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Environmental awareness and legislative pressures have made manufacturers responsible for the take-back and end-of-life treatment of their products. Therefore, manufacturers are struggling to find ways to recover maximum value from returned products. This goal can best be achieved by promoting multiple reuse programs as reuse is one of the most effective ways to enhance a sustainable engineering economy. Since the essential goal of the reuse strategy is to reuse parts, the reliability of used parts becomes a core issue. Research indicates that reuse is technologically feasible, associated with a significant manufacturing cost saving, and it does not compromise product quality. However, it is not easy to be applied in reality. There are several uncertainties associated with reuse, the most common is the uncertainty of the product???s quality after use. A widespread implementation of the reuse strategy could be triggered, subject to the availability of reliable methods to assess the useful remaining life of parts. The evolution of such a methodology would play a pivotal role in making decisions on the supply chain process and the recovery value of returned products. Reliability assessment by life cycle data analysis is the basis of this research. The proposed methodology addresses the problem of reliability assessment of used parts by considering two important aspects. It performs statistical as well as condition monitoring data analysis for decision-making on reuse. The analysis is carried out in two stages. Firstly, a wellknown reliability assessment procedure, the Weibull analysis, is applied to analyse time-tofailure data to assess the overall reuse potential of components. In the second stage, the used capacity (actual life) of components is determined by analysing their operating history (condition monitoring data). The linear and nonlinear regression analysis, Kriging procedures and artificial neural networks (ANN) are employed in this stage. Finally, the Weibull analysis and ANNs are integrated to estimate the remaining useful life of components/assemblies of a product at the end of its first life cycle. The model was validated by using life cycle data from consumer products.

Bibliography: leaves 92-98. Considers the issue of achieving sustainable development in a society operating under the constraints of poverty, lack of environmental awareness and political instability.

Bibliography: leaves 116-127.

Bibliography: leaves 253-280.

Social controls influence the environmental performance of firms and require them to be more accountable for their environmental impacts. These controls include governmental interventions such as mandatory disclosure requirements, regulation and subsidisation, as well as less formal controls such as stakeholder opinion. This thesis examines the relative influence of environmental social controls on the acceptability of capital investment and provides insight into the perceptions of Australian managers concerning capital investment decision-making. An experiment is used to measure the relative influence of the four social control measures. This is supported by a survey to gauge firm size and industry influences and also a range of attributes of the controls on the capital investment decision. Experiment results suggest that the influence of stakeholder opinion on capital investment is very high and mandatory disclosure very low. The survey measured the influence of a range of indicators of each control and also firm size and industry effects. Firm size effects were weak while industry effects were much clearer and more consistent. A comparison of the influence of social control indicators and a range of financial and strategic indicators on the capital investment decision showed that the mainstream indicators had more influence. / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

