Waste management is a distinct practice aimed at reducing its effects on health and the environment and increasing energy and material recovery. The urban waste management industry has been slow to adopt new technologies, such as sanitary landfills and incineration, which enable better treatment results. The aim of a thorough ecological-economic evaluation of different treatment technologies is...

The ecologist H. T. Odum introduced a principle of physics, called Maximum Empower, in order to explain self-organization in a system (e.g. physical, biological, social, economical, mathematical, ...). The concept of empower relies on emergy, which is a second notion introduced by Odum for comparing energy systems on the same basis. The roots of these notions trace back to the 50’s (with the wo...

Marine debris is a growing global marine environmental issue. It causes negative and serious impacts on marine ecosystem, tourism, navigation safety, and fisheries. Derelict fishing gears (DFGs) have been considered as one of the major sources of marine debris in the Korean seas. The Korean government has implemented many policy measures to control DFGs since late 1990s. We compared three repre...

After having briefly recalled the main results shown in the previous Conference (a rigorous definition of Emergy in mathematical terms and a general formulation of the Emergy Balance equation) the paper presents an extremely general mathematical formulation of the Maximum Em-Power Principle. Such a formulation allows us to analyze in particular (but not exclusively): i) in what sense the “maxim...