This review article was prompted by a remarkable growth in the number of scientific publications dealing with the use of nanocellulose (especially nanofibrillated cellulose (NFC), cellulose ...nanocrystals (CNC), and bacterial cellulose (BC)) to enhance the barrier properties and other performance attributes of new generations of packaging products. Recent research has confirmed and extended what is known about oxygen barrier and water vapor transmission performance, strength properties, and the susceptibility of nanocellulose-based films and coatings to the presence of humidity or moisture. Recent research also points to various promising strategies to prepare ecologically-friendly packaging materials, taking advantage of nanocellulose-based layers, to compete in an arena that has long been dominated by synthetic plastics. Some promising approaches entail usage of multiple layers of different materials or additives such as waxes, high-aspect ratio nano-clays, and surface-active compounds in addition to the nanocellulose material. While various high-end applications may be achieved by chemical derivatization or grafting of the nanocellulose, the current trends in research suggest that high-volume implementation will likely incorporate water-based formulations, which may include water-based dispersions or emulsions, depending on the end-uses.
We examine whether the requirements of analytical skills and physical strength in jobs held by immigrant women in five major European destinations (France, Italy, Spain, Sweden, and the UK) converge ...to those of jobs of native-born women in their first ten years in the destination country. To this aim, we combine data from the European Labour Force Survey (2005–2015) of immigrant women arriving in these five countries and information about skill requirements from the Occupational Information Network (O*NET). At arrival, migrants in Spain and France use much less analytical skills, but for the period before the Great Recession, that gap closes relatively fast over time compared to other destinations, particularly in the low end of the skill distribution. Physical strength requirements of immigrant’s jobs increase over time and the gaps open in countries where immigrants depart from relatively more strength-intense jobs, while they close in Spain where immigrants use less strength than natives at arrival. Our estimates are also robust to selection into employment both at the average and across the skill distribution using recent techniques. Since the Labour Force Survey does not have information on wages, we use wage information from the European Union Structure of Earnings Survey to proxy average immigrant-native wage gaps implied by our estimated skill gaps by country.
► Empty Palm Fruit Bunch Fibers (EPFBF) were subject to sulfur-free chemical treatments. ► Microfluidization of EPFBF yields nanofibrils comparable to those from wood fibers. ► Nanopaper with ...excellent properties was manufactured from nanofibrillar EPFBF. ► Valorization of EPFBF is attractive due its higher yields and lower costs.
Different cellulose pulps were produced from sulfur-free chemical treatments of Empty Palm Fruit Bunch Fibers (EPFBF), a by-product from palm oil processing. The pulps were microfluidized for deconstruction into nanofibrillated cellulose (NFC) and nanopaper was manufactured by using an overpressure device. The morphological and structural features of the obtained NFCs were characterized via atomic force and scanning electron microscopies. The physical properties as well as the interactions with water of sheets from three different pulps were compared with those of nanopaper obtained from the corresponding NFC. Distinctive chemical and morphological characteristics and ensuing nanopaper properties were generated by the EPFBF fibers. The NFC grades obtained compared favorably with associated materials typically produced from bleached wood fibers. Lower water absorption, higher tensile strengths (107–137MPa) and elastic modulus (12–18GPa) were measured, which opens the possibility for valorization of such widely available bioresource.
Sustainable urban infrastructure: A review Ferrer, Ana Luiza Carvalho; Thomé, Antônio Márcio Tavares; Scavarda, Annibal José
Resources, conservation and recycling,
01/2018, Letnik:
128
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Strategic diagrams for sustainable urban infrastructure: 2010–2015
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•Sustainable urban infrastructure is a new and evolving theme.•Sustainable urban infrastructure evolved from social ...and environmental sciences.•Leading themes are governance and engineered facilities and utilities.•Climate change plays a predominant role in sustainable urban infrastructure.•Disaster mitigation, services, metabolism, e-city, and resilience are motor themes.
Urban infrastructure is a multifaceted concept that goes beyond a set of engineered facilities, utilities, and systems. It is equally a place for local and global governance, intertwining issues of economic growth, climate change, and municipal waste. The concept of sustainability is relatively new and it encompasses a multidisciplinary field made of engineering, economic, social, and environmental sciences. Research in sustainable urban infrastructure is a new and ever evolving field.
This paper offers a verifiable and reproducible systematic literature review of sustainable urban infrastructure, electronically analysing and scrutinizing 995 papers for the co-occurrence of keywords. It aims to answer two research questions: (i) what are the sustainable urban infrastructure prevailing themes and (ii) how have these themes evolved? The main themes identified were storm-water, developing countries, cities, investments, urban areas, environmental impact, life cycle, climate change, urban infrastructure, and vulnerability. Sustainable urban infrastructure themes have evolved from modernity in urbanism, slum areas, and degradation of urban spaces in the mid of last century to ecological views of the built environment and urban networks. The taxonomy of themes and the analysis of its evolution led to a research agenda on disaster mitigation, maintenance and sustainability of facilities and utilities, urban metabolism and vulnerabilities, e-city, and communication networks.
