The Monitoring Framework proposed in the EU27 New Circular Economy Action Plan comprises two mass-based indicators, namely overall recycling rate and recycling rate for specific waste streams. Yet, ...to monitor and assess the impacts of circular economy, indicators cannot be limited to mass-based indicators; we argue assessments should also include environmental and economic effects. Towards this end, these impacts can be quantified by an advanced model based on life cycle thinking, entailing the use of life cycle assessment and costing (LCA/LCC). Calculating these effects for municipal waste management is challenging due to gaps in available data for estimating generated waste. We propose a methodology to estimate more finely the amounts of waste generated in the Member States, complemented with LCA/LCC. The results highlight that important inconsistencies in municipal waste data reporting exist and that recycling rates calculated from these are lower than hitherto estimated. The impacts quantification shows great performance variation across EU27, with C-footprint ranging from -490 to 539 kg CO
-eq. t
. Potentials for improvement are substantial and can bring up to 103 Mt CO
-eq. additional annual saving, reducing costs (calculated as Full Environmental LCC) of waste management by 8.4 billion EUR and bringing 206,100 new jobs in the sector. The approach presented highlights the rationale for improved data management on waste statistics and the potential for harmonised models. It also paves the way for more sophisticated impact analyses relevant for policymaking, by bringing a richer perspective to the environmental and economic impacts of waste management on top of tracking generated, collected and recycled waste flows.
Cross-view matching aims to learn a shared image representation between ground-level images and satellite or aerial images at the same locations. In robotic vehicles, matching a camera image to a ...database of geo-referenced aerial imagery can serve as a method for self-localization. However, existing work on cross-view matching only aims at global localization, and overlooks the easily accessible rough location estimates from GNSS or temporal filtering. We argue that the availability of coarse location estimates at test time should already be considered during training. We adopt a simple but effective adaptation to the common triplet loss, resulting in an image representation that is more discriminative within the geographically local neighborhood, without any modifications to a baseline deep neural network. Experiments on the CVACT dataset confirm that the improvements generalize across spatial regions. On a new benchmark constructed from the Oxford RobotCar dataset, we also show generalization across recording days within the same region. Finally, we validate that improvements on these image-retrieval benchmarks also translate to a real-world localization task. Using a particle filter to fuse the cross-view matching scores of a vehicle's camera stream with real GPS measurements, our learned geographically local representation reduces the mean localization error by 17% compared to the standard global representation learned by the current state-of-the-art.
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► We monitor on real-time basis gas and particulate phases of moped exhaust. ► Two mopeds complying with EURO-1 and EURO-2 emission standards are studied. ► Multivariate data analysis ...highlighted the effect of temperature on the particles and heavy PAH emissions. ► The more recent after-treatment device may generate potentially harmful particles.
Two-stroke mopeds are a popular and convenient mean of transport in particular in the highly populated cities. These vehicles can emit potentially toxic gaseous and aerosol pollutants due to their engine technology. The legislative measurements of moped emissions are based on offline methods; however, the online characterization of gas and particulate phases offers great possibilities to understand aerosol formation mechanism and to adapt future emission standards. The purpose of this work was to study the emission behavior of two mopeds complying with different European emission standards (EURO-1 and EURO-2). A sophisticated set of online analyzers was applied to simultaneously monitor the gas phase and particulate phase of exhaust on a real time basis. The gaseous emission was analyzed with a high resolution Fourier transform infrared spectrometer (FTIR; nitrogen species) and a resonance-enhanced multiphoton ionization time-of-flight mass spectrometer (REMPI-ToF-MS; polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons: PAH), whereas the particulate phase was chemically characterized by a high-resolution time-of-flight aerosol mass spectrometer (HR-ToF-AMS; organic, nitrate and chloride aerosol) and a multiangle absorption photometer (MAAP; black carbon). The physical characterization of the aerosol was carried out with a condensation particle counter (CPC; particle number concentration) and a fast mobility particle sizer (FMPS; size distribution in real time). In order to extract underlying correlation between gas and solid emissions, principal component analysis was applied to the comprehensive online dataset. Multivariate analysis highlighted the considerable effect of the exhaust temperature on the particles and heavy PAH emissions. The results showed that the after-treatment used to comply with the latest EURO-2 emission standard may be responsible for the production of more potentially harmful particles compared to the EURO-1 moped emissions.
The European Commission recently established a novel test facility for heavy-duty vehicles to enhance more sustainable transport. The facility enables the study of energy efficiency of various ...fuels/scenarios as well as the chemical composition of evolved exhaust emissions. Sophisticated instrumentation for real-time analysis of the gas and particulate phases of exhaust has been implemented. Thereby, gas-phase characterization was carried out by a Fourier transform infrared spectrometer (FT-IR; carbonyls, nitrogen-containing species, small hydrocarbons) and a resonance-enhanced multiphoton ionization time-of-flight mass spectrometer (REMPI-TOFMS; monocyclic and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons). For analysis of the particulate phase, a high-resolution time-of-flight aerosol mass spectrometer (HR-TOF-AMS; organic matter, chloride, nitrate), a condensation particle counter (CPC; particle number), and a multiangle absorption photometer (MAAP; black carbon) were applied. In this paper, the first application of the new facility in combination with the described instruments is presented, whereby a medium-size truck was investigated by applying different driving cycles. The goal was simultaneous chemical characterization of a great variety of gaseous compounds and particulate matter in exhaust on a real-time basis. The time-resolved data allowed new approaches to view the results; for example, emission factors were normalized to time-resolved consumption of fuel and were related to emission factors evolved during high speeds. Compounds could be identified that followed the fuel consumption, others showed very different behavior. In particular, engine cold start, engine ignition (unburned fuel), and high-speed events resulted in unique emission patterns.
Considerations on the 11th Symposium Manfredi, P.F.
Nuclear instruments & methods in physics research. Section A, Accelerators, spectrometers, detectors and associated equipment,
12/2010, Letnik:
624, Številka:
2
Journal Article
•Recycled cork wine stoppers were used as a highly sustainable carbon source.•An industrial waste was used as main raw material in the geopolymers production.•First ever report on cork-geopolymer ...composites for EMI shielding applications.•Maximum total shielding effectiveness values ranging from −13.8 to −15.9 dB.•This highly sustainable material may ensure large-scale electromagnetic protection.
In this investigation, and for the first time, pyrolysed sustainable cork was used to produce waste-based geopolymer-cork composites with enhanced electromagnetic interference (EMI) shielding properties. The influence of the pyrolysed cork amount and the geopolymer porosity on the EMI shielding ability of the composites was studied. The maximum total shielding effectiveness (SET) values achieved by these novel building materials (−13.8 to −15.9 dB) are equal to any other reported geopolymer microwave (MW) absorbers over the X-band, despite containing much lower carbon content. In addition, our composites were produced using an industrial waste (biomass fly ash) as raw material and recycled wine stoppers as a carbon source (2.5–3.75 wt%). This strategy is different from those implemented in the only other reported MW absorbing geopolymers, which used standard commercial chemical precursors, and the added carbon component is also a non-renewable commercial product, added in much greater quantities (10× more). Therefore, our approach not only decreases the consumption of virgin raw materials (e.g. kaolin), but also enhances the global sustainability of the construction sector.
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