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This research focuses on quantifying the flows of gold related to small waste electrical and electronic equipment in Germany and in the USA. The results demonstrate that for mobile phones in Germany, only about 5% of the gold is currently recovered. These losses are due to insufficient collection and inadequate treatment.
Micro systems with autonomous energy supply exhibit a high potential for the realisation of highly miniaturised, cost- and material-efficient wireless sensing applications. The conversion of electromagnetic, thermal and kinetic energy from the ambient environment into electric energy by means of 'energy scavenging' is an approach to support or even replace primary batteries to in long-term applications...
Many commercial print applications - book publishing, newspaper and magazine production, paper-based marketing material and numerous others - are characterized by high levels of over-production and waste. Printed matter is manufactured and distributed to end users, retailers and warehouses, where a proportion is unwanted or loses its value before being sold. Subsequently, obsolete printed material...
In the process of designing a successful plant for recycling E-scrap, one identifies many areas that depend on the business environment and legal framework that will evolve. Therefore, it is most important to first support the development of the legal framework in which the recycling industry will develop. North America is currently going through the process of developing that framework. Different...
To achieve better fuel economy, automakers are seriously considering vehicle weight and size reduction. This is achieved by using lighter-weight materials like high-strength steel and aluminum, better vehicle design, and offering smaller vehicle models. To consider the effectiveness of these approaches, it is important to take into account the dynamic life-cycle energy and environmental impacts. For...
No two sciences have been more directly informative of sustainability than thermodynamics (the science of energy and material resources) and economics (the science of how those resources are allocated for production, distribution, and consumption). Both disciplines share a preoccupation with understanding efficiency, which is critical to many interpretations of sustainability and so it is not surprising...
In this paper we address the problem of taking the general notion of sustainability as reported in the Brundtland Report and later in Arrow et al approach and interpreting it from a thermodynamics point of view, with a goal of developing operational principles of sustainability in terms of physical principles that complement economic views.
This paper is a case study of the implementation of one of the nation's largest solar array panel arrays, within a year's time frame at a public university. The state funding received for solar energy will create 2 megawatts per day for a savings of 22 million dollars over 30 years.
This article explores concepts and methods to characterize long-term limits on the capacity of technology to deliver energy services based on thermodynamics, or more generally, physical laws. Carnot's law, for example, places an upper limit in the ability of a heat engine to deliver useful work. The framework developed starts with characterizing different energy services deemed necessary for a sustainable...
This paper summarizes recent explorations of the use of lifetime exergy consumption as a thermodynamically based metric for sustainability of information technologies. Other proposed thermodynamic metrics are described and compared with life cycle exergy consumption. The pros and cons of different metrics are discussed, and the advantages of life cycle exergy as a metric for information technologies...
Environmental policy making, green product rating, and marketing activities seem likely to drive the utilization of eco-assessments in the near future. In this paper we show from the example of EuP Preparatory Studies and other policy supporting studies some characteristics of ICT eco-assessments on different economical levels. We argue that the high diversity of individual cases coupled with technology...
Corporations and institutions, including the electronics manufacturing and computer services sectors have become concerned with their impacts on climate change and are participating in carbon footprint assessment and climate management discussions. Existing carbon footprint protocols classify carbon footprint into tiered ldquoScopesrdquo: direct emissions as ldquoScope 1rdquo, emissions from direct...
Vehicle lightweighting, or mass reduction, via materials substitution is a common approach to improve fuel economy. The many subsystems in a vehicle, choices of materials, and manufacturing processes available, though, lead to numerous paths to achieving the mass reduction and identifying the best ones for an automaker to implement can be a challenge. In this paper, that challenge is addressed through...
In this paper, we describe an integrated design and management approach to creating a sustainable IT ecosystem: a physical infrastructure where information technology has been seamlessly interwoven to improve environmental efficiency while achieving lower cost. Specifically, we describe five principles to achieve such integration: ecosystem-scale life-cycle design; scalable and configurable resource...
The value in identifying current trends and viewing them in a historical light is that the results can be used to inform ongoing policy and investment decisions. This paper highlights historic and current patterns in human population, energy use, and culture, with technological development as both a facilitating and resultant factor. It is shown that there is a positive relationship between national...
Several recent events in the U.S. have highlighted the criticality and vulnerability of infrastructure systems to sudden shocks such as natural disasters, terrorist attacks, and food shortages. Proper understanding of such disruptive scenarios and their impact using holistic and integrated systems modeling techniques is crucial for effective resource allocation and disaster management. An input-output...
Materials selection decisions exhibit great influence on the environmental performance of firms through their impact on processing technology, product form, and supply chain configuration. Consequently, materials dictate a product's environmental profile via the burden associated with extraction and refining, transformation from material to product, product performance characteristics during use,...
Existing Life Cycle Assessment does not take into account the relative temporal differences in inventory data. The lack of such considerations could lead to an inaccurate analysis of impacts and to incorrect conclusions in the comparative studies of products with comparable inventories but different life cycle times. In this paper, we report on our research of the investigation of the embedded temporal...
A schematic method to characterize the human health impact of toxic chemicals is presented. This schematic method uses a streamlined three-tiered hierarchy process which includes intake, toxicity and persistence of a chemical release for its impact characterization. The human health impact of a chemical is represented by its position in a two-dimensional characterization plot, which enables the benchmarking...
China plays an important role in waste electrical and electronic equipment (WEEE, also known as e-waste) recycling around the world. Over 0.7 million people were employed for e-waste recycling industry in 2007, and 98% in the informal recycling sector. These informal e-waste recycling activities pose significant threats to the environment as well public health. Based on analysis of the current policies...
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