• Membrane Journal
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• v.23 no.1
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• pp.24-44
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• 2013

The MBR technology has evolved rapidly over the past two decades with significant gains in performance and reliability, and reductions in costs. Membrane bioreactors (MBR) technology is widely recognised as offering a key option for enhanced wastewater treatment or reuse. The objective of this paper is then to critically review the remarkable achievement on the research and commercial applications of membrane bioreactor (MBR) technology and to present current and potential MBR markets on a global scope. This brief review of the technology incorporates five key aspects : 1) evolution of MBR practice, 2) the commercial technologies of MBRs, 3) the largest MBR installations globally (e.g. > $10,000m^3/day$), 4) MBR market growth, and 5) directions for future research. Finally, the development directions of economical, environmental and technical aspects in MBRs; 1) investment costs; 2) effluent water quality; 3) membrane materials and modules; 4) MBR equipment and treatment process; 5) operating costs (higher energy & chemical consumption); and 6) sustainability such as anaerobic MBRs in the coming years were addressed.

• International conference on construction engineering and project management
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• 2015.10a
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• pp.564-567
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• 2015

The incorporation of sustainability principles into the structural engineering design of buildings is increasingly important. Historically the focus of improvements to the environmental performance of structures has been operational energy considerations. Current research has highlighted the requirement for changing the approach by increasing the consideration of embodied energy in structures. This research was conducted to build on previous research by the authors in quantifying the contribution of column optimization to the embodied energy performance of concrete framed buildings. Ultimately, the authors intend to develop mechanisms through which sustainable design can be quantified, enabling alleviation prior to construction. Columns are a key structural element to consider as part of this development process. The outcomes of this assessment reinforced previous findings, observing that reduced structural weight as a result of other sustainable design measures carries manifold benefits include column design savings. Through the quantification of the embodied energy outcomes during this research phase, the columns were shown to contribute up to 19.71% of the total embodied energy of the structural system dependent upon construction technique used.

• Clean Technology
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• v.28 no.2
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• pp.193-200
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• 2022

The term environmental, social and governance (ESG) was first used in the 2003 United Nations Environmental Programme Finance Initiative (UNEP FI). Among the three areas of ESG, environment refers to the impact of companies on the environment. Environmental factors address climate change policies and attempts to reduce emissions, waste and natural resource consumption. Social factors refer to the direction in which a company can improve the social impact of stakeholder includes employees, customers, communities, and governments involved in direct or indirect interaction with the organization itself and the company. Governance factors refer to stakeholders who make major decisions, the composition of the board of directors, their diversity and independence, and the internal policies that set limits and expectations for decision-making. Research related to ESG management is part of corporate social responsibility, sustainability, corporate or financial performance, and social responsibility investment. Through case studies and data-based empirical studies, it was confirmed that ESG management companies had positive results for most of the ESG related fields. Through literature analysis of domestic and international ESG history, introduction background, and management performance, this paper presents theoretical, practical implications by confirming that ESG's introduction and operation strategies are strong competitive strategies that directly affect corporate growth by creating attractive factors.

• Architectural research
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• v.14 no.4
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• pp.117-124
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• 2012

High rise office buildings represent one of the most energy-intensive architectural typologies. The growth of urban population necessitates sustainable high rise towers that lessen environmental impacts and energy consumption. Among various sustainable strategies, the integrated design is long known to be an important process that has great impact on building's sustainability. The framework for this paper is based on the case study of integrated towers that are located in different climate zones. The paper specifically addresses to what extent climate conditions influence the design of a high rise building and what kinds of the climate integrated design has been implemented. Qualitative case studies were carried out using published data and architectural drawing set. The technical work presented in the paper is based on computer simulation that examines the insolation analysis using hourly recorded weather data. The analysis results revealed that the site and building envelope integration and the site and building service systems have shown the most frequently employed in the integrated towers through the implementation of renewable resource integration, high performance envelopes and sustainable building service systems. Internal comfort and further energy saving in the integrated towers are offered through an automatic building management system. Due to the dynamic climate conditions, integration of building systems requires a sophisticated approach to building sustainability.

• Journal of Computing Science and Engineering
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• v.2 no.4
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• pp.412-427
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• 2008

We propose ID-exchange protocol for Connectionless Location-Awareness Service (CLAS) to locate mobile nodes in indoor sensor network. When adapting location-awareness service to sensor network, the target system must be designed in accordance with various metrics which reflect the system requirement. We especially consider sustainability of the existing service which has been provided for its original purpose, such as environmental monitoring. The detailed meaning of sustainability here is that, even if location-awareness service is newly added to the existing service, the system must be assured to retain a stable network condition, and to deal with newly caused traffic properly. The CLAS ID-exchange protocol is especially designed for fixture and mobile nodes communication to achieve these properties. The protocol operates on 802.15.4 MAC layer to make mobile node work independently of the procedure to build routing table of fixture node, so a stable routing condition can be achieved even if there are many mobile nodes. Moreover, the dedicated frequency channel is assigned only for this protocol, so that traffic caused by location-awareness service can be distributed to another channel. A real system adapting the protocol was implemented to monitor fire and authorities' positions. We verified the overhead and elapsed time for location-awareness. The result shows the proposed protocol has a high performance in detecting speed, traffic distribution, and stability of overall network.

