Municipal Urban Waste Management—Challenges for Polish Cities in an Era of Circular Resource Management

Municipal authorities increasingly view environmental protection as one of the goals of city management. The pro-environmental orientation of cities can, therefore, foster the creation of new management methods and instruments and promote reorganization of determining material flows in a municipal system. Activities of this kind should result not only in the reduction of generated waste but also in the creation of closed material cycles. Considering the tasks of Polish local governments, municipalities should pay the most attention to municipal waste. Accordingly, the goal of this study was to identify the problem of mixed municipal waste in cities and assess the influence of investments into fixed assets for environmental protection in the scope of waste management on the quantity of mixed municipal waste in cities. This article also identifies activities for circular resource management that need to be realized by Polish municipalities. The analysis was performed using the panel model, dynamic indexes, and critical analysis of city documents. The conducted research revealed positive trends in cities with respect to the amount of waste collected non-selectively that is conducive to circular resource management. The fact that municipal waste quantity is on the increase should encourage urban authorities to promote pro-environmental waste management behaviors among city dwellers.

GeoERA´s Contribution Towards Resilience in Europe’s Raw Materials Supply Chains

<p>The well-being of society and the interdependencies of national economies depend heavily on reliably functioning supply chains as the COVID-19 pandemic proved this long-known statement in everyone's daily life. None of the supply chains can do without the mostly mineral raw materials. The United Nations sees raw materials as the key component for achieving all 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The European Green Deal (COM(2019) 640 final) of the European Union as well as the Paris Agreement cannot be achieved without raw materials. The IPR Global Resources Outlook 2019 [1] foresees an increasing demand for raw materials worldwide regardless of all efforts to further close the raw material cycles. At the same time, the demand for responsible procurement under ethically, socially and ecologically sound conditions is becoming more and more stringent.</p><p>The four GeoERA Raw Materials projects EuroLITHOS, FRAME, MINDeSEA and Mintell4EU share expertise, information and focus on European on-shore and off-shore resources as a first step to take our share of responsibility to ensure responsible sourcing from domestic sources [2]. It is among the tasks of the GeoERA raw material projects to know and evaluate in a comparable way the raw materials of the geology under our feet and to visualize these results in accessible databases, maps and publications.</p><p>Results will be presented and discussed on the example of selected raw materials that are particularly important for the energy transition to make Europe climate-neutral by 2050.</p><p> </p><p> </p>

Challenges in Ecofriendly Battery Recycling and Closed Material Cycles: A Perspective on Future Lithium Battery Generations

The global use of lithium-ion batteries of all types has been increasing at a rapid pace for many years. In order to achieve the goal of an economical and sustainable battery industry, the recycling and recirculation of materials is a central element on this path. As the achievement of high 95% recovery rates demanded by the European Union for some metals from today’s lithium ion batteries is already very challenging, the question arises of how the process chains and safety of battery recycling as well as the achievement of closed material cycles are affected by the new lithium battery generations, which are supposed to enter the market in the next 5 to 10 years. Based on a survey of the potential development of battery technology in the next years, where a diversification between high-performance and cost-efficient batteries is expected, and today’s knowledge on recycling, the challenges and chances of the new battery generations regarding the development of recycling processes, hazards in battery dismantling and recycling, as well as establishing a circular economy are discussed. It becomes clear that the diversification and new developments demand a proper separation of battery types before recycling, for example by a transnational network of dismantling and sorting locations, and flexible and high sophisticated recycling processes with case-wise higher safety standards than today. Moreover, for the low-cost batteries, recycling of the batteries becomes economically unattractive, so legal stipulations become important. However, in general, it must be still secured that closing the material cycle for all battery types with suitable processes is achieved to secure the supply of raw materials and also to further advance new developments.

