Global Resource Consumption Research Articles

Enhancing Green Port Construction through Advanced Computing: An Evolutionary Game Model under Social Accountability and Government Supervision

Ports, as pivotal hubs for global resource consumption and pollution emissions, have garnered considerable attention in the pursuit of sustainability. Despite the Chinese government’s efforts in promoting the green construction of ports and a growing public awareness of environmental protection, progress remains sluggish, with pollution and energy consumption issues still rampant. This paper introduces an evolutionary game model that leverages advanced computing techniques, including big data analytics and simulation, to optimize green port construction strategies, supervision, and enforcement under the lens of social accountability. By applying the Jacobi matrix for analyzing equilibrium paths at diverse initial settings and conducting simulations under various scenarios of punishment intensity and social accountability probabilities, this study unveils that high social accountability likelihoods naturally incentivize ports towards green practices. Conversely, in low accountability scenarios, differentiated outcomes emerge from imposing penalties on ports and local governments. Notably, increasing penalties on ports substantially elevates green construction standards, whereas local government penalties exhibit only transient efficacy. Furthermore, leveraging artificial intelligence for predictive analysis and simulation demonstrates the critical role of technological advancements in enhancing green port construction. The study proposes augmenting penalties on ports, amplifying social oversight, and diminishing green construction costs via port consortia as strategic measures to expedite China’s transition to green ports.

Low carbon concrete for prefabricated modular construction in circular economy: An integrated approach towards sustainability, durability, cost, and mechanical performances

The construction industry accounts for significant global resource consumption and carbon emissions through cement production, concrete mix design and building operation, which can be affected by the constituent composition, mechanical and thermal performance of concrete mix. Prefabrication and circular economy nowadays can be a game-changer for the construction industry. This study investigates the effects of concrete mix design on the sustainability, carbonation-induced durability, cost, and mechanical performances of a standard module of prefabricated modular construction throughout the whole life cycle in circular economy. Sixteen concrete mixes, including ordinary Portland cement (OPC) concrete blended with supplementary cementitious materials, ultra-lightweight cement composite (ULCC) with calcined clay and limestone replacement, and foam concrete, are examined. Comprehensive life cycle cost, mechanical, durability and sustainability assessments are conducted for the concrete mixes, considering expected service lives of 50, 100, and 150 years. Results indicate that prolonging service life from 50 years to 150 years in circular economy can improve the annual sustainability performances by up to 20 %. Utilizing lightweight concrete (ULCC and foam concrete) can reduce energy consumption for air-conditioning by 17 % and decrease transportation-related costs by from 30 % to 15 %. ULCC mix demonstrates superior overall performance due to its reduced weight, low thermal conductivity, and enhanced durability, showing improvements up to 25 % compared to OPC concrete.

A Decade Review of Research Trends Using Waste Materials in the Building and Construction Industry: A Pathway towards a Circular Economy

The construction industry is among the most prominent contributors to global resource consumption, waste production, and greenhouse gas emissions. A pivotal step toward mitigating these sectoral impacts lies in the adoption of a circular production and consumption system. The use of alternative waste materials can mitigate landfill accumulation and the associated detrimental environmental effects. To highlight unconventional materials, this study began with a bibliometric assessment via a bibliography analyzis software called “Bibliometrix” (version 4.1.3). The outputs from the analyzis can assist in identifying research trends, gaps in literature and benchmark research performance. The search engine used for sourcing publications was Scopus, using the main criteria as “Waste materials used in building and construction”. The time-period analysed was from 2013 to 2023. The results included publications obtained in journal articles, book chapters and conference proceedings. The assessment reviewed 6238 documents from 1482 sources. The results revealed an array of waste materials; however, rubber, textiles, and ceramics had a significant reduction in research attention. Rubber waste presents promising opportunities in civil concrete construction methods. The preparatory steps of textile fibres in composite materials are frequently disregarded, resulting in structural issues for the end-product. Obstacles persist in ceramic technology due to the absence of transparency, primarily because industry entities closely safeguard proprietary information. While sustainability research often emphasizes emissions, practical trials commonly revolve around integrating materials into current systems. A more comprehensive approach, contemplating the complete lifecycle of materials, could provide deeper insights into fostering sustainable construction practices. Researchers can use these findings when determining trends, research gaps, and future research directions.

