Sealing materials withstand challenging applications throughout the hydrogen value chain

Soil fertility provides the foundation for nutritious food production and resilient and sustainable livelihoods. A comprehensive survey and summit meeting were conducted with the aims of understanding barriers to enhancing soil fertility in sub-Saharan Africa and providing evidence-based recommendations. The focus regions were West Africa, East Africa, the Great Lakes region, and Ethiopia. Overall recommendations were developed with four emerging themes: (1) strengthening inorganic fertilizer-based systems, (2) access to and use of quality organic inputs, (3) capacity building along the entire knowledge-transfer value chain, and (4) strengthening farming systems research and development across biophysical and socio-economic factors. The evidence-based process and methodology for prioritizing these recommendations makes these findings useful for setting out action plans for future investments and strategies. Access to inorganic fertilizer, its use, and related implementation issues were prominent considerations; nevertheless, biophysical and socio-economic barriers and solutions were identified as equally important to building soil fertility and natural resources. Soil management initiatives should focus on providing holistic solutions covering both biophysical and socio-economic aspects along the entire value chain of actors and creating an enabling environment for adoption. A broader view of soil fertility improvement using all available options including both inorganic and organic sources of nutrients and farming system approaches are highly recommended.

Construction and demolition waste best management practice in Europe

With 1.07% of the country's overall GDP coming from fishing, the fishing industry has huge significance in India. The supply chain and overall exports to foreign nations will be improved by revolutionizing this sector of the economy. Consumers are nowadays very much concerned about their health and in knowing about the quality of the goods they purchase or consume, particularly when it comes to nutrition. Fish must be consumed within a certain time frame and under the right circumstances because it is a perishable food. The government officials must also keep an eye on illicit fishing, which is another serious problem that disrupts ecosystems in many different places. In other words, consumers, the government, and society in general demand transparency throughout the entire value chain of fish products. In this research, the use of blockchain using Ethereum-based smart contracts to trace fish packages back and forth throughout the entire fisheries value chain is explored.

Geopolitical transformations produce their impact on the cross-border regulation of hydrogen production and transportation. Russia's military aggression has blown up the global energy system and driven up energy prices. This exacerbated the issue of energy security, highlighting the excessive dependence of the EU on imports from the Russian Federation. These factors have accelerated Europe's transition to clean energy and increased hydrogen production. The object of the research is legal relations in the field of development, transportation and storage of hydrogen in the territory of European states. The results made it possible to propose mechanisms for reforming the legal regulation of the production and transportation of hydrogen across Europe. The vectors of the regulatory policy of European states are revealed, which should coordinate the increase in the potential of Ukraine in the regional leadership in decarbonization. It was stated that the legislative innovations of Ukraine are the basis for adaptation to EU practices. The practical approbation of the changes in production practice declared by the states of Europe in the context of the global energy transition to a carbon-neutral society is substantiated. It has been established that reducing the cost of hydrogen and finding its wide application will become a global priority in the short term. The basis of the hydrogen infrastructure has already been laid by including it in the renewed trans-European energy network. The issue of full-fledged approbation of production procedures in modern geopolitical conditions is debatable. Despite the hostilities, Ukraine continues the course of reforms by coordinating and arranging the purchase of hydrogen from renewable sources, which will allow full accession to the EU Energy Platform. The results of the study can be used in the legislative sphere for a comprehensive reform of the national legislation of Ukraine

Hydrogen storage and transportation are the intermediate link of hydrogen production and the point of end-use. Standards for hydrogen storage and transportation published by ISO, CGA, NFPA, ASME, ANSI, SAC, CEN and JISC are reviewed and analysed in this paper. Numbers of standards for hydrogen embrittlement are more than the others. Standards for hydrogen piping and pipelines are only published by CGA and ASME. Chinese GB standards are mainly focused on general design and safety, gaseous hydrogen receptacles and hydrogen embrittlement. Standards for liquid hydrogen storage receptacles and safety, hydrogen piping and pipelines, and hydrogen transportation should be emphasized.

Chapter 9 - Hydrogen energy storage and transportation challenges: A review of recent advances

International and national development agendas acknowledge the need for equitable sanitation services. The presence of comprehensive policy documents is crucial for guiding implementation in line with set goals. Beyond mapping the scope of existing policy documents, this landscape analysis examined existing policies for comprehensiveness, coordination and equity. Policies were characterised for content, processes and actors in relation to faecal waste management (FWM) along the entire value chain (capture, containment, emptying, transportation, treatment and safe disposal) in Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda. We found that FWM was sub-optimally represented in the broader environmental, water and sanitation policies scattered in multiple policy and legal frameworks. Other than Kenya, no country had a ratified stand-alone sanitation and hygiene policy or a ‘home-ministry’ for sanitation. Several aspects of the FWM chain were not exclusively addressed by the policies. Although the responsibility for FWM was shared between the private sector and several relevant government institutions (ministries of health, education, local government and environment), the burden of FWM disproportionately lay on individual households with minimal subsidies for the urban-poor. Comprehensive policy frameworks addressing FWM along the entire value chain are needed to foster the implementation of equitable sanitation services in cities.

