No description available.

This thesis means to find out how preschool teachers are working to demonstrate the importance of recycling and reuse for children. My hope is to contribute knowledge about various practical methods to establish the idea of sustainable development in the operation. I have used the method of qualitative research and done semi-structured interviews with preschool teachers on certified green flag preschools. The questions I have asked for example concerned how the preschool teachers have worked with recycling and reuse, how much the children have been able to influence and if other didactic subjects are implicated. Six interviews were made and these are summarized in the result part. The analysis shows that all teachers want to teach the children the importance of protecting our earth and what actions each person can contribute with. Even in my search through earlier literature, this has been emphasized since the children absorb a lot of knowledge during the preschool age. Reuse and recycling is integrated into the operation and are not something that is done out of the ordinary. The preschool teachers did not consider it to be any difficulties or obstacles. It rather simplified their work because the policy document gets integrated.

Wooden grain elevators are purely functional buildings that store, dry, and move grain. These buildings were first introduced to the Canadian Prairies at the turn of the twentieth century and quickly became an icon, sometimes referred to as the cathedral of the prairies. With the improvement of production and technology the number of wooden grain elevators have dramatically decreased. A portion of the Trans Canada Trail in Western Manitoba, that was once a rail line, is investigated to establish a deeper understanding of the eleven remaining elevators and their context. The intention of this practicum is to re-envision the role of these grain elevators and to incorporate them into a regional narrative. A proposed design is developed to save the remaining elevators focusing on ideas of memory, growth, and identity in order to connect communities and visitors to the landscape’s past, present, and future. / February 2017

Changing circumstances during Late Antiquity and the Early Byzantine Period (4th-9th centuries A.D.) required Byzantine communities to make deliberate adjustments in order to survive, endure, and ultimately flourish again during the Middle Byzantine Period (10th-12th centuries). The role these communities had in decision-making can easily be overlooked, leaving instead hapless victims of insurmountable external pressures such as imperial manipulation, economic recession, Christian acculturation, or a general sense of inexorable decline. Although factors such as these played a role as each community deliberated on a complex and unique set of local concerns, the ultimate decisions each community made should not be assumed but rather investigated on the basis of both textual and archaeological evidence. The stoa is particularly well-suited for the study of reuse and therefore valuable for understanding the adaptive strategies implemented by Byzantine individuals and communities during the transition period from antiquity to the medieval period. The stoa was one of the most ubiquitous buildings of the Greco-Roman city and was highly adaptable for reuse, whether by incorporation into large structures such as churches or fortifications, or by subdivision into smaller units for uses such as housing, storage, or commercial activities. The stoa was commonly found not only in urban contexts, particularly in agorai and fora, but also at many extraurban sanctuaries. By compiling data on the reuse of stoas throughout the Byzantine Empire during the 4th - 10th centuries, four patterns of reuse can be identified: residential, economic, ecclesiastical, and defensive. Abandonment, or a lack of reuse, is a fifth pattern. These patterns of reuse provide insight into the lives of Byzantines outside of the imperial and ecclesiastic elites and inform the excavation of post-classical phases of stoas.

At the rate the population is growing it is important to find ways to be more efficient with the energy and water we use. The increase in population increases the need for electricity and water, but the way we are using our sources will not leave us with enough for future generations. The constant use of "dirty energy", energy that emits CO2 and other chemicals into the atmosphere, will continue to harm our environment. A new system is needed to help preserve water and produce green energy that will not harm the only earth we have.

Aluminum dross is a by-product of Aluminum production. At present, dross is processed in rotary kilns to recover the Al, and the resultant salt cake is sent to landfills; although it is sealed to prevent from leaching, the potential for leaching exists and could harm the environment as the salt cake contains fluorides and other salts. Furthermore, much energy is consumed to recover the Al from the dross; this is energy that can be saved if the dross could be diverted and utilized as an engineering material. The objective of this work is to eliminate waste and instead utilize the waste in a natural cycle (closed loop) by using it as an engineered material. Three avenues were investigated to utilize the dross: (i) refractory materials; (ii) aluminum composites; (iii) high temperature additive for de-sulphurizing steel. We have found that the use of dross waste to manufacture refractory material has much merit. Mechanical property evaluations revealed the possibility for dross waste to be utilized as filler in concrete, resulting in a 40% higher flexural strength and a 15% higher compressive strength compared to pure cement. These results will be presented and discussed.