Barriers and Enablers to the Adoption of Circular Economy Concept in the Building Sector: A Systematic Literature Review

The building sector is a major contributor to global resource consumption and waste generation. The circular economy (CE) concept offers a promising alternative to the traditional linear economy by promoting the reuse, remanufacture, repair, and recycling of materials and products. However, the adoption of CE in the building sector faces several barriers. This paper presents a systematic literature review utilising the PRISMA (Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses) approach, focusing on the barriers and enablers influencing the adoption of the CE concept in the building sector. Drawing from an analysis of numerous papers published between 2008 and 2023, we identified a high number of barriers and enablers that delay the integration of CE. The barriers were categorised into six categories: awareness, technical, economic and market, implementation, support/promotion, and social. The paper also discusses the interdependence of the identified barriers, using a co-occurrence matrix. The study findings indicate lack of CE regulations, fragment supply chain, and high upfront investment cost as major barriers to the implementation of CE in the building sector. Based on the study results, stringent governance and legislation, financial incentives, and the development of technology and innovation for circular building tools are critical factors for the successful implementation of CE principles. The results of this study provide a comprehensive overview of the feasibility to CE adoption in the building sector, which could also help to develop strategies to accelerate the transition to an integrated CE.

Sustainability

Humanity is currently using the Earth’s resources at a much higher rate than that at which the planet can regenerate them. Public awareness of this problem is increasing, especially with regard to issues such as the need to recycle waste, and to reduce our reliance on single-use plastic and on fossil fuels. However, the scale of the problem is still under-appreciated, and in many cases, there are no simple solutions to make our current systems truly sustainable. Meanwhile, the global human population is growing and despite higher awareness, our consumption of global resources is increasing rather than decreasing. This article explores some of the reasons why sustainability is such a complex problem and puts the case that an effective approach to sustainability will require effort from experts in fields ranging from economics to materials chemistry, as well as from legislators and leaders of industry.

Selection of eco-friendly alternative brick for sustainable development; A study on Technical, Economic, Environmental and Social feasibility

The pursuit of sustainable development has become increasingly important in addressing the challenges of environmental degradation and resource depletion. The construction industry accounts for significant global resource consumption and pollution. The study aims to investigate the selection of alternative bricks for sustainable development. Social, Economic, Environmental and Technical feasibility was studied to identify the best alternative brick. Five different bricks, i.e., Fired clay brick (FCB), Fly ash cement brick (FACB), Fly ash geopolymer brick (FAGB), Recycled concrete waste geopolymer brick (RCWB) and recycled brick waste geopolymer brick (RBWB), were developed and their technical and environmental impacts were studied. A life cycle analysis (LCA) of one brick was carried out, and seven impacts were studied and reported in this paper. Multi-criteria decision-making methodology (MCDM) was used to select the best brick. In addition, the microstructural properties of recycled geopolymer brick were investigated to study the morphology and mineralogy of the brick’s mixes. Sustainability Index (SI) indicates that fired bricks contribute a higher environmental impact per compressive strength in comparison with alternative bricks. According to the Analytical Hierarchy process (AHP), RBWB is the preferred choice with an overall weight of 0.22, followed by fly ash cement brick (0.217). The mineral resource scarcity (MRS) of 82–87 % can be reduced if alternative recycling waste materials were used in production of brick.

Greening the Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa (BRICS) economies: Assessing the impact of electricity consumption, natural resources, and renewable energy on environmental footprint

AbstractElectricity consumption is a crucial factor in the environmental pollution process, and therefore, its impact needs to be carefully considered by policymakers. This study investigates the relationship between energy consumption, electricity generation, natural resource utilization, and environmental pollution in BRICS nations, which have a substantial share in global resource consumption. To this end, we employed a novel methodology, namely the Method of Moment Quantile Regression (MMQR), for the time period between 1990 and 2018, within the framework of the Environmental Kuznets Curve (EKC) theory. The study's outcome shows that natural resources and renewable energy are efficacious and significant in curbing environmental degradation among the sample countries. The investigation reveals a positive correlation between electricity consumption and environmental degradation, thereby highlighting this vital resource's role in exacerbating the BRICS nations’ ecological footprint. The findings from this research can provide crucial insights for policymakers to achieve sustainable development and carbon neutrality in these countries.

Lateralization of autonomic output in response to limb-specific threat.

