Waste Management & Research最新文献

High-quality recycling of photovoltaic (PV) modules starts with a delamination process. It aims to remove the encapsulation layer between glass and solar cells. Many studies have investigated the delamination of ethylene-vinyl acetate encapsulant, whereas the delamination of polyolefin elastomer (POE) encapsulation in solar modules remains a research gap. This study presents methods of solvent and thermal treatment for the separation of layers in a PV module encapsulated with POE polymer. Various organic compounds were tested for the solvent treatment. The results showed that most of the solvents did not separate the materials. However, with some of them, polymer swelling was achieved. Glycerol was the only solvent capable of separating glass from multi-material laminate. The separated glass does not include contaminants and is therefore suitable for the use as a secondary material. However, the solar cells remained encapsulated in the polymer, thus additional processing is needed to remove it. The time and solvent temperature for glycerol treatment were measured. The thermal treatment was conducted based on the results of thermogravimetric analyses, which determined the degradation of POE under heating conditions. Thermal treatment at 500°C for 1 hour in an air atmosphere was found to be the effective way to detach PV layers. Glass, solar cells and metal ribbons were separated without polymer contamination and are therefore suitable for further use.

Plastic pollution has been identified as one of the most pressing environmental issues of the 21st century, driven by excessive consumption and inadequate plastic waste management. This issue is particularly reflected in short lifespan of plastic products, particularly plastic packaging within the food and beverage (F&B) industry. Urgent and relevant policy actions are needed to promote plastic circularity and improve waste management practices. Developing countries such as Montenegro face significant challenges in managing plastic waste flows due to legal, institutional and infrastructural gaps. This research addresses these challenges by employing material flow analysis (MFA) and advanced techniques like artificial neural networks to estimate the quantities and types of plastic packaging used in the F&B sector in Montenegro. The findings reveal that over 21,300 tonnes of F&B plastic packaging were placed on the market in Montenegro in 2018. Approximately 11% of this amount ends up directly littered in the environment or dumpsites, whereas the remaining 89% is predominantly collected and deposited in controlled landfills. Detailed MFA models were developed separately for the eight most common polymer types used in the F&B sector, along with specific models for plastic bags and polyethene terephthalate bottles to explore closed-loop recycling systems. It was found that only a small fraction of all analysed types of plastic packaging placed on the market can be effectively treated and recycled. This research contributes to the understanding of plastic waste management in Montenegro and facilitates the formulation of effective strategies to mitigate plastic pollution in the F&B industry.

Environmental attitude, value and awareness are widely believed to help reach the goal of cutting global food waste, but these psychological and cognitive factors are not always good predictors of wasteful behaviours. Notably, it is still unclear how the role of pro-environmental attitude (PEA) in reducing household food waste (HFW) changes with grocery shopping distance. To this end, using 7319 households survey data from China, this study investigates the moderating effect of shopping distance on the link between PEA and HFW behaviour. The results of Tobit regressions show that PEA is an important predictor of actual HFW behaviour in the absence of the constraint of shopping distance. However, the expansion of shopping distance will weaken the positive role of PEA in reducing HFW. It indicates that, due to the temporal and financial constraints generated by shopping distance, there is a certain degree of hypothetical deviation between the wasteful behaviours that individuals actually exhibit and their stated PEA. Our findings, from the perspective of the moderating effect of shopping distance, explain why some individuals deviate from their stated PEA in HFW behaviour, which provides a new insight into the generation of 'attitude-behaviour' gap. Therefore, policy interventions that merely enhancing environmental education may have limited effect on reducing food waste; instead, the promotion of citizen environmental ethics should be combined with efforts to improve the accessibility of retail infrastructures.

