Wenjie Peng

Raised access floors are nowadays widely used in buildings. A novel raised access flooring product is developed by this research, with a set of sustainable features, including less environmental impact and high strength. Its floor panels are made of polyurethane (PU) reinforced with glass fibre, which is light-weight and fire-resistant, replacing the traditional floor panel materials, and the panels are supported by simplified steel stringers to reinforce the strength of the flooring product. Instead of the conventional sandwich design consisting of a core material encapsulated by outer layers, the new floor panel design adopts the reinforced PU as its sole material, which not only simplifies the structure but also reduces floor weight and costs. The sustainable advantage is further approved by the environmental life cycle assessments of the new raised flooring product in comparison to traditional ones made of cement and woodchips, with results showing that the new floor product’s total environmental impact is 52% less than cement floor and 47% less than woodchip board floor. Further, the finite element analysis (FEA) was carried out, and the experimental test was conducted to verify the FEA results, indicating that the new product’s strength is higher than the requirements of the raised access flooring product standards. There is no raised access flooring product made of PU reinforced with glass fibre available in the market, and, hence, the new product developed by this research is a novel contribution.

Recently, there has been a growing effort to reduce the environmental impact of products throughout their life cycle, particularly during the end-of-life (EoL) stage. To incentivise consumers’ recycling/reusing behaviours and enhance their environmental awareness, a novel ICT-based system for recycling and eco-shopping has been developed in this paper. The recycling of EoL products is conducted based on information-communication technologies to remotely monitor and manage the recycled products (such as electronics or household bio-wastes), enabling consumers’ recycling process over the Internet. Consumers are awarded the eco-credits, which can be used for various forms of eco-incentives, such as shopping discounts, tree planting donations, and exchanges for theatre and museum tickets. The eco-costs reflect the environmental impact of a product throughout its life cycle. The consumer is informed about the eco-costs through eco-shopping, which are displayed on a payment receipt. Both eco-costs and eco-credits are recorded in the consumer’s eco-account. To develop the recycling and eco-shopping system, multiple information-communication technologies are utilised, such as hardware digital monitoring/control, Internet-based communication services, traceability media (bar-code and QR code), user identity recognition and privacy protection, and multi-language supports. A case study is conducted, including online tracking of the recycling process and then implementing incentive activities with the eco-credits and eco-costs. The system has been successfully validated via illustrating recycling, eco-shopping, and eco-incentives in public places (e.g., schools, urban cultural centres), as well as promoting the consumer’s participation in recycling and enhancing their environmental awareness, which proved the successful implementation of the novel contribution of this research.

In order to incentivise consumers to engage in sustainable consumption, a mobile application system is developed to implement an eco-incentive scheme, in which eco-credits are awarded to consumers who recycle and reuse end-of-life products and in which they can use the eco-credits for discounts in shopping, exchange the eco-credits for museum/theatre tickets, or make donations for tree planting. In this paper, the related concept and eco-incentive scheme are introduced first; the infrastructure of the mobile application system is presented; and the process of system development is detailed. The mobile system infrastructure consists of three layers: a database server; communication and integration; and four functional modules including user registration and login, obtaining eco-credits, spending/donating eco-credits, and viewing eco-credit history. Multiple mobile development techniques are utilised to implement the mobile application system. A case study was conducted, demonstrating that the mobile application for eco-incentive can efficiently support consumers in recycling products and managing their reward records. The literature review and user survey revealed that there has not been a mobile application system with the eco-incentive functions of the mobile app presented in this paper, which indicates the novelty of this research.

A novel Internet-based information communication technology (ICT) infrastructure for an eco-accounting system was successfully developed to deliver “EcoCosts”, which are the values of environmental impact throughout the product life cycle. The ICT infrastructure manages its internal elements and interacts with operation modules in the supply chain via Web-based service interfaces. The infrastructure consists of upperware, middleware, and resource layers. The upperware layer manipulates the middleware elements (cloud-based load balancing, life cycle assessment, Web-based services, and Radio Frequency Identification (RFID)-enabled mobile access), and manages the associated resources within the eco-accounting system. As novel features of the ICT infrastructure, load balancing is used to handle large numbers of data and to allocate the computing load across the eco-accounting network nodes, and life cycle assessment is conducted to analyse product footprints, which are the core of “EcoCost”, to facilitate consumers in comparing the environmental impacts between different products. A case study was conducted by transmitting product EcoCosts from businesses to consumers through the Internet, successfully verifying the system developed in this research. Because this research aims to pay more attention to the ICT aspects, the EcoCost is represented using a single value, hence simplifying the related calculation. This research provides a novel solution for dealing with the large numbers of data and computing loads required to manage EcoCost data throughout the product life cycle and to transmit EcoCosts from businesses to consumers.

Nowadays, eco-accounting is widely used in sustainable consumption and production. In order to incentivise consumers’ sustainable consumption and enhance their environmental awareness, a novel mobile based eco-accounting infrastructure has been developed by this research. It applies the eco-credit values to incentivise the consumer’s recycling activities and utilises the eco-cost values to record the consumer’s footprint obtained through consumption. The infrastructure consists of four modules: the consumer’s eco-account, eco-shopping, eco-recycling and eco-incentives. In order to implement the mobile eco-accounting infrastructure, multiple mobile technologies have been applied to develop the novel functions of the mobile app, including a new QR encryption algorithm, embedded Google maps, advanced Internet-based services and multi-language support. A case study is conducted by demonstrating the consumer’s purchasing and recycling processes. It proves that the novel mobile application system has been successfully developed, which provides an effective support for the implementation and demonstration of the eco-accounting infrastructure.