In times of stress or danger, the autonomic nervous system (ANS) signals the fight or flight response. A canonical function of ANS activity is to globally mobilize metabolic resources, preparing the organism to respond to threat. Yet a body of research has demonstrated that, rather than displaying a homogenous pattern across the body, autonomic responses to arousing events, as measured through changes in electrodermal activity (EDA), can differ between right and left body locations. Surprisingly, an attempt to identify a function of ANS asymmetry consistent with its metabolic role has not been investigated. In the current study, we investigated whether asymmetric autonomic responses could be induced through limb-specific aversive stimulation. Participants were given mild electric stimulation to either the left or right arm while EDA was monitored bilaterally. In a group-level analyses, an ipsilateral EDA response bias was observed, with increased EDA response in the hand adjacent to the stimulation. This effect was observable in ∼50% of individual participants. These results demonstrate that autonomic output is more complex than canonical interpretations suggest. We suggest that, in stressful situations, autonomic outputs can prepare either the whole-body fight or flight response, or a simply a limb-localized flick, which can effectively neutralize the threat while minimizing global resource consumption. These findings are consistent with recent theories proposing evolutionary leveraging of neural structures organized to mediate sensory responses for processing of cognitive emotional cues.

Global assessment of land and water resource demand for pork supply

Growing population and rising incomes are leading to an ever-increasing demand for animal-based foods. Pigmeat is currently the most consumed meat globally, even exceeding the consumption of poultry meat. Despite the disproportionate environmental burden of animal production—mostly attributable to associated feed demand, up-to-date country-scale quantifications of the land and water impacts of the concentrate feed (mainly cereals and soybean) and co-products required to support pig production are still missing. In addition, the specific role that international feed trade plays in separating resource use from consumption and in altering resource use efficiencies remains unclear. This paper analyses at a country-scale the internal and external consumption of natural resources (i.e. land and water) to support pig feed production in 2018. Combining data on the country- and production system-specific diets and crop-specific yields with an agro-hydrological model, we find that 64.1 Mha of agricultural land (5% of all croplands) and 332.6 km3 of water (both green and blue) (6% of all agricultural water use) were utilized by China, EU-27 and the United States (accounting for 70% of pigmeat production) to produce pig feed alone. Comparing domestic feed production scenarios with those that also consider the feed trade, we show that global resource consumption tends to be more efficient when considering international feed trade, especially in China and EU-27, while sometimes causing significant environmental impacts. This demonstrates the need to investigate the environmental effects of pig feed associated both with the domestic use of natural resources, but also to the ones displaced by international trade.

An Actuator Concept for Adaptive Concrete Columns

The building industry accounts for half of the global resource consumption and roughly one third of global CO2 emissions. Global population growth and increasing resource scarcities require engineers and architects to build for more people with less material and emissions. One promising solution are adaptive load-bearing structures. Here, the load-bearing structure is equipped with actuators, sensors, and a control unit which allows the structure to adapt to different load cases, resulting in substantial material savings. While the first prototypes use industry standard actuators to manipulate deformations and stress states, it is essential to develop actuator concepts which fit the specific requirements of civil engineering structures. This paper introduces new concepts for linear actuators, developed within the Collaborative Research Centre (SFB) 1244 Adaptive Skins and Structures for the Built Environment of Tomorrow, which can be used as adaptive concrete columns. The concept of an actuator which actuates a concrete column by external compression through hydraulic pressure is discussed in further detail. This concept allows for controlled axial extension while also increasing the compressive strength of the concrete column.

Learnings from Developing a Context-Specific LCA Tool for Buildings—The Case of LCAbyg 4

Buildings are a major cause of global resource consumption, greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and other impacts on the environment, originating from both operational energy and material use. Informed design decisions can help mitigate potential impacts on the environment, by the use of life cycle assessment (LCA) in the early project stages. In order to mitigate building environment impacts throughout the industry, architects and engineers need tools that are integrated in the design workflow and based on the information available. Existing LCA tools for building design professionals are predominantly embedded in a specific context such as a country or a sustainability scheme. This paper provides learnings for the development of context-tailored tools for building-LCA using the case of Denmark, with specific focus on GHG-emissions that are in focus worldwide. Based on stakeholder involvement, four key areas were defined: Default information, flexibility, environmental design feedback and transparent results. Tool functions include a component library and a quantity estimator for bridging incomplete building information. A comparison monitor displays the performance of design solutions selected in the model, while a number of graphs and tables provide analysis of inventory and results. Finally, a customisable model data export, a complete input/output file for revision and custom analysis are among key functions for transparency.

