Addressing sustainability gaps

Strategies for developing sustainable communities in higher education institutions

Higher education institutions (HEIs), based on learning, innovation, and research, can support the progress of civil society. Many HEIs are implementing sustainability practices and projects to counteract climate change, often involving youth participation. The present study aimed at identifying how sustainable communities may be fostered in a university setting. To that end, a questionnaire was administered to engineering students at the start and end of a course on energy issues, assessing their perceptions of sustainability using multi-criteria decision analysis. The results showed that students placed greater value on sustainability at the end of the course. Additionally, the findings highlight that the implementation of projects aimed at tackling real problems may be useful for disseminating knowledge and sustainable practices. The main implications of this study indicate that sustainable communities in academia lay on six foundational pillars: sustainable education, energy (and resource) independence, subsidies in support of the green economy, initiatives aimed at reducing the carbon footprint, energy community development, and new green professional opportunities.

An automated materials and processes identification tool for material informatics using deep learning approach

This article reports a tool that enables Materials Informatics, termed as MatRec, via a deep learning approach. The tool captures data, makes appropriate domain suggestions, extracts various entities such as materials and processes, and helps to establish entity-value relationships. This tool uses keyword extraction, a document similarity index to suggest relevant documents, and a deep learning approach employing Bi-LSTM for entity extraction. For example, materials and processes for electrical charge storage under an electric double layer capacitor (EDLC) mechanism are demonstrated herewith. A knowledge graph approach finds and visualizes different latent knowledge sets from the processed information. The MatRec received an F1 score of 9̃6% for entity extraction, 8̃3% for material-value relationship extraction, and 8̃7% for process-value relationship extraction, respectively. The proposed MatRec could be extended to solve material selection issues for various applications and could be an excellent tool for academia and industry.

Plastic wastes in the time of COVID-19: Their environmental hazards and implications for sustainable energy resilience and circular bio-economies

The global scope of pollution from plastic waste is a well-known phenomenon associated with trade, mass consumption, and disposal of plastic products (e.g., personal protective equipment (PPE), viral test kits, and vacuum-packaged food). Recently, the scale of the problem has been exacerbated by increases in indoor livelihood activities during lockdowns imposed in response to the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic. The present study describes the effects of increased plastic waste on environmental footprint and human health. Further, the technological/regulatory options and life cycle assessment (LCA) approach for sustainable plastic waste management are critically dealt in terms of their implications on energy resilience and circular economy. The abrupt increase in health-care waste during pandemic has been worsening environmental quality to undermine the sustainability in general. In addition, weathered plastic particles from PPE along with microplastics (MPs) and nanoplastics (NPs) can all adsorb chemical and microbial contaminants to pose a risk to ecosystems, biota, occupational safety, and human health. PPE-derived plastic pollution during the pandemic also jeopardizes sustainable development goals, energy resilience, and climate control measures. However, it is revealed that the pandemic can be regarded as an opportunity for explicit LCA to better address the problems associated with environmental footprints of plastic waste and to focus on sustainable management technologies such as circular bio-economies, biorefineries, and thermal gasification. Future researches in the energy-efficient clean technologies and circular bio-economies (or biorefineries) in concert with a "nexus" framework are expected to help reduce plastic waste into desirable directions.

Anaerobic Digested Wastewater CO2 Sequestration Using a Biophotocatalytic System with a Magnetized Photocatalyst (Fe-TiO2)

This study presents a biophotocatalytic system as a sustainable technology for the recovery of clean water and renewable energy from wastewater, thereby providing a unique opportunity to drive industrialization and global sustainable development throughputs. Herein, inhouse magnetized photocatalyst (Fe-TiO₂) with surface area 62.73 m²/g synthesized via co-precipitation, was hypothesized to hasten an up-flow anaerobic sludge blanket (UASB) reactor for the treatment of local South Africa municipality wastewater with the benefit of high-quality biogas production. A lab scale UASB process with a working volume of 5 L coupled with two UV-lights (T8 blacklight-blue tube, 365 nm, 18 W) was operated batchwise under mesophilic conditions for the period of 30 days with a constant organic load charge of 2.76 kg COD/m³. d. This biophotocatalytic system performance was investigated and compared with and without the Fe-TiO₂ charge (2–6 g) with respect to effluent quality, biogas production and CO₂ methanation. Using chemical oxygen demand (COD) measured as the degree of degradation of the pollutants, the best efficiency of 93% COD removal was achieved by a 4 g Fe-TiO₂ charge at 14 days and pH of 7.13, as compared to zero charge where only 49.6% degradation was achieved. Under the same charge, cumulative biogas and methane content of 1500 mL/g COD.d and 85% were respectively attained as compared with the control with 400 mL/g COD.d and 65% methane content. Also, the energy produced can be used to offset the energy utilized by the UV-light for the wastewater abatement and other limitations of photocatalysis. The BP system was found to be an eco-friendly and cost-effective technology to be explored in water treatment settings.

Sustainability in Numbers by Data Analytics

For a successful delivery of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (UNSDGs) and to track the progress of UNSDGs as well as identify the gaps and the areas requiring more attention, periodic analyses on the "research on sustainability" by various countries and their contribution to the topic are inevitable. This paper tracks the trends in sustainability research including the geographical distribution on sustainability research, their level of multi-disciplinarity and the cross-border collaboration, their distribution of funding with respect to the UNSDGs, and the lifecycle analyses. Cumulative publications and patents on sustainability could be fitted to an exponential function, thereby highlighting the importance of the research on sustainability in the recent past. Besides, this analytics quantifies cross-border collaborations and knowledge integration to solve critical issues as well as traditional and emerging sources to undertake sustainability research. As an important aspect of resource sustainability and circular economy, trends in publication and funding on lifecycle assessment have also been investigated. The analytics present here identify that major sustainability research volume is from the social sciences as well as business and economics sectors, whereas contributions from the engineering disciplines to develop technologies for sustainability practices are relatively lower. Similarly, funding distribution is also not evenly distributed under various SDGs; the larger share of funding has been on energy security and climate change research. Thus, this study identifies many gaps to be filled for the UNSDGs to be successful.