Environmental Standard Level Research Articles

Environmental and economic evaluation of a low emission zone for urban freight transport

This paper aims to quantify the environmental and economic impacts of a low emission zone in the context of urban freight transport. The research's originality lies in its combination of behavioral data, urban freight transport and environmental models, and cost-benefit analysis methodologies. Through this methodological framework, we examine the costs and benefits of implementing a low emission zone using different scenarios with varying perimeters and environmental requirements in the urban area of Lyon. The findings of this study suggest that increasing the size of the perimeter is more economically and environmentally efficient than tightening the level of environmental standards.

DEVELOPMENT OF ECONOMIC THEORY – FROM THEORIES OF ECONOMIC GROWTH AND ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT TO THE PARADIGM OF SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT

Rapid economic growth is a relatively recent phenomenon, which has been examined since the end of the 18th century. In the scientific literature researchers use the concept of “economic growth” and “economic development” when analyzing economic processes. “Economic growth”, as defined by Paul M. Romer occurs whenever people use resources and rearrange them in more valuable ways. Thus, economic growth means an increase in a real national income / national output. In contrast, economic development is an improvement of the quality of life and living standards, e.g. improvement of literacy, life expectancy, and approach to environmental issues. Economic development encircles a wider range of metrics than just gross Domestic Product (GDP) per capita, it is about actual standard of living, level of environmental standards, availability and quality of housing and other aspects. The article analyzes, compares and evaluates theories of economic growth and economic development in the context of sustainable development.

ON A QUESTION OF ECONOMIC GROWTH

Economic development looks at a wider range than GDP per capita. Economic development is concerned with how people are actually affected. It looks at their actual living standards and social conditions. Measures of Economic development will look at: Real income per head – GDP per capita; Levels of literacy and education standards; Levels of healthcare (e.g. number of doctors per 1.000 population); Quality and availability of housing; Levels of environmental standards; Levels of infrastructure (transport, communication); Levels of corruption; Educational standards & labor productivity; Labor mobility; Flow of foreign aid & investment; Level of savings & investment; etc.

Catalytic and environmentally friendly removal of hydrogen sulfide from Claus-derived molten sulfur by nanosilica

Removal of hydrogen sulfide as one of the most dangerous pollutants in molten sulfur has been studied here. In fact, catalytic degassing of Claus-derived molten sulfur containing about 150–200 ppmw of dissolved hydrogen sulfide and hydrogen polysulfide was performed over silica and nanosilica catalytic extrudates to reduce the hydrogen sulfide content up to environmental standard levels. In this regard, small extrude cylinders of silica and nanosilica particles were placed in a basket (mesh size of 4 mm) inside a batch reactor. Outlet of the degassing system was monitored by a hydrogen sulfide analyzer and also analyzed by IBT method. The results showed that residual content of hydrogen sulfide in molten sulfur during 4 h of degassing at 150 °C was as low as 6, 20, 60 ppmw for degassing by nanosilica, bulk silica, and nitrogen, respectively. This revealed the positive effect of accessible surface area in the decomposition of polysulfide bonds in molten sulfur. Degassing catalysts were then subjected to characterization by analytical methods including Brunauer, Emmett, and Teller analysis, field-emission scanning electron microscope, energy-dispersive X-ray spectroscopy, Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy, and mechanical strength test. The spent catalysts were also regenerated by using Piranha solution for increasing the density of the lost silanol groups, which decreased the residual hydrogen sulfide in molten sulfur until 12 ppmw. This reflected the effect of surface silanol groups in improvement of proton abstraction, as the main reason for decomposition of hydrogen polysulfide in system.