Innovation or Introduction? The Impact of Technological Progress Sources on Industrial Green Transformation of Resource-Based Cities in China

With the increasingly prominent problems of global resource consumption and environmental pollution, industrial green transformation has become one of the requirements of China’s industrial development in the new era. However, there is a lack of research on the impact of technological innovation and technology introduction on the industrial green transformation of resource-based cities. To bridge this gap, this study uses the panel data of 115 resource-based cities in China from 2003 to 2016, and uses the dynamic panel generalized method of moments (GMM) estimation method to study the impact of technological innovation and technology introduction on industrial green transformation of resource-based cities. The results show that technology introduction has a negative effect on the industrial green transformation of resource-based cities, while technological innovation can have a positive effect. Meanwhile, technology introduction has imparted a greater role to technological innovation in promoting this transformation. In addition, the interactive effects between technological innovation and technology introduction have obvious heterogeneity on the industrial green transformation of different types of resource-based cities. Therefore, resource-based cities should continue to increase investment in scientific research, to constantly improve and consolidate their technological innovation ability, optimize foreign investment strategy in technology introduction, and strengthen the digestion and absorption of imported technology, while increasing technological innovation and personnel training.

A Research on the Influence of Enterprise Sustainable Development Concept Information Communication Strategy on Consumers’ Purchasing Intention

With the continuous consumption of global resources, the concept of sustainable development has been paid more and more attention by enterprises.There’s been a lot of academic research on this topic, however, there are not many quantitative studies that taking sustainable development conception as an information communication strategy analyzes its impact on consumers’ purchasing intentions. From this new perspective, this article firstly establishes a conceptual model and divides the information communication strategies of enterprise sustainable development concept into four types, according to the goal and scale of framing effects. By the scenario simulation experimental method, this paper studies the influence of information communication strategy of enterprise sustainable development concept on consumers’ purchasing intention and the moderating effect of consumer knowledge, applying T test and regression analysis. The results show that:compared with the loss framework, the gaining framework for information communication strategy of sustainable development concept has a significant positive impact on consumers’ purchasing intention;and the lower the consumer knowledge is, the greater the influence of information communication strategy has effect on consumers’ purchasing intention.

Global resource consumption effects of borderless climate change: EU’s indirect vulnerability

Abstract We investigate how global climate change impacts affect the consumption of resources, namely water, labor, malaria risk and crops, across world regions. We quantify both impact channels, direct comprising domestic effects and indirect, subsuming cross-border effects. Methodologically we combine MRIO methodology, illustrating virtual flows of resources, with global climate change impact projections, showing climate induced changes of global resource availability. Our results underscore the importance of analyzing both, the direct and indirect climate change impact channels. Europe is predominantly indirectly affected, via imports from abroad, while for Asia-Pacific and for North America -in case of most resources-direct impacts are much stronger. The significance of borderless climate change impacts also depends on the resource investigated. Results show that, in the median scenario, crop consumption of all regions is mainly affected by domestic impacts, while in case of labor and water consumption the indirect impact channel is decisive. Worldwide and on a country level, this high influence of the indirect impact channel is emphasized: depending on the investigated resource, in a third up to a half of all countries the indirect impacts exceed the domestic ones. This dominance is particularly pronounced for the EU28 member states, where in most cases the imported impacts are five to ten times higher than the domestic ones.

Customizing Products through Remanufacturing -Ideation of a Concept

Remanufacturing is one key element of a circular economy and plays an important role in reducing global resource consumption. Though advantages are clear, manufacturers often hesitate to introduce remanufacturing in fear of increasing production complexity, high manual effort and uncertain customer demand for remanufactured products. Meanwhile in new production, the development of consumer demand leads to individualized and diversified products, especially in business to customer relationships. In this paper, we propose a rationale for using remanufacturing as a strategy to increase product individualization in combining elements and strategies from mass customization and remanufacturing, while considering ecological and economic aspects. A conceptualization of potential use-cases explores an approach using remanufacturing to individualize products and thus tap new customer groups without cannibalizing new product sales.