Residual Multi-Attention Classification Network for A Forest Dominated Tropical Landscape Using High-Resolution Remote Sensing Imagery

Tropical forests are of vital importance for maintaining biodiversity, regulating climate and material cycles while facing deforestation, agricultural reclamation, and managing various pressures. Remote sensing (RS) can support effective monitoring and mapping approaches for tropical forests, and to facilitate this we propose a deep neural network with an encoder–decoder architecture here to classify tropical forests and their environment. To deal with the complexity of tropical landscapes, this method utilizes a multi-scale convolution neural network (CNN) to expand the receptive field and extract multi-scale features. The model refines the features with several attention modules and fuses them through an upsampling module. A two-stage training strategy is proposed to alleviate misclassifications caused by sample imbalances. A joint loss function based on cross-entropy loss and the generalized Dice loss is applied in the first stage, and the second stage used the focal loss to fine-tune the weights. As a case study, we use Hainan tropical reserves to test the performance of this model. Compared with four state-of-the-art (SOTA) semantic segmentation networks, our network achieves the best performance with two Hainan datasets (mean intersection over union (MIoU) percentages of 85.78% and 82.85%). We also apply the new model to classify a public true color dataset which has 17 semantic classes and obtain results with an 83.75% MIoU. This further demonstrates the applicability and potential of this model in complex classification tasks.

An Estimation of Fish Biomass and Attached Organisms beneath Oyster Rafts in Hiroshima Bay, Japan

Hiroshima Bays is top production approximately 60% of oyster production in Japan. For cultivate of oyster, fishermen use hanging rafts. A thousand of raft is hanging during 2-3 years in the bay. Large-scale oyster culture may change the ecosystem structure and material cycles in the bay through the filtration of particulate matter by oysters and other associated animals. This study described the community structure of marine organisme in terms of fishes surrounding and animal attached on oyster rafts. Field observation was carried out from 2016 to 2019 at oyster farming in Hiroshima Bay. Oyster production and provisioning for the fish habitat were also evaluated by placing underwater video cameras beneath oyster culture rafts. The result showed that black seabream was high biomass and oyster it shelf was bigger bioyster for animal attached on oyster raft. The number of individual, mussel is most abundance of animal attach on oyster raft with ratio 9:1 than number of oyster. Maintaining oyster culture is important not only for maintaining oyster production, but also for maintaining fish production by enhancing material cycles through the paths in the food chains of Hiroshima Bay under oligotrophic conditions.

Integrated LCA and OPEN LCA-CML baseline analysis on environmental impact associated with the plastic packaging waste management system of Rubavu city Rwanda

Over the past few decades, the life cycle assessment (LCA) has been established as a critical tool for evaluating environmental issues of chemical processes and material cycles. Plastic bottles are the most used materials for packaging beverages and other liquids. In Rubavu, wasted plastic bottles end their lives in Rutagara. This is an open dumpsite that is home to all of the different types of generated waste of Rubavu city, and its management is alarming. This study analyses the impact on the environment associated with the existing plastic bottle waste pathways in Rubavu, Rwanda, from the cradle to the grave perspective until the other process in Nairobi Kenya, as an extended process. Questionnaires, Interviews, Literature: scientific papers, government reports and internet websites were used through this study to get both primary and secondary data. Open LCA CML (baseline) method was applied to analyze the environmental impacts caused by plastic bottles during their management, focusing on its parameters conspicuously: acidification potential, climate change (GWP100), depletion of abiotic resources (elements, ultimate reserves), depletion of abiotic resources (fossil fuels), eutrophication (generic), freshwater aquatic ecotoxicity( FAETP inf), human toxicity (HTP inf), marine aquatic ecotoxicity (MAETP inf), ozone layer depletion (ODP steady-state), photochemical oxidation (high NOx), terrestrial ecotoxicity (TETP inf). Two alternatives to these were also analysed: sanitary landfill, and recycling, described as scenarios 1 and 2. In this framework, the result of LCA shows that the use of landfill was found to have the highest adverse environmental effects, and this process has resulted in high global warming potential due to plastic bottle packaging waste decomposition effects as they release methane and ethylene, which contributes significantly to the greenhouse gases.