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Currently, waste is regarded as a symptom of inefficiency. The generation of waste is a human activity, not a natural one. Currently, landfilling and incinerating wastes are common waste management techniques; but the use of these methods, in addition to wasting raw materials, causes damage to the environment, water, soil, and air. In the new concept of “Zero Waste” (ZW), waste is considered a valuable resource. A vital component of the methodology includes creating and managing items and procedures that limit the waste volume and toxicity and preserve and recover all resources rather than burning or burying them. With ZW, the end of one product becomes the beginning of another, unlike a linear system where waste is generated from product consumption. A scientific treatment technique, resource recovery, and reverse logistics may enable the waste from one product to become raw material for another, regardless of whether it is municipal, industrial, agricultural, biomedical, construction, or demolition. This chapter discusses the concept of zero landfills and zero waste and related initiatives and ideas; it also looks at potential obstacles to put the ZW concept into reality. Several methods are presented to investigate and evaluate efficient resource utilization for maximum recycling efficiency, economic improvement through resource minimization, and mandatory refuse collection. One of the most practical and used approaches is the Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) approach, which is based on green engineering and the cradle-to-cradle principle; the LCA technique is used in most current research, allowing for a complete investigation of possible environmental repercussions. This approach considers the entire life cycle of a product, including the origin of raw materials, manufacturing, transportation, usage, and final disposal, or recycling. Using a life cycle perspective, all stakeholders (product designers, service providers, political and legislative agencies, and consumers) may make environmentally sound and long-term decisions.

This study attempts to elucidate the role of key influencers impacting the student decision-making process of enrollment for higher education in India from the lenses of Stephen Covey's theory on circles of life.

A sample of 556 students of Delhi NCR, India was selected based on a multi-staged sampling method. PLS-SEM was subsequently applied for statistical data analysis.

This quantitative finding voiced the relationships among the constructs in the proposed theoretical framework, i.e. Stephen Covey's circle of life theory. Additionally, it tinted the crucial role of “College attributes” in reconnoitering the relationship dynamics between key influencers (Circle of Influence and Circle of Concern) and student college choice (Circle of Control).

The present study incorporates only the first-year student population of undergraduate management courses in private universities from Delhi NCR, India limiting the generalization of findings substantially.

The study garners the attention of education policymakers on the cognizance of the role played by parents and cohorts in driving the student's decision-making process of college choice under the circle of influence.

This study is pioneering research disseminating a comprehensive outlook of the circle of life theory of great Stephen Covey engrained upon a compendious conceptual model which enlightens the landscape of the decision-making process of student on enrollment under the influence of key influencers.

Advancing behavioral health and primary care integration is a priority for helping clients overcome the complex health challenges impacting healthcare deserts like those in Arizona, United States of America (USA). This study aimed to explore the perspectives of people with a substance use disorder (SUD) on accessing integrated primary care (IPC) services in a rural-serving behavioral healthcare organization in Arizona.

Clients from a behavioral health facility in Arizona (n = 10) diagnosed with SUDs who also accessed IPC participated in a 45-min semi-structured interview.

The authors identified six overarching themes: (1) importance of IPC for clients being treated for SUDs, (2) client low level of awareness of IPC availability at the facility, (3) strategies to increase awareness of IPC availability at the behavioral health facility, (4) cultural practices providers should consider in care integration, (5) attitudes and perceptions about the experience of accessing IPC and (6) challenges to attending IPC appointments. The authors also identified subthemes for most of the main themes.

This is the first study in rural Arizona to identify valuable insights into the experiences of people with SUDs accessing IPC, providing a foundation for future research in the region on care integration.

This aim of this study is to identify the ways of helping public authorities bring about change to environmentally sustainable household food practices.

The authors identified the practices involved in this concept from the consumer perspective and measured their diffusion among French households. The analyses were conducted following two successive data collection campaigns comprising 571 and 501 respondents in France. The methodology involved two complementary scaling techniques: factor analysis and item response theory.

The results show that consumers understand sustainable food through five food practices: buying and cooking products with sustainable attributes, anti-waste storage, self-production, plant protein consumption and anti-waste cooking.

