Skip to main content Thank you for visiting nature. Collection 11 November Nanomaterials for energy and environmental applications The rapid growth of the global population has significantly increased energy consumption and pressure on the environment. Collection home About the Guest Editor. Nanomaterials for energy storage. Nanomaterials for environmental applications. Ishii illustrates one technique— the reverse fish-bone diagram—that designers can use to gain knowledge about parts and components of existing production.
The purpose of undertaking such an exercise is to create knowledge that can be used in future designs to improve the recyclability of the product or family of products. These examples show some steps of knowledge management and creation that a firm can take to improve its own environmental performance. Modern production operations, however, are nodes in an increasingly complex network of suppliers and distributors, which in turn require equally sophisticated knowledge systems if they are to be properly informed.
Kleindorfer and Snir this volume explore environmental stewardship activities in this highly complex supply chain by focusing on how environmental information is gathered and used. They suggest that information technologies may help firms improve the environmental aspects of their products at three important levels: product and supply-chain design to minimize environmental impacts, ongoing waste minimization and risk mitigation after the product has been deployed, and diagnostic feedback from supply-chain participants to assess opportunities for new products and processes.
Whereas these models often can be used to optimize production, the technique of accessing such software and developing unique models is new. Similar applications may be developed that will help small manufacturers improve their environmental performance.
Beyond the firm, environmental knowledge creation and management involve collaborations that are more complex. The complexity tends to be a huge obstacle that impedes the progress towards individuals involved working together effectively. Yet there is a critical need for collaborative work in the larger arena beyond the firm, and several collaborative arrangements have emerged.
One is sector specific. In the for-profit world it takes the form of consortia of firms from a specific industrial sector working together on a particular problem.
In the nonprofit sector, it takes the form of government agencies often forming task forces to work together on common issues. Another collaborative arrangement involves partnerships consisting of for-profit firms, private nonprofit interest groups, and the government that work on developing consensus on and solutions to issues of common interest.
While the motivations that drive the two types of collaborations may differ, the challenges in both revolve around developing a common understanding of approaches to the problem at hand and establishing a standard terminology that all can work with. Killgoar this volume makes the point that, from a private-sector perspective, the motivation for collaboration is to gain data, information, and knowledge.
Using the automotive sector as an example, he describes the nontechnical, softer. These issues, if successfully dealt with, can have enormous payback in development of new technologies. The challenge is to integrate information gleaned from these collaborative efforts into the operations of the constituent firms. Government collaborations, on the other hand, are motivated by public-interest concerns such as getting information obtained by the government into wider circulation.
Department of Energy, the U. These agencies have different types of related information from disparate sources and in different databases. According to Pitts and Fowler this volume , EDEN seeks to provide a dynamic information system for accessing environmental data stored in diverse distributed databases. Like the collaborations in industry, the players involved in EDEN also had to agree on a framework of common approaches and a common terminology.
Not only are socially responsible investor institutions on the quest for such information, but the public is also. The extent to which information systems, mainly based on the Internet, support the development and distribution of environmentally relevant information and the potential power of this type of information distribution system usually is not well recognized, in part because of the newness of the medium.
Already, however, global environmental information networks, complete with chat rooms and instant reporting of environmentally relevant events, are being developed Knauer and Rickard, this volume.
The Internet is unique in its ability to facilitate dialog. Use of the Internet is enhanced further by effective organization of relevant information. Choucri this volume demonstrates how distributed knowledge-networking systems, such as the Global System for Sustainable Development GSSD , can broaden the concept of merging knowledge from science with management prescriptions.
GSSD is designed specifically for use in conjunction with Internet resources. Its knowledge base is organized as a hierarchical embedded system of entries about human activities and conditions; sustainability problems associated with human actions; current scientific and technological solutions; attendant economic, political, and regulatory solutions; and the broad range of evolving international actions and responses.
This Internet site, established by the Environmental Defense ED , pulls together Toxics Release Inventory data that companies report to the EPA and relates it to specific manufacturing sites on local- or national-scale maps. Knowledge is enhanced by linking information on specific chemicals to information on health and toxicity. By linking data and information, ED has put knowledge about emissions from specific industries and their potential harmful effects into the hands of individuals who may be affected.
The existence of the Web site allows users to act on the information they find by, for example, communicating their concerns to responsible individuals in companies or to local regulators. The implications of these developments for companies is that they have to be vigilant in providing accurate and meaningful information to the public.
Knowledge, not just data, is particularly important because, with knowledge, the public can influence firms to change their behavior. Costs that reflect environmental performance and the availability of capital to address issues will have immediate and powerful impacts on firm behavior; similarly, public concerns about a firm or a nearby facility can create significant costs and even force curtailment of operations or closure of the facility.
As the chemical industry learned—and responded to through the Responsible Care Program— public accountability is an increasingly powerful reality of corporate life.
By reducing the level of false information, the credibility of all involved in environmental discussions will be heightened. If decision making is to be effective, it must be informed. As the papers in this volume show, an environmentally and economically efficient world will not necessarily be a simpler world; rather, it will be more complex and more informationally dense. There will be more, not less, demand for systems that can integrate information into knowledge across disparate spatial, temporal, and organizational scales.
These trends have at least three important public policy implications. First, there have to be incentives to generate environmentally relevant knowledge. From an industrial ecology perspective, such knowledge can impact the design of products, engineering or reengineering of ecological systems, communication with customers, understanding materials and energy flows, and research and development.
Government support of academic research in this area can help identify new processes and techniques that enhance ecological objectives, articulate technical and management standards that reflect best strategic environmental approaches, and define criteria for determining environmental impacts and metrics of environmental performance. This narrow need within the realm of the industrial sector may seem trivial in the context of larger environmental issues of climate change and biodiversity but it is critical, particularly for the large and growing number of small and medium-sized manufacturers.
Second, there is a serious need to ensure that the environmental information is of high quality, not misinformation. They pay special attention to global climate change, the contribution made to it by energy uses, and the salient technologies that are being developed to mitigate this effect. Ideal for upper-level undergraduate and first-year graduate students, as well as professionals in the fields of energy and environmental sciences and technology, Energy and the Environment: Scientific and Technological Principles , Second Edition, equips readers with the basic factual knowledge needed to develop solutions to these environmental problems.
Contents 1 Energy and the Environment 1. Vehicle Emission Standards 9. Emission Standards Ambient Standards Bibliography Problems 12 Mitigating GlobalWarming James A. Dan S. As defined by the Brundtland Commission in , sustainable solutions are those that meet the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs. Key principles in the area of Effects of Technology on the Natural World that all students can be expected to understand at increasing levels of sophistication are:.
At the fourth-grade level students are expected to know that sometimes technology can cause environmental harm. For example, litter from food packages and plastic forks and spoons discarded on city streets can travel through storm drains to rivers and oceans where they can harm or kill wildlife.
However, such negative effects can be lessened by reusing or recycling products as well as by reducing the amount of resources used in producing the products. Eighth-graders are expected to recognize that technology and engineering decisions often involve weighing competing priorities, and there are no perfect solutions. For example, dams built to control floods and produce electricity have left wilderness areas under water and affected the ability of certain fish to spawn.
They should be able to analyze such conflicts and be able to recommend changes that would reduce environmental impacts. For example, students could study the trade-offs involved in using paper or plastic to carry groceries or research the causes and effects of acid rain on forests and the costs of reducing those effects.
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