• Geomechanics and Engineering
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• v.34 no.2
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• pp.173-186
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• 2023

In order to prevent environmental pollution, initiatives to increase the sustainability of resources are supported by society. However, the performance of recycled materials does not generally match that of natural materials. This study looks into the use of geogrid to improve various types of recycled aggregates. For this purpose, five different recycled aggregates were created by recycling wastes from the construction industry. Besides, direct shear tests (DS tests) were carried out on these recycled aggregates to determine their shear strengths. Following that, a triaxial geogrid was placed in the recycled aggregates to provide reinforcement, and the DS tests were conducted on the reinforced recycled aggregates. The results of the tests were also compared to those of tests performed on natural aggregates (NA). In conclusion, it was found that the recycled aggregates have lower shear strengths than the NA. Nonetheless, when reinforced with geogrid, the shear strength of the recycled concrete aggregates (RCA) and construction and demolition wastes (CDW) exceeded that of the NA. Furthermore, the geogrid reinforcement increased the shear strength of the recycled crushed bricks (CB), though not to the level of the NA.

• Journal of Distribution Science
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• v.17 no.11
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• pp.53-62
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• 2019

Purpose: This research aims to study the internal and external social practices of supply chain management along with economic and social performance of eight Portuguese companies from different industrial sectors. Through empirical data derived from eight case studies, five research propositions are suggested and tested. Research, design, data and methodology: The data was collected through 22 semi-structured interviews with general, procurement, and environmental/safety managers from eight companies from different industrial sectors. Secondary data was collected from reports, websites, and companies' internal documentation. Results: The analysis identifies the most important social practices considered by managers, as well as the performance measures that are most appropriate and most widely used to evaluate the influence of social practices on corporate economic and social performance. The results support four of the five propositions of this research. Companies' economic and social performance are affected by the implementation of social practices into the supply chain, namely the internal social practices. Conclusions: The findings confirmed that there is a positive relationship between internal social practices and economic performance. Internal social supply chain practices contribute to improve social performance. It also identifies the social practices which have negative effects on focal company performance.

• Journal of Korean Society for Geospatial Information Science
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• v.24 no.2
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• pp.89-94
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• 2016

New urbanism is a school of urban development that combines residential, commercial, and civic land uses in a dense urban fabric of carefully prescribed form. Its advocates claim that New Urbanist developments are superior to prevailing urban development patterns on social and environmental sustainability. Its critics, however, argue that New Urbanism developments do not measure up to the social and environmental ideals and are, in some cases, just another form of urban sprawl. The goal of this study is to evaluate various criticisms of New Urbanist communities. This paper used empirical evidence to determine the performance of New Urbanist developments on the broader spatial and social context as opposed to the internal characteristics of the communities using GIS indicators. The results showed that the communities did not meet conventional criteria for New Urbanist ideals.

• International Area Studies Review
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• v.14 no.3
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• pp.205-219
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• 2010

In general, industrial production involves large amounts of harmful by-product, causing serious pollution and ecological risk. Eco-efficiency, which indicates how efficient the economic activity is by considering both the environmental risks and economic performance, is a new concept for economic sustainability analysis and quantitative ecological risk analysis. Data envelopment analysis (DEA) has been widely used to examine eco-efficiency in recent years. Whereas traditional DEA models such as CCR and BCC model neglect undesirable outputs, this paper adopts a stochastic undesirable-output DEA model to measure the eco-efficiency of each province of China and Korea. The results indicate that whereas the eco-efficiency of the eastern region was the highest, that of the western region was the lowest. The reason may come from the negative external dis-economies of environment. And thus the governmental efforts for outreach on the underdeveloped regions should be promoted.

• Clean Technology
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• v.20 no.4
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• pp.339-348
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• 2014

Life cycle assessment (LCA) has become an important tool used to enhance the environmental performance of process systems and products. LCA is an essential element in design for environment (DfE) because LCA can be utilized to evaluate and analyze environmental impacts incurred in the life cycle and supply chain. This review presents methodologies that can be used to integrate LCA into DfE activities and reduce environmental impacts from process systems and products; and introduces case studies for water supply systems and cellular phones. LCA is first used to quantify environmental impacts and identify the principal contributor to high impacts. In the next step, environmental impacts from principal contributors can be reduced by using mathematical optimization tools as an engineering and technological approach and by utilizing the cooperation of professionals from a diverse range of fields. Because the methodologies and case studies can be applied and extended to other fields, this review paper can contribute to helping prevent environmental pollution and enhance the sustainability of our society.