1,720,980 research outputs found
The cost of comfort: waking up to furniture waste: Researching material use in European household furniture using dynamic stock analysis
No full textThis study is a first attempt to address some of the more significant gaps in the available data on (European) furniture. Furthermore, this study takes a dynamic stock analysis approach to look into material stock- and flow dynamics of European household furniture and project them over time. A total of 11 material categories in 14 furniture product categories are assessed. Using principles of dynamic stock analysis and IMAGE data on population and residential floorspace per capita: a Python model has been developed to assess required furniture- and material stocks, the required primary material used in furniture production and the total amount of recycled- and landfilled material per year, and to project the results overtime. To further inform the model, a material database is developed, containing material- and lifetime information on 14 furniture product categories and a survey (n=108) on household furniture has been conducted to derive furniture intensities per unit residential surface. To project the development of material stocks- and flows in European household furniture over time, two scenarios are defined: the business-as-usual or the ‘baseline’ scenario and a second scenario called ‘the reduced waste scenario’ in which reuse and recycle fractions are gradually increased over time. Following business-as-usual patterns in the baseline scenario, the total material stock for furniture is projected to increase with roughly 97 Mt (or 20%) to 584 Mt, towards 2050. The total amount of landfilled- and recycled waste material from household furniture is estimated to be 36 Mt and 4 Mt respectively in 2050. The total amount of required primary material is estimated to increase to 38.5 Mt in total in 2050. In the reduced waste scenario, the total amount of landfilled material is estimated to decrease to 15 Mt in 2050, where the amount of recycled material is estimated to increase to 15 Mt. Also the amount of required primary material is estimated to decrease to less than 18 Mt in 2050. The results from the reduced waste scenario show that a gradual increase from the reuse fraction from 2021 onwards (from 6% to 35% with a 1% step per year) and a gradual increase from the recycle fraction from 2021 onwards (from 10% to 50% with a 2% step per year), would be enough to reduce the need for primary material by half towards 2050. Based on these results, it is the author’s conviction that furniture should be given a separate waste status, similar to that of cars as set out in the end-of-life vehicle directive (European Commission, 2000): materials inside furniture should be labelled and furniture manufacturers should develop dismantling guidelines for their products to ease repair, remanufacturing and recycling. Targets should be set on the country level for the recycling of waste furniture and for the use of recycled (furniture) material in primary production. … Let’s wake up to furniture waste.Industrial Ecolog
Quantifying materials in household furniture: A case study of dynamic furniture stock in American homes
No full textCurrent cravings for more are taking a great toll on the Earth and its most vulnerable communities. The rise in ’fast furniture’ has contributed to this issue, popularizing the idea that furniture can be cheap, to the point of being disposable. To understand the size of this issue and how much more damage to the environment might be in store if these trends continue, we need to measure the amount of the furniture stock now and project what might be needed in the future. Currently, there is a knowledge gap in understanding how much furniture is in our homes, especially on a national scale. This thesis aims to quantify the stock and flows of household furniture materials in the US, distinguished by income and area type (i.e., urban or rural). To inform strategies toward circularity in household furniture, a second object of the study is to investigate the effects of repair and reuse – lifetime extension strategies – on the behavior of the American household furniture stock. To quantify the stock of furniture units, the average number of furniture units per m2 of residential floor space was collected using a bottom-up approach. The results were scaled to the national level using residential floor space data from the Integrated Model to Assess the Global Environment (IMAGE), scenario SSP2. Dynamic stocks and flows were calculated based on projected changes in residential floor space to understand how the stocks and flows might behave over time. The lifetime extension scenarios were simulated by extending the lifetime and adding mass (for repair) of a percentage of the furniture in the stock. Overall, demand for household furniture is not expected to saturate until the end of the 21st century. The highest-earning quintile owns half of the furniture stock mass, and material inequality is expected to remain until the end of the century in the base case. Urban residents own a majority of the household furniture and are expected to own a larger share as urbanization continues. About three-quarters of the furniture stock is wood-based, presenting opportunities for carbon storage but challenges in the volume of hard-to-recycle and low-durability particleboard. Circularity efforts to decrease furniture demand should target higher-income groups and separate strategies for lower-income groups should aim to increase affordability and access to more durable furniture. Urbanization also presents opportunities for local furniture circularity projects and hubs to attract skilled furniture repairers and secondhand distributors.Industrial Ecolog