The findings suggest that while at the individual level people appear to have incorporated anti-waste practices into their daily lives, at the household level, there is still work to be done for improving diets and stimulating the production of home-grown food. It is also worth noting that the emerging vision typically involves sustainable foods that are organic, locally grown, seasonal, based on fair trade and packaging-free.

There is a growing body of literature discussing the green logistics practices (GLPs) that companies could introduce to reduce the logistics environmental impact. Current approaches also identify several influencing factors within firms that could serve as barriers to, or enablers of, GLPs. However, less is known about the role of extra-firm stakeholders, even though these are crucial to operationalizing green logistics effectively. This study merges current theoretical understanding with empirical evidence to provide a detailed stakeholder analysis of GLPs.

Using stakeholder theory as a theoretical lens, the authors aimed at offering a mid-range contribution by conducting multiple embedded case studies examining Italian logistics service providers and shippers. GLPs and the related influencing factors were examined as sub-units of analysis within broader companies' environmental sustainability strategies.

The authors identified cascading effects among factors influencing the adoption of GLPs (e.g. key economic factors are affected by external factors which also influence organizational and collaboration factors). These effects are moderated by interdependencies between primary and secondary stakeholders, and the study highlights the prominent involvement of secondary stakeholders, such as final consumers.

This paper contributes to better understanding how and why companies adopt GLPs, emphasizing the wide set of stakeholders involved and illustrating how different stakeholders impact on GLPs adoption by affecting a set of influencing factors. By combining insights from the available literature with contemporary empirical data, the authors emphasize how Logistics Service Providers (LSPs) and shippers can no longer address the adoption of GLPs as “focal companies”, but only as part of a “focal network of interconnected stakeholders”, all of them influencing GLPs adoption.

This study aims to uncover apple preference and consumption in Indonesia, to disclose the risk of non-halal contamination of apples and the importance of maintaining the halal integrity of apples along the supply chain and to uncover the impacts of food miles of apples along supply chain segmentation.

This study adopted mixed research methods under a fully mixed sequential dominant status design (QUAN → qual). Data were collected through a survey in some Indonesian provinces (N = 396 respondents). Samples were collected randomly from individual consumers. The qualitative data were collected through interviews with 15 apple traders in Indonesia. Data were analysed using crosstab, chi-square and descriptive analysis.

First, Muslim consumers believe in the risk of chemical treatment of apples because it can affect the halal status of apples. Second, Indonesian consumers consider the importance of halal certification of chemical-treated apples and the additives for apple treatments. Third, the insignificance of domestic apple preference contributes to longer food miles at the first- and middle-mile stages (preference for imported apples). Fourth, apple consumption and shopping distance contribute to the longer food miles problem at the last-mile stage. Fifth, longer food miles have negative impacts, such as emissions and pollution, food loss and waste, food insecurity, financial loss, slow development of the local economy and food unsafety.

This research has implications for the governments, farmers, consumers (society) and business sectors.

This study proposes a framework of food miles under a halal supply chain (halal food miles) to reduce the risk of food miles and improve halal integrity. The findings from this research have theoretical implications for the development of the food mile theory, halal food supply chain and green supply chain.

Universities’ unique position within society means they have an important role to contribute to sustainability and to help achieve the sustainable development goals (SDGs), which are one of the most widely recognised articulations of sustainability. This study aims to look at the integration of the SDGs in education, specifically, in the Bachelor of Design (B-DES) “pathways” at the University of Melbourne, Australia.

Interviews with pathway coordinators and a survey of all 45 core subjects were used to understand the current degree of integration and the benefits, constraints and opportunities of deeper integration.

Sustainability is deeply incorporated into B-DES curricula, but the SDGs are not. Most teachers, but particularly pathway coordinators, see value in deeper incorporation. Issues that constrain this include some students’ fatigue with the idea of “sustainability”, a crowded curriculum and some teachers’ scepticism, even disdain for the SDGs, which they see as contradictory, too broad or overly political.