A large amount of agricultural waste is produced annually. Producing biochar is an excellent solution for waste management, resource recovery, emission reduction, energy production, reduction in transportation and enhancing carbon sequestration. This study was done to investigate the aeration status of biochar-based growth media as compared with the commercial soilless medium of cocopeat-perlite. Biochars from oven-dried residues were produced by slow pyrolysis at 300 (B300) and 500°C (B500) with a rate of 2°C min^-1 and using a continuous inflow of nitrogen. Sawdust (Sd), wheat straw (WS), rice hull (Rh), palm bunches (Plm) and sugarcane bagasse (SC), their biochars, vermiculite (V) and zeolite (Z) were used to prepare 13 mixed growth media. Oxygen diffusion coefficient (D_p) of media was measured at six matric potentials (h) of -5, -10, -15, -20, -40 and -60 hPa. Troeh et al. (1982) model was fitted to D_p/D₀ versus air-filled porosity (AFP) data. Although AFP was more than 0.1 m³ m^-3 for some media, the D_p/D₀ was very low. Considering optimum D_p/D₀ (i.e. 0.010-0.015) for growth substrates at h = -8 hPa, aeration status of four media (cocopeat-perlite, Rh-SCB300-Z, Sd-SCB300-Z and WSB500-Rh-V) was optimum. Highest D_p/D₀ at h = -8 hPa was observed for Rh-SCB300-Z. The AFP at h = -10 hPa was highest for Rh-SCB300-Z, cocopeat-perlite and WSB500-Rh-V. Biochar-based media with good aeration status and water retention can be a suitable substitute for commercial soilless culture in greenhouse production. Overall, WSB500-Rh-V is a suitable substitute for cocopeat-perlite.

Liquid fertilizers (LFs) produced by microwave-assisted acid hydrolysis of livestock and poultry wastes were applied to potted hot pepper (Capsicum annuum L.) to evaluate their potential to be used as amino acid LFs. A preliminary experiment was conducted to determine the optimum acid-hydrolysis conditions for producing LFs from a mixture of pig hair and faeces (P) and another mixture of chicken feathers and faeces (C). Two LFs were produced under the optimum acid-hydrolysis conditions (acidification by sulphuric acid (7.5 mol L^-1) in a microwave (200 W) for 90 minutes), and a commercial amino acid LF (Guo Guang (GG)) was used for comparison. P, C and GG fertilizers were tested in potted hot pepper cultivation at two doses, whereas no fertilizer application served as the control (CK). P and C fertilizers significantly increased the fruit yield compared with GG fertilizer, particularly at the higher dose. Moreover, the treatments improved the fruit vitamin C and soluble sugar contents in the order of C > P > GG compared with CK. These results could be attributed to more types of amino acids in C fertilizer than in P and GG fertilizers. The results also indicated that the prepared fertilizers could significantly increase the shoot and root dry weight, soil available nitrogen and phosphorus contents and nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium (NPK) uptake by plants compared with CK. In conclusion, microwave-assisted acid hydrolysis could effectively convert unusable wastes into valuable fertilizers comparable or even superior to commercial fertilizers.

In winter season, the burning of crop residues for ease of sowing the next crop, along with industrial emissions and vehicular pollution leads to settling of a thick layer of smog in northern part of India. Therefore, to understand the opinion of farmers regarding sustainable management of organic waste, the present study was conducted in Ludhiana district of Indian state of Punjab. An ex post facto research design was used and a total of 800 dairy farmers having significant crop area were selected randomly for the study, grouped equally as small and large dairy farmers. Results revealed that majority of farmers had a highly favourable opinion regarding organic waste management due to the fact that they were aware of the ill-effects of undesirable practices like crop residue burning. Further, to predict the farmers' opinion and the effect of independent variables on farmers' opinion, a multi-layer perceptron feed-forward deep neural network was developed with mean squared error of 0.036 and 0.137 for validation and training data sets respectively, marking a novel approach of analysing farmers' behaviour. The neural network highlighted that with increase in the magnitude of input variables, namely, education, experience in dairying, information source utilisation, knowledge regarding organic waste management, etc., the farmers' opinion regarding sustainable waste management increases. The study concluded with the impression that cognitive processes like education, information and knowledge play a significant role in forming the opinion of the farmers. Therefore, efforts focusing on enhancing cognition should be made for sustainable management of organic waste.