Fungal levels in houses in the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant evacuation zone after the Great East Japan Earthquake

ABSTRACTResidences located within 20 km of the damaged Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant were evacuated shortly after the Great East Japan Earthquake. The levels of airborne and surface fungi were measured in six houses in the evacuation zone in August 2012 and February 2013. Airborne fungal levels in all of the houses in the summer were higher than the environmental standard levels for residential houses published in Architectural Institute of Japan (>1000 colony-forming units [CFU]/m3). In two houses whose residents rarely returned to visit, fungal levels were extremely high (>52,000 CFU/m3). Although fungal levels in the winter were much lower than those in the summer, they were still higher than environmental standard levels in several houses. Indoor fungal levels were significantly inversely related to the frequency with which residents returned, but they were not correlated with the air exchange rates, temperature, humidity, or radiation levels. Cladosporium spp. and Penicillium spp. were detected in every house. Aspergillus section Circumdati (Aspergillus ochraceus group) was also detected in several houses. These fungi produced ochratoxin A and ochratoxin B, which have nephrotoxic and carcinogenic potential. The present study suggests that further monitoring of fungal levels is necessary in houses in the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant evacuation zone, and that some houses may require fungal disinfection.Implications: The results suggest that residents’ health could be at risk owing to the high levels of airborne fungi and toxic fungi Aspergillus section Circumdati. Therefore, monitoring and decontamination/disinfection of fungi are strongly recommended before residents are allowed to return permanently to their homes. In addition, returning to home with a certain frequency and adequate ventilation are necessary during similar situations, e.g., when residents cannot stay in their homes for a long period, because fungal levels in houses in the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant evacuation zone were inversely correlated with the frequency with which residents returned to visit their houses.

Contaminant transport in a three-zone wetland: Dispersion and ecological degradation

To further understand the fate of contaminant transport in real waterways interacting with riparian buffers and adjacent aquatic vegetation, solute dispersion is analytically explored for three-zone wetland flows with usually high Peclet number in this paper. Ecological effects are also taken into account. Environmental dispersion is addressed independently via an exponential transformation of the basic formulation of mass transfer in the context of porous media flow. After rigorously generalizing Taylor’s classical analysis, asymptotic analysis was used instead of the method of concentration moment or multi-scale analysis to simplify the examination. The mean concentration expansion base in Gill’s method is adopted to model concentration deviations produced in the lateral-average operation. With a previously derived velocity profile, environmental dispersivity is obtained, effectively illustrating the effects of critical dimensionless parameters. Analytical expressions for evolution of the lateral mean concentration and critical length of the contaminant cloud are determined by combining the effects of both hydraulic dispersion and ecological degradation. An application example is provided to illustrate the evolution of contaminant cloud in terms of the critical length and duration with concentration greater than a given environmental standard level. Results show that for three-zone wetlands, the duration is clearly increased while the region affected by the contaminant cloud is slightly smaller than that for two-zone wetland flows.

Critical Length of Contaminant Cloud in a Three-Layer Wetland: Multi-scale Analysis for Environmental Dispersivity

Presented in this paper is a multi-scale analy- sis for environmental dispersion in a three-layer wetland for predicting the critical length of contaminant cloud that derives from instantaneous emission. The analysis of depen- dence of the dispersivity on characteristic parameters is determined. Longitudinal concentration distribution cen- tered at the origin of a moving coordinate system is charac- terized to illustrate the effects of dimensionless parameters on the environmental dispersion. For the heavy metal Hg that is emitted as pollutant, an application is carried out to predict the critical length of the contaminant cloud beyond given environmental standard level, with comparisons of results between the cases of different apparent reaction rates. The work provides two valuable indicators, namely critical length and duration, for the wetlands restoration.

