Industrial ecology is a new approach to the industrial design of products and processes and the implementation of sustainable manufacturing strategies. It is a concept in which an industrial system is viewed not in isolation from its surrounding systems but in concert with them. Industrial ecology seeks to optimize the total materials cycle from virgin material to finished material, to componen...

One of life’s immutable laws, sometimes known as Murphy’s law of dirt, is that, to make something clean, something else must become dirty. Thus now, when more than ever before, our manufacturing and process industries are striving to achieve total cleanliness and purity of products and components, we are also making more dirty waste products than ever before. Further, to make something very cle...

–A detailed investigation has done Redmud an Alluminium industrial waste product has done to study its feasibility for use in road constructions. In this study Redmud was stabilized with 2, 4, 6, 8,10and 12 percentages of lime and unconfined compressive strength, Split tensile strength and California bearing ratio tests were conducted at 1, 3, 7 and 28 days curing periods respectively. From the...

In a stylized model of international trade, firms in the North indirectly export second-hand products to a representative firm in the South to be reused as intermediate goods, with potential trade gains. The degree of reusability of waste products is a crucial choice variable in the North. This is because with a lack of international vigilance, non-reusable waste can be mixed illegally with the...

Several current-use (≤ 80 ng g⁻¹ dry weight) and organochlorine pesticides (≤ 15 ng g⁻¹ dry weight) and polychlorinated biphenyls (≤ 18 ng g⁻¹ dry weight) were found in the biodegradable fraction of source separated household waste, compost, and/or anaerobic digestate. The degradation rates of individual compounds differ depending on the treatment. Dieldrin and pentachloroaniline, e.g., degrade...

Medical waste is a necessary by-product of any hospital environment; however, the majority of regulated medical waste is produced in the OR from the use of disposable surgical supplies (eg, drapes, gowns, basins, gloves, sponges). We conducted a concept comparison project in the ORs of two large medical centers in Bethesda, Maryland, and Washington, DC, to evaluate the effects of using reusable...

This paper describes a strategic level simulation model developed to help stakeholders understand the Los Angeles solid waste system. The model structure is based on a “recycling loop” incorporating five interconnected sectors: consumption, collection, processing, disposal, and production. The user interface includes eight strategic decision levers (product durability, waste in products and pac...

Clean water is paramount to human health. In this article, we present a technique for detection of trace amounts of human or animal waste products in water using fluorescence emission cavity-enhanced spectroscopy. The detection of femtomolar concentrations of urobilin, a metabolic byproduct of heme metabolism that is excreted in both human and animal waste in water, was achieved through the use...

Over the years, chemists have been known to make a significant contribution to science, and to generate new chemical substances as a result of their professional activities. Over 20 million compounds have been recorded in the literature, however, because of their use in chemical processes and their disposal in waste products, only a smaller number of these compounds are available for furture us...

The role and application of the concept of the soundscape, vis-à-vis that of environmental noise management, needs elaboration. In noise control, sound is a waste product, managed to reduce the immision of sounds that cause human discomfort. The soundscape approach, by contrast, considers the acoustic environment as a resource, focussing on sounds people want, or prefer. Quiet is not a core req...