The application of substantial quantities of phosphorus (P) has been required to increase productivity on many Australian soils. Unfortunately, these applications have often resulted in increased concentrations of P in surface runoff that contributes to excessive algal growth in surface waters and consequently a decline in their quality. The concentrations of P in runoff from intensively managed pastures are often high (1-5 mg/L) and typically at least an order of magnitude higher than water quality targets. Although a substantial amount of research has been devoted to the problem of P accumulation and mobilisation in arable systems ( in which P is typically mobilised by the action of raindrop impact and subsequently transported in particulate form ), there has been substantially less research in intensively managed pasture systems. Consequently, there is a paucity of knowledge concerning the fundamental processes and factors responsible for P in runoff from these systems and a dearth of truly effective remedial strategies. In this thesis, the accumulation of P in soil under intensively managed pastures used for dairying and the processes responsible for its mobilisation in surface runoff were investigated. This research was undertaken at two research sites in South - east Australia, i.e. Camden in New South Wales and Flaxley in South Australia. A number of factors relating to scale and hydrology may influence the processes of P mobilisation and its concentration in runoff. A comparison was made of the forms and concentrations of P in runoff between a typical rainfall simulation methodology and large runoff plots. The effect of rainfall intensity on the forms and concentrations of P was also investigated. The concentrations of P in runoff from small - scale, high - intensity rainfall simulations were on average 33 % lower than those from large plots ( approximating hillslopes ) although the processes of mobilisation ( as evidenced by runoff P forms ) were similar. Increasing rainfall intensity resulted in decreasing P concentrations, but similar forms of P. It was hypothesised that changes in hydrological characteristics ( residence time and depth of runoff ) were responsible for the differences in the P concentrations. A model of P mobilisation ( incorporating hydrological and P - release characteristics ) was developed and shown to successfully predict runoff P concentrations under a range of rainfall intensities. These findings and the subsequent model were used in the successful modelling of landscape scale nutrient exports based on rainfall simulation data as part of a separate, but complementary project. There is anecdotal evidence to suggest that Australian soils are relatively ' leaky ' in terms of P in runoff compared to soils overseas. Consequently, comparisons of the labile soil P characteristics and soil P - runoff P relationships were made between Australian soils and soils of similar fertility from the USA, UK and New Zealand ( using both experimental data and data sourced from the literature ). It was concluded that Australian soils leak more P than soils of similar fertility in the USA, UK and New Zealand, although it was beyond the scope of the thesis to make more detailed comparisons between Australian and overseas soils. The accumulation and mobilisation of P in two soils used for intensive pasture production in Australia were investigated. In intensive pasture systems P accumulated in the shallowest zones of the soil and principally as inorganic P. The concentrations of labile P were 3 - 5 times higher in the top 0.01 m than in the top 0.1 m. Using a simple model, it was estimated that only the top several mm of soil influence runoff P concentrations. The dominant form of P in runoff was shown to be orthophosphate although in low to moderate fertility soils, dissolved organic P can constitute a substantial proportion of the P in runoff. These results confirm the need to reduce the pool of P available for mobilisation in the immediate topsoil in order to reduce runoff P concentrations. Because P is stratified, it was hypothesised that one method to reduce the pool of P available for mobilisation is to de - stratify the soil ( i.e. mix the topsoil ). The effect of this technique on runoff P concentrations was investigated in laboratory and rainfall simulation experiments. These experiments revealed that reductions in runoff P concentrations between 45 and 70 % can be achieved by de - stratification of soils under permanent pastures. It was hypothesised that the benefits of de - stratification could be maximised using a combination of information relating to catchment hydrology and the spatial distribution of soil P and that this would result in large reductions in P exports with a relatively small degree of inconvenience to land managers. Given the limited opportunities identified in previous research to reduce P exports in runoff, the strategic utilisation of de - stratification is a potentially important option in water quality management for the dairy industry and warrants further investigation. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--School of Earth and Environmental Sciences, 2006.

Bibliography: leaves 253-280. / viii, 280 leaves ; 30 cm. / Title page, contents and abstract only. The complete thesis in print form is available from the University Library. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Adelaide, Dept. of History, 2002?

Sources of polar/water-soluble organic compounds conjunctly with apolar biomarkers were characterized in natural organic matter. This multi-biomarker approach was accomplished by a simple analytical method consisting of extraction with dichloromethane:methanol (2:1, v/v), silylation and analysis by gaschromatography- mass spectrometry (GC-MS). Polar and apolar biomarkers, derived mainly from higher plants and microorganisms, were used as tracers of processes occurring in the environmental compartments and registered in aerosol, soil and sediment samples. Sugars (monosaccharides, disaccharides, anhydrosugars and sugar alcohols) were utilized to trace seasonal variation inputs of biogenic organic carbon to aerosols over a pristine forest and the passage of a smoke plume from the long-range transport wildfire emissions. Sugars and fatty acid methyl esters were target compounds used to better understand the plant-microorganism dynamics in a ryegrass soil over a one-year period. Distributions and abundances of straight chain homologous series (n-alkanes, n-alkanols, n-alkanoic acids), cyclic components (e.g., diterpenoids, triterpenoids, steroids) and polar biomakers (e.g., sugars) were determined for sediment and smoke samples. In the first study, the transport and alterations of major terrestrial biomarkers were assessed for small rivers draining the northwestern US. In the latter, biomarkers and their thermal alteration derivatives were identified in smoke emissions from known temperate and semi-arid green vegetation to be applied as tracers of wildfires. This work demonstrated that a multi-biomarker tracer analysis is a useful tool for describing and understanding the biogeochemistry occurring in various environmental compartments. / Graduation date: 2006