Longitudinal spread of bicomponent contaminant in wetland flow dominated by bank-wall effect

Presented in this paper is a theoretical analysis for longitudinal spread of bicomponent contaminant in a fully developed steady wetland flow dominated by bank-wall effect. Based on the general form of concentration transport equations adopted for wetland flows, an ecological risk assessment model is given for the decay of concentration under the combined action of reversible and irreversible reactions, as well as hydraulic dispersion. Through a combination of the method for solving linear parabolic system and an asymptotic analysis for hydraulic dispersion in the wetland flow, an analytical solution for long time evolution of bicomponent contaminant concentration is rigorously derived and illustrated. The solution is shown to be an extension of known solutions for single component contaminant transport due to an irreversible reaction and hydraulic dispersion, as well as biocomponent contaminant transport due to reversible reactions and hydraulic dispersion. It is found that the concentration ratio of binary components can approach an equilibrium status, with necessary time to obtain the status dependent on transfer and degradation rates of each component. The length and duration of influenced region with concentration of contaminant cloud beyond given environmental standard level are presented for a uniform instantaneous emission into the wetland flow. The result shows that the length increases with time to reach maximum and then decreases to zero, and the duration is sensitive to the variation of a dimensionless parameter to reflect the relative importance of an irreversible action and lateral mass dispersion.

Developing Country Second‐Mover Advantage in Competition Over Environmental Standards and Taxes

AbstractWe show that, in competition between a developed country and a developing country over environmental standards and taxes, the developing country may have a “second‐mover advantage.” In our model, firms do not unanimously prefer lower environmental standard levels. We introduce this feature to an otherwise familiar model of fiscal competition. Four distinct outcomes can be characterized by varying the marginal cost to firms of an environmental externality: (1) the outcome may be efficient; (2) the developing country may be a “pollution haven”—a place to escape excessively high environmental standards in the developed country; (3) the developing country may “undercut” the developed country and attract all firms; (4) the developed country may be a pollution haven.

Creation Sustainable Building Shell Using Smart Materials

It’s been almost a decade that the idea of smart materials has attracted man’s attention. These materials are capable of responding to their surrounding environment and of adapting to it. The development pace of construction materials has also been towards multi-purpose and smart materials, which would ultimately result in manufacturing phase matters. In fact, the existence of smart structural materials and systems has played a substantial role in developing the idea of the smart control of a construction. These materials can improve designing methods and the construction of buildings. In the sustainable buildings design approach (a new approach to designing buildings which should meet a high level of environmental standards with an emphasis on the costs of their useful lifespan), such highly efficient materials are used because they are more adaptable to the environment and increase a building’s useful lifespan. In this article, some of the smart materials used for the façade are introduced and their performances will be studied. It is concluded that using such technologies requires less energy and very little amounts of chemicals and detergents which could be a step taken towards achieving sustainable architectural and environmental goals.

Contaminant transport in a two-zone wetland: Dispersion and ecological degradation

Understanding the fate of contaminant in wetland flows is essential in applications such as ecological risk assessment and environmental hydraulic design. Presented in this paper is an analytical study on the dispersion of contaminant in a two-zone wetland, with the effect of ecological degradation taken into consideration. Environmental dispersion is discussed separately via an exponential transformation for the general formulation of contaminant transport. Taylor’s classical analysis for solute dispersion in a long and thin tube flow is rigorously generalized for the dispersion of the lateral mean contaminant concentration in the longitudinal direction. A method of asymptotic analysis is adopted instead of the concentration moment method in order to simplify the process of deduction and the expression of the analytical solution. Gill’s method of mean concentration expansion is applied to model the concentration deviation terms produced in an averaging operation. With the velocity profile obtained previously, the enhancement of the environmental dispersivity under long time evolution is determined and shown to be consistent with that obtained by the method of concentration moment. Analytical solutions for the evolution of the contaminant concentration and the influenced region of the contaminant cloud are obtained by combining both the hydraulic and the ecological effects. For typical pollutant as the heavy metal Hg, the evolution of contaminant cloud is illustrated by critical length and duration in an application with concentration beyond some given environmental standard level. Results show that for wetland flows with a two-zone structure, the influenced region is reduced evidently while the duration of the contaminant cloud remains nearly unchanged, compared with that for the single-zone wetland flow.