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Get PDFThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
Get PDF“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Get PDFWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Global Material Stocks of Agricultural Field Machinery: Quantification of the Current In-Use Stock and Exploration of Future Pathways through a Material Stock Scenario Analysis
No full textThe growing demand for food production and the global developments regarding the intensification and mechanization of agriculture are likely to affect material use in the agricultural sector in some way in the future. This study addressed a research gap regarding the current and future material requirements of the global agricultural system, and it represents a first attempt to estimate the size and composition of the current global material stock embedded in agricultural field machinery. The study also explored the potential future developments of this material stock in five Shared Socioeconomic Pathways (SSPs) through a material scenario analysis, which utilized scenario data generated by an integrated assessment model IMAGE. Available country-level data on the number of machinery in use was linked to agricultural production data through the calculation of ‘mechanization factors’, which describe the relationship of the size of the in-use machinery stock and the annual production quantities of a country. Regionally aggregated mechanization factors were used in combination with regional production data for the estimation of the total numbers of different field machinery currently in use in 26 world regions. These numbers were combined with literature-based estimates of the average material compositions and masses of different types of agricultural field machinery to quantify their current in-use material stocks. Steel (121 Mt), ductile iron (86 Mt), and rubber (21 Mt) were identified as the largest global material stocks of agricultural field machinery, and the largest shares of the materials were found in tractors and combine harvesters. The results of the quantification of the current material stock were incorporated in a material scenario analysis in combination with IMAGE scenario data on agricultural production in the different SSPs. The scenario analysis involved two scenario models with distinct assumptions concerning the development of mechanization levels over time. Depending on the SSP scenario and the model assumptions, the results of the scenario analysis indicated a 50 to 200 percent growth in the global material stock of agricultural machinery by the year 2100. While the scenario analysis assumed the current agricultural practices and technologies to maintain their importance in the future, the study also explored some newer developments taking place in the global agricultural system and the ways they might influence the material stock of agricultural machinery in the future.Industrial Ecolog
Integrating Reuse in MaTrace Models: An implementation and evaluation
No full textThe growing world population gaining affluence is driving the extraction of raw materials. Resource availability is finite and concerns about future supply shortages rise. An approach to tackle this problem is circular economy which entails multiple strategies to reduce the demand of virgin materials. The implementation of those strategies require knowledge about material stocks and flows in a society. Material Flow Analysis can provide those insights. This fast developing field brought about MaTrace models which allow to trace the fate of materials in an open-loop recycling system. Recycling is only one of multiple circular strategies, thus the purpose of this research is to integrate an elaborate reuse model into a MaTrace model to build the foundation of a model which considers multiple circular strategies in sufficient ways.Two existing models were combined to achieve this: Consumer goods present in the MaTrace model were redirected into a reuse model and the end of life products of the reuse model were fed back into the MaTrace model. The impacts of this model extension were investigated by comparing the total in-use stock when considering one, two, and three consumer products' use cycles. Furthermore, Monte Carlo simulations were conducted to gain an understanding of the model behaviour.The results show that the total in-use stock increases in the peak by 8 % when reuse is considered. However, the gross stock dynamics do not change significantly in comparison to the original model. The evaluation of the Monte Carlo simulations revealed that the input which contributes the most uncertainty to the total in-use stock is the split of the initial material inflow. Furthermore, the results of the Monte Carlo simulations appear to be strongly connected to the initial input data. On the basis of this research it can be recommended to further extend MaTrace models to obtain a more comprehensive representation of a circular economy. Furthermore, MaTrace models using time series data for inflows and model parameter have to be created, this way MaTrace models can follow the evolution of MFA from static to dynamic models.Industrial Ecolog
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Get PDFWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
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