Interest in sustainability and its relation to performance has grown significantly among practitioners and operations management (OM) scholars. However, there is still a paucity of research on the ...antecedents and drivers of sustainability, as well as on the relationship between sustainability and performance. Moreover, the literature offers contradictory results on this relationship. Therefore, the goal of this paper is to provide a research synthesis about the overall state of the art of empirical research on the impact of sustainability management practices on performance, encompassing social and environmental dimensions. To achieve this goal, the authors develop a rigorous systematic review of the extant literature on sustainability relationships with firm performance, emphasizing the under-researched area of causal models of sustainability and operational performance. This research is a first attempt to go beyond the highly dispersed work on the subject, aiming to provide more generalizable evidence about theories, methods and findings. The synthesis embraces 231 papers in total and identifies the main variables on causal models depicting the relationships between sustainability and performance, analyses how the studies on the subject are conducted, and investigates the impact and the mechanisms through which sustainability affects operational performance (OP). Overall, there are positive effects of sustainability on performance, such as lower costs, better delivery and product quality, enhanced volume and mix flexibility, although different mechanisms drive the sustainability-performance links and they differ according to contexts. The study outlines implications for practice and future research.
•A research synthesis on the impact of sustainability on performance is provided.•Variables on causal models linking sustainability and performance are identified.•The paper evaluates how studies on sustainability and OP were conducted.•The impact and the mechanisms through which sustainability affects OP are analysed.
Unbleached (UN), oxygen-delignified and fully-bleached (FB) birch fibers with a residual lignin content of ca. 3, 2 and <1 %, respectively, were used to produce nanofibrillated cellulose (NFC) and ...nanopaper by using an overpressure device. The tensile index, elongation and elastic modulus of nanopaper were compared and the effect of residual cell wall components accessed. Under similar manufacturing conditions, UN NFC produced nanopaper with a density of 0.99 g/cm
3
, higher than that from FB NFC (0.7 g/cm
3
). This translated in much lower air permeability in the case of UN nanopaper (1 and 11 mL/min for UN and FB samples, respectively). Fundamentally, these observations are ascribed to the finer fibrils produced during microfluidization of UN fibers compared to those from lower yield counterparts (AFM roughness of 8 and 17 nm and surface areas of 124 and 98 m
2
/g for NFC from UN and FB fibers, respectively). As a result, values of stress at break and energy absorption of nanopaper from high yield fibers are distinctively higher than those from fully bleached NFC. Interactions of water with the surface and bulk material were affected by the chemical composition and structure of the nanofibrils. While UN nanopaper presented higher water contact angles their sorption capacity (and rate of water absorption) was much higher than those measured for nanopaper from FB NFC. These and other observations provided in this contribution are proposed to be related to the mechanoradical scavenging capacity of lignin in high shear microfluidization and the presence of residual heteropolysaccharides.
The ability to speak the language of the destination country plays a key role in the labour market performance of immigrants. To assess the influence of language on economic assimilation, we combine ...large samples of the restricted version of the Canadian Census (1991–2006) with both a measure of proximity to English of the most used language in the immigrant’s country of origin, and information about wages and the occupational skills required for the jobs immigrant men hold. Immigrant men whose language is more distant from English earn lower wages and work in jobs requiring more physical strength and fewer social and analytical skills, than the jobs of similar native‐born workers. More importantly, linguistic distance imposes a relatively larger wage penalty on college‐educated upon entry into the country than on non‐college educated individuals. However, both the wage and the analytical skill requirements of the jobs held by college‐educated immigrant men from linguistically distant countries increase markedly with time in the country, while their physical strength requirements decline moderately. Our analysis suggests that facilitating language acquisition may speed up the labour market assimilation of immigrant men in Canada.
Industry and academia shift from the single cloud provider paradigm to cloud federations and alternative models, which orchestrate heterogeneous resources, such as Mobile Edge Computing and Fog ...Computing. In such complex environments, incorrect selection of deployment platform can lead to underwhelming application performance. This dictates the necessity of Service Level Agreements (SLA) and trust management services in order to enforce performance guarantees and enable customers to simultaneously evaluate their application’s performance and give performance indicators for future provider selection. In this paper, we propose a collaborative SLA and Reputation-based Trust Management (RTM) solution for federated cloud environment. The SLA service defines clearly the performance metrics and measures the actual performance of the deployed cloud applications. Based on the SLA, the RTM service of the collaborative solution leverages several technical and user’s experience metrics to compute the reliability of the cloud providers and the credibility of the customers. A proof of concept of the collaborative solution in a realistic federated environment is provided and validated. The corresponding experimental results demonstrate that it objectively computes the cloud providers’ reputation values under various scenarios.
•A collaborative SLA and Trust Management solution for cloud applications deployed in federated environment is proposed.•SLA assessment is based on various performance indicators.•Reputation-based Trust Management is based on a multicriteria decision method.
Persistent house price increases are a likely candidate for consideration in fertility decisions. Theoretically, higher housing prices will cause renters to desire fewer additional children, but home ...owners to desire more children if they already have sufficient housing and low substitution between children and other 'goods', and fewer children otherwise. In this paper, the authors combine longitudinal data from the Canadian Survey of Labour Income and Dynamics (SLID) and averaged housing price data from the Canadian Real Estate Association to estimate the effect of housing prices on fertility in a housing market that has historically been less volatile and more conservative than its American counterpart has. They ask whether changes in lagged housing price affect the marginal fertility of homeowner and renter women aged 18-45. They present results both excluding and including those who move outside their initial real estate board area, using initial area housing prices as an instrument in the latter case. For homeowners, but not renters, the authors predominantly find evidence that lagged housing prices have a positive effect on marginal fertility and possibly on completed fertility. These pro-natal effects are confined to non-movers.
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