funded restoration. The Restoration Plan and Environmental Assessment on which the case settlement was based called for creation of approximately 4 acres of oyster reef in addition to 4 acres of estuarine marsh restoration. Through an initial scoping process, the Trustees determined that more information was needed to select the most appropriate locations and techniques to implement the large scale oyster restoration project. The Trustees identified 3 general locations with potential for larger scale oyster reef creation. A portion of settlement funding was used to contract for construction and monitoring of an oyster reef pilot project to examine the efficacy of oyster reef construction at the three locations using 4 different cultch materials. At each of the locations, 4 small reefs (approximately 75’ × 20’) were constructed and monitored for spat set, oyster survival and growth as well as subsidence. A baseline construction report and final monitoring report detailed the results. In addition, a separate report was completed that outlined the feasibility of constructing a 4 acre oyster reef in Hillsborough Bay, FL. This report included several construction considerations such as local sources and costs of cultch materials, shipping/transport, staging areas, construction equipment as well as potential local contractors. This paper reports the results of the oyster pilot project and feasibility report as well as lessons learned from each approach.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Steluta topalov

<p>On 4 august 2020, one of the biggest non-nuclear explosions the world has seen in recent times took place in the Port of Beirut. Caused by the detonation of 2,750 tons of ammonium nitrate, inadequate stored in a warehouse in the port, the blast destroyed much of the city’s port and the surrounding infrastructure and severly  damaged the dense residential and commercial areas within 5 km of the explosion site. The impact of the explosion, which registered as a 3.3 magnitude earthquake according to the U.S. Geological Survey, was felt as far away as the island of Cyprus.</p><p>Athough the event was an technological hazard, the impact of the explosion is similar to a standardised natural disaster.</p><p>According to UNDP, a total of 200 000 residential units were affected with an estimated of 40 000 buildings damaged; 200 people lost their lives, around 6 000 individuals were injuried and around 300 000 people were displaced.</p><p>Such figure are comparable to other large-scale disasters such as Cyclone Vayu in India, which occured in June 2019 or the displacement caused by the Typhoon Vongfong, in the Philippines.</p><p>The frequent increase of the natural disasters  puts pressure on the critical infrastructure of the cities. The disruption of the transportation system,  which is vital for the sustainable daily operations, are having a big impact on the economical, enviromental and social dimension of a city system. Among the various types of transportation system, ports are a focal point because of its strategic role for the economic growth of cities,regions and  global network. In addition, they are nodal points for the social and economical activity of the inhabitants.</p><p>Although the ports have played a key role in the development of their host cities, they are also vulnerable to a broad range of risks and threats because of a particular spatial character: the location at the intersection of land and sea.  </p><p>The study of the Beirut’s Port explosion examines the impact of port failures on the host urban enviroment and the relationship between hazards, vulnerability and the impact. The vulnerability of the port to disasters results  to the vulnerability of its host city. A context –based understanding  of the impact of the disaster and the elements at risk is essential to identify appropriate risk management strategies. The location of the port within the urban environment, in densely populated area, as in case of Beirut are some of the characteristics of the port cities that can magnify the impact of disasters to which they are prone.  The study will focus on a collection of data that records the impact and allows visualisation of the complex patterns of the disaster risk reduction.</p><p>The impact caused by the Beirut’s port explosion reminds us about the important role of the ports in their host cities and how fundamental is to identify the port’s infrastructure  exposure to hazards and risks.  Lessons learned from such event may be useful to reduce disaster risks in the port cities.</p>


2017 ◽  
Vol 22 (6) ◽  
pp. 486-505 ◽  
Author(s):  
Benjamin Tukamuhabwa ◽  
Mark Stevenson ◽  
Jerry Busby

Purpose In few prior empirical studies on supply chain resilience (SCRES), the focus has been on the developed world. Yet, organisations in developing countries constitute a significant part of global supply chains and have also experienced the disastrous effects of supply chain failures. The purpose of this paper is therefore to empirically investigate SCRES in a developing country context and to show that this also provides theoretical insights into the nature of what is meant by resilience. Design/methodology/approach Using a case study approach, a supply network of 20 manufacturing firms in Uganda is analysed based on a total of 45 interviews. Findings The perceived threats to SCRES in this context are mainly small-scale, chronic disruptive events rather than discrete, large-scale catastrophic events typically emphasised in the literature. The data reveal how threats of disruption, resilience strategies and outcomes are inter-related in complex, coupled and non-linear ways. These interrelationships are explained by the political, cultural and territorial embeddedness of the supply network in a developing country. Further, this embeddedness contributes to the phenomenon of supply chain risk migration, whereby an attempt to mitigate one threat produces another threat and/or shifts the threat to another point in the supply network. Practical implications Managers should be aware, for example, of potential risk migration from one threat to another when crafting strategies to build SCRES. Equally, the potential for risk migration across the supply network means managers should look at the supply chain holistically because actors along the chain are so interconnected. Originality/value The paper goes beyond the extant literature by highlighting how SCRES is not only about responding to specific, isolated threats but about the continuous management of risk migration. It demonstrates that resilience requires both an understanding of the interconnectedness of threats, strategies and outcomes and an understanding of the embeddedness of the supply network. Finally, this study’s focus on the context of a developing country reveals that resilience should be equally concerned both with smaller in scale, chronic disruptions and with occasional, large-scale catastrophic events.