Information management systems are being developed and introduced to engineering design activities to help companies reuse their information. This trend has been identified in multi-location companies, which operate design departments at various locations. Investigating how multi-location companies can configure their information management environment to fulfil engineers' information needs in design process opens up a research topic for us. A well configured information management environment will require a clear understanding of what designers need from it. A literature review has identified that only a few studies have observed the way in which design practitioners work in an industrial environment; and since these studies were all conducted 10 or 20 years ago within a specific context, their findings may no longer reflect current practice. The first phase of this research investigates the information needs of designers in the vehicle industry, and the different approaches and resources that they currently adopt to fulfil these needs. The findings of this first phase of research are then used to identify further industry-based studies. The second phase of the research focuses on the structures and operations of information management for engineering design. A case study of four multi-location companies was conducted to understand their information management environments (IMEs). Primary data was collected in fieldwork visits to the companies. Inductive grounded coding was applied to analyse the data, revealing the constructs of information management environments at the case companies studied. The analyses identified strategic orientations, structures, organisational enablers and individuals' capabilities in case companies' IMEs. A new classification of IMEs was proposed to understand their structural and operational features. The analyses have implications for how companies should configure their IMEs. The studies reported in this dissertation contribute to theory by providing an understanding of the configuration of IMEs in companies and proposing ways of configuring IMEs in practice. Researchers in the domain of information systems can develop a good understanding of how professional practitioners interact with information environments so that they can propose information management systems or methods that make tangible improvements. This study also helps engineers map out the information environment that they search to acquire information. Chief engineers or managers in companies who are in charge of information management can benefit from the understanding of their own information environment and use the proposed model as a guide to configure their own information management environments. The study also suggests future research directions, such as identifying and proposing the indicators that can be used to measure the performance of information management.

Strategies for reuse of components are important in order to create a closed loop manufacturing system. Over decades, the notion has been gaining ground due to environmental and legislative reasons. Reuse of components is desirable and in many cases might be economically beneficial. However, the implementation of reuse strategies has been hindered by the requirement of reliable methodologies to assess the remaining life and reuse potential of used components. The estimation of the remaining life is problematic as the useful life of a component is affected by several causes of obsolescence. The common causes are due to physical and technological issues. So far, little research has attempted to address these issues simultaneously, and integrating them. This thesis seeks to develop methodologies that aid in predicting the integrated remaining lifetime of used components. There are three core parts of this research. First, the methodology determines the remaining life of used components from the physical lifetime perspective. This was derived from the estimation of physical failure using failure rate data, and the statistical analysis of usage intensity age as obtained from customers survey. Second, the research presents the use of the technological forecasting technique to predict the remaining technological life. As it is influenced by the technology progress, the forecast was developed on the basis of product technology clusters and market trend extrapolation analysis. Finally, the resulting estimations from the two aspects were combined to obtain an integrated assessment for estimating the remaining life of components. The potential for components in a product to be reused is justified when the remaining life is greater than the average expected lifespan of the product. Two cases of domestic appliances – televisions and washing machines were used to highlight and demonstrate the validity of the proposed methodology. The results show that the proposed method provides the practitioners with a promising tool for end-of-life decision making. This is in particularly attractive when used as a preliminary decision support tool prior to the time consuming and costly processes such as disassembly and quality testing.

Adaptive reuse, as an alternative approach to the treatment of existing old buildings and urban areas, is being received more concerns in contemporary China. Taking Shanghai as an example, this thesis attempts to assess the practice of reuse of historical buildings in the urban context of Shanghai from 1990 to 2008. / In this research, the practice of adaptive reuse is studied with a focus on improving dynamic urban life through giving old buildings an advisable new use. With the aim of finding out what makes a lively and dynamic city, I employ the theory of city diversity from Jane Jacobs into my research as a theoretical basis to be tested in the research. / These investigations of Shanghai were conducted during a fieldwork in Shanghai. The case includes three types, which are respectively located in different areas in contemporary Shanghai. The first one is an alteration and upgrading of old industrial buildings on the waterfront. The second is a reuse of clusters of commercial buildings built in the colonial era on the Bund, with the ‘Bund 18’ building as a critical example. The third one is an urban renewal through adaptive reuse of traditional residential buildings in an inner city area, with a focused study on the Xintiandi area. / Through empirical analysis of these three cases, I try to examine the relationship between the buildings transformed through adaptive reuse and the urban surroundings in terms of participation or use by the various urban populations, and further explore how adaptive reuse may contribute to the generation and sustaining of diverse urban life in the urban context. / We may assume that the relationship between the city and the user is linked by urban activities, and that diversity of urban life can contribute to the healthy growth of cities. Given these assumptions, the empirical studies in this thesis suggest that the principal condition in adaptive reuse of historical buildings, for generating diverse and active urban life, is a potential in the old buildings to be ‘divided’. This includes ‘divisions’ of space, function and the category of users. Consequently, the design principles, as I would propose at the end of this study, are as follows: extracting spatial potential, creating mixed and small-scale businesses, and expanding categories of users to attract participation of a broad spectrum of the population with a diverse social background. Based on this, the practice of adaptive reuse of historical buildings can help reviving a close and dynamic relationship between the user and the physical setting, people and the city, facilitating the generation and sustaining of a diverse and healthy urban life.

<p>This report presents a study of the effect of reusing experience in the Hazards and Operability Analysis method (HazOp method) with regards to how the effectiveness of the method is affected. The study was conducted by first creating a software tool for experience reuse in HazOp, then testing that tool in a student experiment in which the participants used the tool when conducting a HazOp.</p><p>During the experiment it was found that students using the tool found 21% more hazards in the system under study than their counterparts. After conducting the experiment it was found that there was a 94% certainty that this improvement was not due to random effects.</p>