This paper provides experimental results to investigate the mechanical properties of sustainable strain-hardening cement composite (2SHCC) for infrastructures after freeze-thaw actions. To improve the sustainability of SHCC materials in this study, high energy-consumptive components-silica sand, cement, and polyvinyl alcohol (PVA) fibers-in the conventional SHCC materials are partially replaced...

Sustainable development with regard to non-renewable resources can best be defined in terms of the inter-generational challenge of the Brundtland commission and the intra-generational challenge worked out in Agenda 21 of the 1992 Rio de Janeiro conference of United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED). In meeting these challenges, the trilemma of security of supply under co...

The problem of energy storage and its continuous delivery on demand needs new effective solutions. Supercapacitors are viewed as essential devices for solving this problem since they can quickly provide high power basically countless number of times. The performance of supercapacitors is mostly dependent on the properties of electrode materials used for electrostatic charge accumulation, i.e. e...

This article explores the resilience of orphaned young people in safeguarding physical assets (land and property) inherited from their parents and sustaining their households without a co-resident adult relative. Drawing on the concept of resilience and the sustainable livelihoods framework, the article analyses the findings of an exploratory study conducted in 2008-2009 in Tanzania and Uganda ...

Over the last decade, enormous strides have been made in creating engineered cementitious composites (ECC) with extreme tensile ductility, on the order of several hundred times that of normal concrete or fiber reinforced concrete (FRC). Current ECC investigations include load carrying structural members in new infrastructure systems, as well as for repair and retrofitting of existing structures...

This review describes the state-of-the-art of material derived from the forest sector with respect to its potential for use in the packaging industry. Some innovative approaches are highlighted. The aim is to cover recent developments and key challenges for successful introduction of renewable materials in the packaging market. The covered subjects are renewable fibers and bio-based polymers fo...

Hydrogen is often described as the fuel of the future, especially for application in hydrogen powered fuel-cell vehicles (HFCV's). However, its widespread implementation in this role has been thwarted by the lack of a lightweight, safe, on-board hydrogen storage material. Here we show that benign, readily-available hydrocarbon wax is capable of rapidly releasing large amounts of hydrogen throug...

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...

Artificial photosynthesis, modeled on natural light-driven oxidation of water in Photosystem II, holds promise as a sustainable source of reducing equivalents for producing fuels. Few robust wateroxidation catalysts capable of mediating this difficult four-electron, four-proton reaction have yet been described. We report a new method for generating an amorphous electrodeposited material, princi...