This paper presents an overview of the resources use and environmental impact of the Chinese industry during 1997-2006. For the purpose of this analysis the thermodynamic concept of exergy has been employed both to quantify and aggregate the resources input and the environmental emissions arising from the sector. The resources input and environmental emissions show an increasing trend in this p...

Balancing groundwater depletion, socioeconomic development and food security in Saudi Arabia will require policy that promotes expansion of unconventional freshwater supply options, such as wastewater recycling and desalination. As these processes consume more electricity than conventional freshwater supply technologies, Saudi Arabia's electricity system is vulnerable to groundwater conservatio...

Over the past 40 years economists have devoted considerable effort to estimating long-run trends in real commodity prices. The results indicate that the real prices for many commodities have fallen, suggesting to the surprise of many that resource scarcity is declining over time. Almost all of this work, however, uses the U.S. producer price index or other standard price deflators, which recent...

Freshwater resources are fundamental for maintaining human health, agricultural production, economic activity as well as critical ecosystem functions. As populations and economies grow, new constraints on water resources are appearing, raising questions about limits to water availability. Such resource questions are not new. The specter of "peak oil"--a peaking and then decline in oil productio...

Various authors have reported conflicting values for the energy return on investment (rE) of ethanol manufacture. Energy policy analysts predisposed to or against ethanol frequently cite selections from these studies to supporttheir positions. This literature review takes an objective look at the disagreement by normalizing and comparing the data sets from ten such studies. Six of the reviewed ...

We study the optimal contracts (payment and extraction path) implemented by a regulator that delegates the production of a nonrenewable resource to a firm which has private information on costs (constant efficiency parameter). We assume the regulator is unable to commit and show that the standard contract that only distorts the inefficient firm’s production and leaves the efficient one with an ...

The development of the complex and multi-dimensional urban socio-economic system creates impacts on natural capital and human capital, which range from a local to a global scale. An emergy-based multiple spatial scale analysis framework and a rigorous accounting method that can quantify the values of human-made and natural capital losses were proposed in this study. With the intent of comparing...

Many processes within production scheduling and project management involve the scheduling of a number of activities, each activity having a certain duration and requiring a certain amount of limited resources. The duration and resource requirements of activities are commonly the result of estimations, and thus generally subject to uncertainty. If this uncertainty is not taken into account the r...

This paper attempts to address the question of what might constitute sustainable development within the context of planning for a project that involves nonrenewable resource extraction, and hence is likely to have irreversible environmental impacts. The study will explore the ways in which the mineral sector is attempting to redefine itself through consultative initiatives. What are the key ele...

generated from a variety of sources, both renewable and nonrenewable. Switching nonrenewable to energy sources is one many strategies that can be used achieve net-zero buildings. In Indonesia, this strategy very feasible due its abundant resources, particularly solar energy. This research presents school building as the proposed case. The school, SCK Citra Garden, chosen pilot project access ra...