Sustainability and Dimensions of a Nexus Approach in a Sharing Economy

Increasing global resource consumption puts the availability of natural mineral resources under significant pressure. One strategy to overcome this trend is the decoupling of economic growth and resource consumption and the application of circular economy approaches. These approaches aim at closing material cycles across sectoral boundaries. Beside these attempts, there are further options for action aimed at minimization of resource consumption through resource sharing approaches. This study investigates resource-saving potentials on different scales namely on a personal scale through sharing goods and services, but also in the frame of industrial symbiosis through sharing of secondary resources at a company scale. The environmental effects have been quantified using life cycle assessment examples for these two simulated cases. The results show for both resource consumption levels, resource savings potentials of up to 2 powers of ten, that can particularly be proven regarding the impact category ‘fossil resource depletion’. The emergence of industrial symbiosis can be identified by six factors: Resource, government, economy, company, technology, and society. The cases simulated in the study are supported by empirical evidence from real-life examples, which consider the mentioned factors.

Measuring Sustainability of Individual Tourist Behavior

Theoretical frameworks for sustainable tourism include individual tourists (Juvan and Dolnicar 2016) as well as tourism enterprises (Buckley 2012). Individual tourist behaviors affect environmental outcomes at all scales, from local recreational impacts in parks to global resource consumption and greenhouse gas emissions (Gossling and Peeters 2015). Here I argue that attempts to measure the sustainable behaviors of individual tourists have been severely lacking in rigor, and a much more rigorous approach is therefore required.

Robust integrated production-maintenance scheduling for an evaporation network

This work aims to reduce the global resource consumption in an industrial evaporation network by better tasks management and coordination. The network works in continuous, processing some products in several evaporation plants, so optimal load allocation and product-plant assignment problems appear. The plants have different features (capacity, equipment, etc.) and their performance is affected by fouling inside the heat exchangers and external factors. Hereby, the optimizer has to decide when maintenance operations have to be triggered. Therefore, a mixed production/maintenance scheduling problem arises. The plant behavior is approximated by surrogate linear models obtained experimentally, allowing thus the use of mixed-integer linear optimization routines to obtain solutions in acceptable time. Furthermore, uncertainty in the weather forecast and in the production plan is also considered via a two-stage stochastic programming approach. Finally, a trade-off analysis between other objectives of interest is given to support the decision maker.

Assessment of Policy Integration of Sustainable Consumption and Production into National Policies

Sustainable Consumption and Production (SCP) was adopted as a stand-alone goal and reflected as one of the cross-cutting objectives of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), with a central role to address global resource consumption and its associated environmental impacts, as well as numerous social and economic issues. With this broad characterization of SCP, policy integration is crucial in addressing it at national level. This paper analyzes characteristics of SCP policy integration based on a survey of national government policies. It reveals that SCP is not fully integrated in national policy-making; high resource consumption sectors such as urban planning, building, and tourism are not fully incorporated into national SCP policies, and there is only limited participation of relevant government ministries other than environment ministries. We find that among countries with horizontal policy integration, those with Green Economy/Green Growth frameworks tend to have better sectoral integration; and those with SCP-specific frameworks are likely to have broader coordination of ministries. By conducting cross-analysis using income level and region, the different characteristics of SCP policy-making approaches were identified. The results of this study provide a better understanding of how SCP is integrated into policy for effective national policy-making and measurement of the SDG Goal 12.

Bounding the Probability of Resource Constraint Violations in Multi-Agent MDPs

Multi-agent planning problems with constraints on global resource consumption occur in several domains. Existing algorithms for solving Multi-agent Markov Decision Processes can compute policies that meet a resource constraint in expectation, but these policies provide no guarantees on the probability that a resource constraint violation will occur. We derive a method to bound constraint violation probabilities using Hoeffding's inequality. This method is applied to two existing approaches for computing policies satisfying constraints: the Constrained MDP framework and a Column Generation approach. We also introduce an algorithm to adaptively relax the bound up to a given maximum violation tolerance. Experiments on a hard toy problem show that the resulting policies outperform static optimal resource allocations to an arbitrary level. By testing the algorithms on more realistic planning domains from the literature, we demonstrate that the adaptive bound is able to efficiently trade off violation probability with expected value, outperforming state-of-the-art planners.