Multi-scale analysis for environmental dispersion in wetland flow

Presented in this work is a multi-scale analysis for longitudinal evolution of contaminant concentration in a fully developed flow through a shallow wetland channel. An environmental dispersion model for the mean concentration is devised as an extension of Taylor’s classical formulation by a multi-scale analysis. Corresponding environmental dispersivity is found identical to that determined by the method of concentration moments. For typical contaminant constituents of chemical oxygen demand, biochemical oxygen demand, total phosphorus, total nitrogen and heavy metal, the evolution of contaminant cloud is illustrated with the critical length and duration of the contaminant cloud with constituent concentration beyond some given environmental standard level.

Environmental dispersion in a two-zone wetland

Abstract As an extension of the modelling on environmental dispersion in a single zone wetland [Zeng, L., Chen, G.Q., 2009. Ecological degradation and hydraulic dispersion of contaminant in wetland. Ecol. Model., 222, 293–300], the typical case of a pulsed contaminant emission into a steady flow through a distinctively vegetated two-zone shallow wetland channel is analytically explored in this paper in terms of the longitudinal evolution of the lateral mean concentration under environmental dispersion. The velocity profile of a fully developed flow through the wetland is derived, with that for a single zone wetland flow included as a special case. Taylor’s classical analysis and Aris’s method of concentration moments for solute dispersion in a single phase fluid flow are rigorously generalized for the two-zone case of a wetland flow to develop the dispersion model and to determine the dispersivity, which is illustrated with an asymptotic time variation characterized by stem dominated, transitional, and width-stem dominated stages. For typical contaminant constituents of chemical oxygen demand, biochemical oxygen demand, total phosphorus, total nitrogen and heavy metal, the evolution of contaminant cloud is illustrated with the critical length and duration of the contaminant cloud with constituent concentration beyond some given environmental standard level.

An ecological risk assessment model for a pulsed contaminant emission into a wetland channel flow

As a continuation of the modelling on ecological degradation and hydraulic dispersion of pollutant emission into an idealized two-dimensional free-surface wetland flow (Zeng, L., Chen, G.Q., 2009b. Ecological degradation and hydraulic dispersion of contaminant in wetland. Ecol. Model., doi:10.1016/j.ecolmodel.2009.10.024), an ecological risk assessment model for the typical case of a pulsed contaminant emission into a realistic three-dimensional wetland channel flow is presented in this paper for the fate of cross-sectional mean concentration under environmental dispersion. An environmental dispersion model for the mean concentration is devised as an extension of Taylor’s classical analysis on dispersion in fluid flows. The velocity distribution and the environmental dispersivity in the fully developed steady flow through the wetland is found and illustrated with limiting cases covering various known solutions for the porous media flow between parallel plates, flow in a shallow wetland, sweeping flow in a densely vegetated wetland, and single phase flow in a channel. Obtained by Aris’s method of moments, the environmental dispersivity is shown characterized with multi-scale asymptotic time variations with stem dominated stage, transitional stage, and width–depth-stem dominated stage. Based on the solution for the evolution of contaminant cloud in the wetland channel flow, critical length and duration of the contaminant cloud with concentration beyond given environmental standard level are concretely illustrated for typical pollutant constituents in wastewater emission. Under the same emission intensity and environmental standard, the duration of contaminant cloud in the wetland channel is revealed shorter than that in a free surface wetland, due to the lateral effect.