Author(s):  
Ilda Vagge ◽  
◽  
Gioia Maddalena Gibelli ◽  
Alessio Gosetti Poli ◽  
◽  
...  

The authors, with the awareness that climate change affects and changes the landscape, wanted to investigate how these changes are occurring within the metropolitan area of Tehran. Trying to keep a holistic method that embraces different disciplines, reasoning from large scale to small scale, the authors tried to study the main problems related to water scarcity and loss of green spaces. Subsequently they dedicated themselves to the identification of the present and missing ecosystem services, so that they could be used in the best possible way as tools for subsequent design choices. From the analysis obtained, the authors have created a masterplan with the desire to ensure a specific natural capital, the welfare of ecosystem services, and at the same time suggest good water management practices. It becomes essential to add an ecological accounting to the economic accounting, giving dignity to the natural system and the ecosystem services that derive from it.


Author(s):  
Anjan Pakhira ◽  
Peter Andras

Testing is a critical phase in the software life-cycle. While small-scale component-wise testing is done routinely as part of development and maintenance of large-scale software, the system level testing of the whole software is much more problematic due to low level of coverage of potential usage scenarios by test cases and high costs associated with wide-scale testing of large software. Here, the authors investigate the use of cloud computing to facilitate the testing of large-scale software. They discuss the aspects of cloud-based testing and provide an example application of this. They describe the testing of the functional importance of methods of classes in the Google Chrome software. The methods that we test are predicted to be functionally important with respect to a functionality of the software. The authors use network analysis applied to dynamic analysis data generated by the software to make these predictions. They check the validity of these predictions by mutation testing of a large number of mutated variants of the Google Chrome. The chapter provides details of how to set up the testing process on the cloud and discusses relevant technical issues.


Author(s):  
Hans-Jörg Schmid

This chapter discusses how the Entrenchment-and-Conventionalization Model explains language change. First, it is emphasized that not only innovation and variation, but also the frequency of repetition can serve as important triggers of change. Conventionalization and entrenchment processes can interact and be influenced by numerous forces in many ways, resulting in various small-scale processes of language change, which can stop, change direction, or even become reversed. This insight serves as a basis for the systematic description of nine basic modules of change which differ in the ways in which they are triggered and controlled by processes and forces. Large-scale pathways of change such as grammaticalization, lexicalization, pragmaticalization, context-induced change, or colloquialization and standardization are all explained by reference to these modules. The system is applied in a case study on the history of do-periphrasis.


2018 ◽  
Vol 14 (4) ◽  
pp. 44-63
Author(s):  
Jan C. Thiele

Joint research projects in ecology typically aim to integrate scientific knowledge from various disciplines. This raises the request for collaboration technologies. As ecological research is data-intensive, it requires the management and exchange of large datasets, often with spatial reference. The demand for collaboration, data, and information management tools in science is addressed by the creation of digital service infrastructures, so-called eResearch Infrastructures, which are collections of typically web-based software systems. Here, an example eResearch infrastructure implemented for a joint research project is presented. It is described by the user stories, the derived functional requirements, and their implementation in software systems. This infrastructure followed an open-source paradigm with only two exceptions. Based on the lessons learned, recommendations for the future development of eResearch infrastructures and their embedment in an organizational, project, and scientific framework are derived.


2019 ◽  
Vol 112 ◽  
pp. 02011
Author(s):  
Cristian-Gabriel Alionte ◽  
Daniel-Constantin Comeaga

The importance of renewable energy and especially of eolian systems is growing. For this reason, we propose the investigation of an important pollutant - the noise, which has become so important that European Commission and European Parliament introduced Directive 2002/49/CE relating to the assessment and management of environmental noise. So far, priority has been given to very large-scale systems connected to national energy systems, wind farms whose highly variable output power could be regulated by large power systems. Nowadays, with the development of small storage capacities, it is feasible to install small power wind turbines in cities of up to 10,000 inhabitants too. As a case study, we propose a simulation for a rural locality where individual wind units could be used. This specific case study is interesting because it provides a new perspective of the impact of noise on the quality of life when the use of this type of system is implemented on a large scale. This option, of distributed and small power wind turbine, can be implemented in the future as an alternative or an adding to the common systems.


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