This study sheds light on the extent of integration and reveals several possible pedagogical approaches: analysing what industries need to do to make a proportionate contribution to achieving the SDGs, critical review of industries’ use of and alignment with the SDGs, comparing and contrasting the SDGs with disciplines’ theoretical frameworks and critiquing the SDGs’ ambition with reference to the capabilities and technologies of a discipline. Provided they are done with due consideration of the SDGs’ limitations, these methods of integration have the potential to better prepare students as global citizens and for international employment.

Given the increasing importance of engineering insurance, it is still unclear which specific factors can enhance the role of engineering insurance as a risk transfer tool. This study aims to propose a hybrid approach to identify and analyze the key determinants influencing the consumption of engineering insurance in mainland China.

The empirical analysis utilizes provincial data from mainland China from 2008 to 2019. The research framework is a novel amalgamation of the generalized method of moments (GMM) model, the quantile regression (QR) technique and the random forest (RF) algorithm. This innovative hybrid approach provides a comprehensive exploration of the driving factors while also allowing for an examination across different quantiles of insurance consumption.

The study identifies several driving factors that significantly impact engineering insurance consumption. Income, financial development, inflation, price, risk aversion, market structure and the social security system have a positive and significant influence on engineering insurance consumption. However, urbanization exhibits a negative and significant effect on the consumption of engineering insurance. QR techniques reveal variations in the effects of these driving factors across different levels of engineering insurance consumption.

This study extends the research on insurance consumption to the domain of the engineering business, making theoretical and practical contributions. The findings enrich the knowledge of insurance consumption by identifying the driving factors specific to engineering insurance for the first time. The research framework provides a novel and useful tool for examining the determinants of insurance consumption. Furthermore, the study offers insights into the engineering insurance market and its implications for policymakers and market participants.

Despite large bodies of research related to the impacts of e-commerce on last-mile logistics and sustainability, there has been limited effort to evaluate urban freight using an equity lens. Therefore, this study proposes a modeling framework that enables researchers and planners to estimate the baseline equity performance of a major e-commerce platform and evaluate equity impacts of possible urban freight management strategies. The study also analyzes the sensitivity of various operational decisions to mitigate bias in the analysis.

The model adapts empirical methodologies from activity-based modeling, transport equity evaluation, and residential freight trip generation (RFTG) to estimate person- and household-level delivery demand and cargo van traffic exposure in 41 U.S. Metropolitan Statistical Areas (MSAs).

Evaluating 12 measurements across varying population segments and spatial units, the study finds robust evidence for racial and socio-economic inequities in last-mile delivery for low-income and, especially, populations of color (POC). By the most conservative measurement, POC are exposed to roughly 35% more cargo van traffic than white populations on average, despite ordering less than half as many packages. The study explores the model’s utility by evaluating a simple scenario that finds marginal equity gains for urban freight management strategies that prioritize line-haul efficiency improvements over those improving intra-neighborhood circulations.

Presents a first effort in building a modeling framework for more equitable decision-making in last-mile delivery operations and broader city planning.

Public participation in policy-making can play a fundamental role in improving effectiveness via two mechanisms: strengthening the alignment between public needs and proposed measures, and increasing public consensus (and compliance) about them. It is, therefore, particularly relevant to foster public participation in sustainable mobility planning at the urban scale, as strongly recommended by the European Union, not only to avoid protests and resolve conflicts but also to find the best solutions for the city. Among many different tools and methodologies for implementing public participation, Living Labs have also shown great potential in enhancing the co-creation of strategies and measures for achieving sustainable mobility for both passengers and freight.

Through the analysis of the participatory process carried out by the municipality of Rome to support the definition of the Sustainable Urban Mobility and Logistics Plans, this chapter explores different involvement levels, tools and strategies in this field, with a particular focus on the innovative Logistics Living Lab developed in this city. This also contributes to filling a gap in the literature on how and to what extent citizens could or should participate in city logistics planning. The results of the analysis highlight that, despite these efforts, citizen participation in planning urban logistics is still a challenge that deserves additional effort and resources to be properly enhanced and improved and that a Living Lab offers great potential to meet this challenge. In turn, this case study could help policy-makers to identify solutions for more effective and acceptable measures to addressing city logistics and the externalities it generates.