Ecological degradation and hydraulic dispersion of contaminant in wetland

For the typical case of a pulsed contaminant emission into a free surface wetland flow, a theoretical analysis is presented in this paper for the decay of the depth-averaged concentration under the combined action of ecological degradation and hydraulic dispersion. Based on a first-order reaction model extensively employed in related ecological risk assessment and environmental hydraulic design, the effect of ecological degradation is separated from the hydraulic effect via an exponential transformation for the general formulation for contaminant transport. The speed profile of a fully developed steady flow through the wetland is obtained. A hydraulic dispersion model for the depth-averaged concentration is devised as an extension of Taylor’s classical analysis on dispersion, and corresponding hydraulic dispersivity is obtained by Aris’s method of moments. Analytical solution of depth-averaged concentration is rigorously derived and characterized. For typical pollutant constituents in wastewater emission, the evolution of contaminant cloud in the wetland flow is illustrated by critical length and duration of influenced region with contaminant concentration beyond given environmental standard level, with essential implications for ecological risk assessment and environmental management.

Balancing competitiveness and conditionality: environmental policy-making in low-regulating countries

This article scrutinizes the effects of economic competition on environmental standard levels in low-regulating states that intensify their economic interlinkage with high-regulating countries. In doing so, it pursues two objectives. First, we provide a detailed empirical account of the impact of economic integration on the development of environmental standards in Hungary and Mexico. Second, we offer a theoretical argument in order to explain why low-regulating countries avoid problems of remaining ‘stuck at the bottom’, although regulatory competition is effective. We argue that missing races to the bottom or stuck at the bottom effects in low-regulating countries are the result of conditionality pressures exerted by high-regulating countries. At the same time, however, low-regulating countries attempt to preserve their comparative advantage ‘through the back door’ by cultivating a lax enforcement practice.

An integrated simulation, inference, and optimization method for identifying groundwater remediation strategies at petroleum-contaminated aquifers in western Canada

This study advances an integrated simulation, inference, and optimization method (ISIOM) for optimizing groundwater remediation systems. SIOM has the advantages of (i) automotive screening of potential explanatory variables (e.g., the pumping rates at various remediation wells), (ii) providing a flexible manner for investigating the linear, interactive, and quadratic effects of operating conditions on the benzene levels, and (iii) mitigating the computational efforts in optimization processes. The method is applied to a petroleum-contaminated site in western Canada for identifying the optimal remediation strategies under a given set of remediation durations and environmental standard levels. To examine the effect of pumping duration on contaminants removing efficiency, 4 duration options are considered including 5, 10, 15, and 20 years, respectively. The results indicate that the pumping duration would have effect on the optimized scheme. It is suggested that the 10-year duration would be more desirable than the 15-year one. The simulation results demonstrate that the peak benzene concentrations would be reduced to satisfy the environmental standard when the optimal remediation strategy is carried out.

An Econometric Analysis of the Impacts on Regional Economy by the Changes of Automobile Traffic and Environment

Recently, atmospheric pollution caused by automobiles becomes the serious problem. Especially in the Tokyo Metropolitan Area (TMA: Saitama, Chiba, Tokyo, Kanagawa Prefecture), in spite of induction of the total amount control to stationary source of occurrence and enforcement of several plans of the control to exhaust gas by automobiles, the achievement rate of the environmental standard level of NO2 is still low, the pollution by nitrogen oxides in Tokyo Prefecture needs to be devised immediate and effective plans.However modern life is closely related with automobile traffic. When the automobile traffic volume is decreased forcibly in order to decrease the concentration of NO2, we expect that the economic influence will be diversely caused.We build a macro-econometric model to measure economic impacts in TMA under the condition that the traffic-situation and environment are changed, and examine the influence of policies of atmospheric pollution (NO2) in TMA.The model consists of eight blocks (population, employment, expenditure, production, income, capital stock, land price, potential) and contains 168 variables. 145 variables are endogenous (122 estimated and 23 definitional equations) and 23 variables are exogenous. Concurrently, two projects were held, and they studied the automobile traffic and the environmental changes. So, the traffic-situation and the concentration of NO2 are exogenous variables. Potential type variables of income and population are used to describe the inter-regional linkages in various equations.After the final test, the model could properly explain the impacts on TMA's regional economy by the changes of the environment and the automobile traffic. Then, we applied the model to do several simulation studies to clarify various policy effects.