The purpose of this paper is to determine the most appropriate model of cooperation between an enterprise and the innovation ecosystem of the territory based on the assessment of its readiness to implement joint innovation activities. One of the requirements necessary for the effectiveness of innovation activity is to ensure the continuity of innovation processes along the entire value chain. The peculiarities of different organizations and different levels of readiness of ecosystem participants for innovation activities lead to ambiguity in the choice of possible options for partnership interactions. The paper presents a scheme of development for the territory's innovation ecosystem based on the concept of a minimum viable ecosystem. The concept of transfer gap is introduced as a violation of the continuity of the process of transfer (transfer) of the results of innovation activity along the entire value chain, which does not allow to obtain a competitive result (an innovative product) and/or bring it to the consumer within a competitive timeframe. Researchers identify two components of the transfer gap: technological and managerial. We developed indicators and scales for their assessment. On the basis of analyzing the interests and risks of participants in innovation processes in all links of the innovation chain, the possibilities of the innovation ecosystem to dampen transfer gaps are identified. We form the model of overcoming transfer gaps on the basis of partnership interactions.

Development of a Methodology to Analyze Energy and Resources Consumption Along the Product Value Chain

A comprehensive review on hydrogen production and utilization in North America: Prospects and challenges

Editorial and News

The purpose of this paper is to increase the knowledge about the implementation of circularity and other sustainability approaches in value chains. The objective is to develop roadmaps for the implementation of digital Circular manufacturing (CMA) and Social-life cycle (S-LCA) assessments in Textile and Clothing (TC) value chains. Implementing these digital assessments in TC value chains can increase their transparency, by validating that product manufacturing safeguards worker wellbeing and the environment. TC is one of the sectors with most critical social and environmental impacts. The roadmaps were developed through a Design Science methodology, combining: i) case studies to understand the practical problem, ii) literature study on CMA and S-LCA to develop the roadmaps, and iii) action research to iteratively apply the roadmaps to the cases and refine them with participants in an EU project, representing the entire TC value chain. The EU project is developing digital sustainability assessments with Blockchain functionality for increased data trustworthiness. This study aims to contribute to theory, practice, and public policies by providing a validated overview of the status, barriers, goals, and systematic activities for the implementation of CMA and S-LCA in TC value chains and for increased sustainability.

The digital transformation of the construction industry offers opportunities to address its inherent complexity. Timber construction stands out as a sustainable alternative to traditional building methods, contributing to climate goals through carbon sequestration. However, the sector faces significant challenges, including fragmented processes, insufficient digital integration, and a lack of lifecycle-oriented approaches. This research presents a reference model that maps the entire timber value chain, from forest to city, to address these challenges. By fostering an understanding of existing processes, the model enables to navigate complexity, identify bottlenecks, and pursue lifecycle-oriented optimizations. Stakeholder workshops enrich process insights with practical experiential knowledge. Building on this foundation, a Business Intelligence tool, called Value Creation Digital Model (VCDM) was developed to support horizontal and vertical integration across stakeholders. While the VCDM is designed to show potential for optimizing regional value chains and to support circular construction, its adoption is limited by the slow pace of digitalization and data availability within the construction sector. Future scenarios envision the VCDM as a tool for planning, certification, and information dissemination, emphasizing the need for trust, participation, and standardized practices across the value chain.

Operational digital twins bring together digitalization technologies, including machine learning, IIoT, data analytics, process simulation and optimization. A digital twin model reconciled with real-time process data provides the foundation for a range of layered applications that are key to transforming the way that process plants and value chains are operated and managed. After outlining the basic numerical methods, this paper will describe three industrial applications of dynamically reconciled digital twin models in gas processing, refining and olefins production. The focus is on application robustness and high availability, delivering increased operating margins and plant flexibility. An operational digital twin model can provide a versatile tool for real-time process optimization, and what-if analysis, as well as operations planning and scheduling. To be effective, the digital twin model needs to be reconciled with real-time process data frequently. In a dynamic operating environment where feed composition, process conditions and product demand may change continuously, this challenging data reconciliation task is solved using a combination of numerical methods: Equation-oriented model structures and solvers provide the flexibility required to solve simulation, parameter estimation and optimization cases. Extended Kalman filter and moving horizon estimation enable reconciliation using real-time dynamic data without the need for steady-state operation. Process models are developed using both first principles and data-driven surrogate modelling methods. A dynamically reconciled digital twin model provides the basis for an equation-oriented multi-period optimizer that can be solved for facility-wide steady state optimization, short-range dynamic optimization and long-range planning and scheduling problems within a single unified modelling and optimization framework. The use of hybrid models that include both data-driven and first principles components can significantly reduce the deployment and maintenance effort, the resulting low-order models facilitate model reuse across the different optimization horizons and objectives and enable large-scale optimization problems to be solved across an entire process plant or value chain. Three industrial applications of these methods will be outlined. The first is a gas plant optimizer that provides real-time process optimization and what-if analysis. The reconciled gas plant model tracks the process under significant feed and ambient variations. The second application is a refinery-wide optimizer that encompasses multiple crude distillation, vacuum and reaction units. The third application is an olefins process scheduling application that optimizes feed distribution, cracking furnace operating conditions and decoke cycle over an extended future time horizon.

Analysis of aquafeed sector competitiveness in Egypt