Abstract This article considers how the construction practices of marginalized communities in Rio de Janeiro link provision essential housing to distant forest environments and markets for wood building materials. As elsewhere Brazil, many families without access real estate have built their own homes using locally available materials, a right protected by 1988 Constitution federal law. Today, ...

Due to the importance of energy consumption in a steam network of oil refinery as a significant unit, present study is concerned with the optimization of an oil refinery steam network. Here, the attempt was made to use concepts such as first and second thermodynamic laws, thermo-economic, environmental and economic discussions to investigate three different scenarios about Tehran refinery steam...

Many impact assessment methods use weighing factors to agregate the different environmental effects into a single score value for the total impact caused by a product life cycle. The introduction of subjectivity in the decision process during product development, by using this kind of weighting factors, should be avoided. A more objective approach uses indicators based on laws of physics, for e...

Why all the talk about endocrine disruptors? In response to public concern that certain environmental chemicals may interfere with endocrine processes in humans, the U.S. Congress passed the Food Quality Protection Act and amendments to the Safe Drinking Water Act in 1996. These laws directed the US EPA to develop and implement a program to investigate the potential for substances to cause adve...

The environmental law as it is known today is an amalgamation of common law and statutory principles. 1 Even before specific laws came into force, there were certain common law remedies against pollution. Common law is the body of customary law of England based upon judicial decisions and is embodied in the reports of decided cases. Common law had been administered by the common law courts of E...

| We consider the problem of stabilizing the position and orientation of a ship to constant desired values, when the ship has only two independent controls and also the ship is subject to an environmental force of unknown magnitude. We propose a time-varying feedback control law and a disturbance adaptation law, and show that this provides semi-global practical asymptotic stability. The control...

Russia of today has the largest federal state territory. Its member-units comprise 21 republics, 49 oblasts, 6 krai, 11 autonomous units and 2 independent federal cities. Although formally, in conformity with the Constitution, all the member-units of the RF are equal, actual definite inequality between them is retained. If the republics are entitled to adopt constitutions, the other member-unit...

greenhouse cultivations are of special importance in agricultural development because of their utilization of artificially controlled production factors and artificially created environmental conditions. proper planning towards a desirable development of this system of agricultural production demands a thorough knowledge and understanding of the factors hindering its soud development. towards t...

Telephone surveys made of 800-1,000 randomly selected residents of the United States and New Jersey in 2003 show a sharp decline in support for antipollution regulations, although pollution remains a major concern. This drop in support is associated with slowing of the economy, fear of terrorism, and other competing priorities. The leading proponents of maintaining strong environmental regulati...

Businesses require the ability to rapidly implement new processes and to quickly adapt existing ones to environmental changes including the optimization of their interactions with partners and customers. However, changes of either intraor cross-organizational processes must not be done in an uncontrolled manner. In particular, processes are increasingly subject to compliance rules that usually ...