This article aims to identify how project management can enable the introduction of circular economy (CE) in agribusiness. The methodological strategy used was the systematic literature review. The research corpus consisted of 70 articles selected from the Web of Science and Scopus databases. For screening, the Rayyan platform was used, and the analysis process was carried out by categorization and grouping of terms and concepts with the help of Excel software. The evidence shown the efforts to reduce agro-waste and how to transform them into by-products. Barriers, challenges, benefits and opportunities for making the CE viable in agribusiness are presented. Three ways of projecting the CE in agribusiness are identified: (1) project management processes in the integration of the CE in agribusiness, (2) innovative projects and new business models as drivers of the CE in agribusiness and (3) 4.0 technologies integrating the CE in agribusiness based on project management methodologies. Results are limited to terms used in search mechanisms. This research contributes towards identifying project management processes that can enable the CE in agribusiness, particularly by identifying the impacts of the CE in different business areas. The research also contributes in a practical way by providing insights on ways to make the CE viable in agribusiness through project management.

Iron ore tailings (IOTs) need to be properly managed to mitigate the environmental, social, and economic impacts of mining activities. To cope with this issue, we use data envelopment analysis (DEA) to evaluate alternatives for using IOT in the construction sector. The classical and weight restriction output-oriented DEA models were used in this analysis. The results show that the ranking of alternatives depends on the aspect being evaluated. Concrete block is the most environmentally friendly alternative when analysing both models. For both social and economic aspects, ceramics produced better results in the classical model, whereas Portland cement showed better outcomes in the weight restriction model. In this sense, the results suggest great potential for the use of IOT in the construction sector, enabling the reduction of risks and social and environmental impacts of tailings dams.

Waste management has been developing in response to needs. The need to get rid of unwanted materials has always been a motivation but using the resource value of waste has also been a driver from the stone age and forwards. In affluent times not so much. Sanitation became a motivation with the discovery of pathogenic microorganisms in the mid-19th century, and after World War 2 (WW2) a strong focus on environmental protection developed, and in recent times, the resource aspect has received an interest despite material affluence. Legislation has been one of the drivers for recent developments, in the case of Sweden, the environmental protection legislation came in the late 1960s, and a few years later, the municipalities got the exclusive right to collect and manage household waste. Many local and regional waste management companies were established, owned by the municipalities. These organizations became agents of development, due to the increased scope and capacity. Adding to the environmental protection agenda, a renewed interest in waste as a resource was initiated by the oil crises of the 1970s, resulting in new waste incineration plants, with energy recovery, connected to already existing district heating networks. Mistakes, failures and alarms in the 1970s and the 1980s resulted in treatment method improvements and the establishment of source separation as an integral part of waste management. The waste management community stands strong today and is taking a more proactive role than before, which includes a stronger focus on communication with other stakeholders.

In order to protect human health and the environment, several regulations have been introduced in recent years to reduce or even eliminate the use of some brominated flame retardants (BFRs) due to their toxicity, persistence and bioaccumulation. Dispersions of these BFRs in polymers are widely used for various applications. In this report, four different brominated molecules, decabromodiphenyl ether (DBDE), hexabromocyclododecane (HBCDD), decabromodiphenyl ethane (DBDPE) and tris(tribromophenoxy)triazine (TTBPT), were dispersed in the solid matrix of an industrial polymer, high impact polystyrene (HIPS). The possibility of degradation of these BFRs within HIPS under UV-visible irradiation in ambient air was investigated. The degradation kinetics of DBDE and HBCDD were followed by Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (FTIR) and high-resolution two-step laser mass spectrometry (L2MS). The thermal properties of the pristine and irradiated polymer matrix were monitored by thermogravimetric analysis (TGA) and differential scanning calorimetry (DSC), which showed that these properties were globally preserved. Volatile photoproducts from the degradation of DBDE, DBDPE and TTBPT were identified by headspace gas chromatography/mass spectrometry analysis. Under the chosen experimental conditions, BFRs underwent rapid degradation after a few seconds of irradiation, with conversions exceeding 50% for HIPS/DBDE and HIPS/HBCDD systems.