An example of planning for sustainable production : the dry-cell battery problem
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Growing awareness of world-wide environmental degradation has prompted the global community to explore alternatives to present human activities, and present economic development models. One concept which has emerged within this exploration is that of Sustainable Development. This thesis specifically uses the concept of Sustainable Development as Rees (1988, 1988a, 1989) and Gardner (1989) define it. Sustainable development will require substantial changes in the productive sphere. An 'energy spiral' is used to depict each stage necessary in the creation, use and disposal of a good. The social and environmental costs of each of these stages of production are explored. The positive impact of integrating re-use, recycling, recovery and replacement strategies into the consumption, production and disposal cycle for goods is described. In this thesis dry-cell batteries are used as an example of products which create problems in their disposal: heavy metals contained in these batteries exist in concentrations which require these spent batteries to be considered hazardous waste. Responses to this problem in other countries are described and critiqued. Present methods and planned strategies for hazardous waste disposal within the GVRD and the city of Vancouver are noted, and analyzed as to the sustainability of these methods and strategies. Specific plans for the disposal of dry-cell batteries are described and critiqued. Using the principles for sustainable development from Gardner (1989) and the 'energy spiral' together provides a synthesis of these two concepts. This framework provides planners and analysts a base from which strategies for sustainable production can be determined. The possibilities for use of this framework are explored, with a specific focus on dry-cell batteries. In considering the whole life-cycle of such a product, and not just focussing on the disposal stage of that cycle, responses that are more useful and pro-active can be devised. Some of the organizations and structures which presently exist and will be useful in establishing a base for the kinds of change that sustainable development will require are mentioned.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.006 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.014 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".