As the pressure on the chemical and process industries to improve environmental and economic performance increases, the need to move away from narrow system definitions and concepts in environmental system management is becoming more apparent. Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) has been a gaining wider acceptance as a holistic tool that enables quantification of environmental interventions and evaluation of the improvement options throughout the life cycle of process, product or activity. The stringent environmental legislation, especially in developing countries has warranted the need for intensive research in this field. Moreover, the capital cost for mitigation of emissions have put enormous pressure on the industries to reduce the overall process economic performance. This has not exempted the Pulp and Paper industry, being the producers of highly variable emissions quality and quantity are the prime candidates for the application of the technique. The application of the LCA in process selection has been necessitated by the fact that sometimes a technology intended to reduce wastes has created unanticipated impacts in other media and/or stages of the life cycle. Thus, LCA has been developed as a means to identify and deal with these impacts before they can occur. It differs from other pollution prevention techniques in that it views all the resource and energy inputs to a product (Life Cycle Inventory), as well as the associated wastes, health and ecological burdens (Impact Assessment), and evaluates opportunities to reduce environmental impacts (Improvement Analysis) from cradle to grave. LCA is often confused with other assessment tools, such as life cycle cost (LCC) or sometimes referred to as "environmental life cycle costing." This study was conducted at Mondi Packaging South African-Piet Retief Mill, a producer of linerboard, since this site has ample opportunity to minimse the environmental burden presented by operation of both Copeland Reactor and Boilers with significant emissions of SOx and NOx, and water effluent. The current mill strategy that is based on tight procurement specification of raw material is unsustainable. The environmental and economic performance analysis for this study followed from a mass balance of the pulp plant, power station, and paper machine as well as black liquor incinerating plant, and it was found that the most significant emissions come from pulp and steam generating processes. These emissions can be reduced by improving the mill energy efficiency and optimizing the Copeland scrubber absorption efficiency. The optimization of the Copeland scrubbing system will surely lead to improved environmental performance, however, the furnace stacks have to be modified to include the scrubbing system for absorption of SOx and NOx. / Dissertation (MEng (Chemical Engineering))--University of Pretoria, 2008. / Chemical Engineering / unrestricted

Loneliness is increasingly understood as a significant physical and mental health concern in modern society. Yet studies of the subject typically characterise it as resulting entirely from subjective individual characteristics and circumstances. The impact of broader living environments is understudied, leaving disciplines such as urban planning with little guidance as to how environmental intervention strategies might best ameliorate loneliness. This paper uses Stockholm as a case study for asking two place-based questions: (1) what can our knowledge of loneliness risk factors tell us about the possible spatial distribution of loneliness in cities? (2) what influence does the built environment itself have on loneliness? An abductive approach is used to test different ways in which urban planners might map risk of loneliness and social isolation in different neighbourhoods. The results shed light on spatial segregation as a potential contributing factor, with implications for planning practice.

Made available in DSpace on 2016-04-29T13:31:20Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 George Moraes De Luiz.pdf: 5186035 bytes, checksum: 3b435105f641786fe4bc92c797215ff4 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2015-11-16 / Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico / This research looks into the co-inhabitance of the population native to the Pantanal region in the center-west region of Brazil, state of Mato Grosso, with the cycle of full tide of the swamps surrounding the rural areas of three cities. We have selected the water cycle as our subject because they dictate the course all forms of life in the Pantanal. The basis of our discussion is formed by an interdisciplinary perspective, which allows for theoretical and methodological approximations with different areas of the social sciences and human sciences, notably the theoretical and epistemological notions of the Actor-Network theory. This has provided us with the understanding of the swamps as heterogeneous networks, establishing a debate with authors of the field of Environmental Education. We have assigned ourselves the task of writing a thesis in which both style and content question the "canons" of the academy, thus opening ourselves to reflections upon new manners of doing social research. In this challenge, we have given a poetic note to the text, valuing the traditional knowledge of the Pantanal region without losing sight of scientific knowledge. This thesis is the result of experiences lived by the researcher as an inhabitant of the Pantanal region, as wells as a result of formal and informal conversations with 42 people who are directly associated with the activities conducted in the swamps, among whom those who live on the river banks. Anchored in the notions of Everyday Conversation, with semi-structured script and field annotations, we have systematized the information by the means of fluctuating readings, generating themes which comprise the corpus of the thesis in the form descriptive narratives. The focus of our analysis is on the manner in which traditional populations predict, prepare themselves for, and live with the cycle of full tide, prioritizing the association between humans and non-humans as a possibility for survival in a flooded territory. The co-inhabitance of people with the full tides is described here in three different themes: birth-giving, housing, and means of transportation. This way of life, intertwined with nature, is commonly described in classic literature as the culture and tradition of the Pantanal populations. However, what we indicate here is that new actors, such as the construction of river dams, park roads and industrial plants, interfere in the Pantanal, altering the cycle of full tide. Due to this interference, it becomes unviable to understand the ways of life of the local populations as crystallized, which makes us argue in favor of the processuality of relations between people and nature, while rethinking the very notion of what the swamps come to be after constant socio-environmental interventions / O foco desta pesquisa é a convivência da população pantaneira com o ciclo de cheia nos pantanais mato-grossenses da região rural dos municípios de Barão de Melgaço, Poconé e Nossa Senhora do Livramento. Elegemos o ciclo das águas como fio condutor deste trabalho por ele ditar o ritmo de todas as formas de vida no Pantanal. Para sustentar nossa discussão, adotamos uma postura interdisciplinar, o que permite aproximações teórico-metodológicas com diferentes áreas das ciências sociais e humanas, notadamente os pressupostos teórico-epistemológicos da teoria ator-rede, o que permitiu compreender os pantanais como redes heterogêneas, em diálogo com autores da educação ambiental. Demo-nos a tarefa de escrever uma tese cujo estilo e conteúdo questionam os cânones da academia, abrindo-nos, assim, para reflexões sobre novas formas de fazer pesquisa social. Nesse desafio, demos tons poéticos ao texto, valorizando o saber tradicional pantaneiro sem abrir mão do conhecimento científico. Esta tese resulta das experiências vivenciadas pelo pesquisador enquanto morador da região pantaneira de Poconé, assim como da convivência e de conversas formais e informais com 42 pessoas ligadas diretamente às atividades nos pantanais, com destaque para os(as) pantaneiros(as) e ribeirinhos(as). Ancorados nas noções de conversas no cotidiano, com roteiro semiestruturado e anotações de diário de campo, sistematizamos as informações por meio de leituras flutuantes, gerando temas que compuseram o corpus da tese em forma de narrativas descritivas. O enfoque de nossa análise está na maneira como os povos tradicionais preveem, se preparam e convivem com o ciclo de cheias, privilegiando a associação entre humanos e não humanos como possibilidade de sobrevivência em um território de inundação. A convivência das pessoas com as cheias está descrita a partir de três temas: os partos, as moradias e os meios de transportes. Comumente, esse modo de vida que se atrela aos elementos da natureza é descrito pela literatura clássica como cultura e tradição pantaneira. Entretanto, sinalizamos aqui que novos atores, como a construção de diques, estradas-parque, aterros e usinas, interferem nos pantanais, alterando o ciclo de cheias. Considerando esse pressuposto, apontamos a inviabilidade de compreender os modos de vida pantaneiros de forma cristalizada, argumentando a favor da processualidade das relações entre os povos pantaneiros com a natureza, e repensando a própria noção do que vêm a ser os pantanais após constantes intervenções socioambientais