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In this chapter the potential to use water-based Trombe walls to provide heated water for building applications during the summer months is investigated. Design Builder software is used to model a simple single-story building with a south-facing Trombe wall. The effects of using different thermal storage mediums within the Trombe wall on building heating loads during the winter and building cooling loads during the summer are modeled. The amount of thermal energy stored and temperature of water within the thermal storage medium during hot weather conditions were also simulated. On a sunny day on Toronto, Canada, the average temperature of the water in a Trombe wall integrated into a single-story building can reach ∼57°C, which is high enough to provide for the main hot water usages in buildings. Furthermore, the amount of water heated is three times greater than that required in an average household in Canada. The results from this work suggest that water-based Trombe walls have great potential to enhance the flexibility and utility of Trombe walls by providing heated water for building applications during summer months, without compromising performance during winter months.

For Marx, workers would be the prime motivators for a fundamental change toward a new economic system. They produce the output of the economy but have little control over their working environment, the product or the direction that economic change would take. They are alienated although often without a consciousness of the systemic source of their alienation. The social system results in workers having to work longer than necessary to reproduce their socially defined needs as workers. The surplus product, taking the form of surplus value, generates property income in the form of rents, interest and profit. Those holding ownership of the means of production claim the results of the workers' labour. The existence of wage labour creates a necessary condition for means of production becoming capital. This concept of capital is different from both chattels and personal property. Stander notes such a difference between these two and capital, but he does not note the difference between means of production and capital which seem to be identical for him.

Globalization has increased the consumer's demand for safe and quality foods. To make food available to consumers from farm to fork, packaging plays a crucial role. The objective of packaging is to shield the foodstuff from degrading and to serve as the medium of communication between the processing industry and the consumers. Conventionally, several materials are used in the packaging such as laminates, plastics, glass, metal, etc., but with the advent of technology, newer and novel smart packaging technologies have entered this field. Smart packaging in the form of active and intelligent packaging not only acts as a barrier to external influences but also prevents internal deterioration. Oxygen scavengers, moisture controllers, antioxidants, CO₂ absorber/emitter, antimicrobial agents, etc., are some of the vital active packaging systems. On the other hand, an intelligent packaging system contains internal or external indicators and sensors that monitor the condition of packed food and gives information about its quality during storage and transportation. It seems that these interventions in packaging have very positive effects on the whole industry, but it is observed that this advancement in the packaging has also raised questions about its disposal. To overcome this issue, industries have started using smart packaging design along with the sustainable packaging trend. Communication with the recycling bodies at the time of development will ensure the smart packaging fit to be recycled. Considering such standards for smart packaging will not only create a healthy bond between industries and consumers but will also help in sustainable development. This chapter mainly focuses on the advancement of the packaging system associated with the agri-food sector. It also discusses how the implementation of these technological advancements will help the industries toward sustainable development.

The malfunction variables of power stations are related to the areas of weather, physical structure, control and load behaviour. To predict temporal power failure is difficult due to their unpredictable characteristics. As high accuracy is normally required, the estimation of failures of short-term temporal prediction is highly difficult. This study presents a method for converting stochastic behaviour into a stable pattern, which can subsequently be used in a short-term estimator. For this conversion, K-means clustering is employed, followed by Long-Short-Term Memory (LSTM) and Gated Recurrent Unit (GRU) algorithms are used to perform the Short-term estimation. The environment, the operation and the generated signal factors are all simulated using mathematical models. Weather parameters and load samples have been collected as part of a data set. Monte-Carlo simulation using MATLAB programming has been used to conduct experimental estimation of failures. The estimated failures of the experiment are then compared with the actual system temporal failures and found to be in good match. Therefore, for any future power grid, there is a testbed ready to estimate the future failures.

This study has covered many types of solar-powered air-conditioning systems that may be used as an alternative to traditional electrically powered air-conditioning systems in order to reduce energy usage. Solar adsorption air cooling is a great alternative to traditional vapor compression air-conditioning. Solar adsorption has several advantages over traditional vapor-compression systems, including being a green cooling technology which uses solar energy to drive the cycle, using pure water as an eco-friendly HFC-free refrigerant, and being mechanically simple with only the magnetic valves as moving parts. Several advancements and breakthroughs have been developed in the area of solar adsorption air-conditioners during the previous decade. However, further study is required before this technology can be put into practise. As a result, this book chapter highlights current research that adds to the understanding of solar adsorption air-conditioning technologies, with a focus on practical research. These systems have the potential to become the next iteration of air-conditioning systems, with the benefit of lowering energy usage while using plentiful solar energy supplies to supply the cooling demand.

There have been times in recent years when it has seemed that the US economy, in particular, has defied economic gravity. This was certainly the case in the late nineties of the twentieth century. Many heaved a sigh of relief when the Nasdaq and the Dow responded to the pull of economic gravity and fell to earth in the early part of the twenty first century. The Earth at the time, in 2002, appeared to be indices of around 8,000 for the Dow and 1,250 for the Nasdaq. These measures still indicated huge wealth in terms of saleable bits of paper as well, indicating the underlying huge capacity of the real economy for creating surpluses. Both indices climbed back, though the Nasdaq was a long way from its astronomic former heights before the next (2007) crisis hit. True to the cyclical record of modern capitalism, however, by 2006 the US and the world stock markets were booming again. The nominal value of shares traded worldwide in 2006 by some estimates was nearly $70 trillion (Bogle, 2005). In 2007, another crisis appeared, ushered in supposedly by the collapse of the sub-prime mortgage market in the United States; subsequent events took their toll in economic and financial terms not only in the United States but worldwide in most of the major economies. The terms “credit crunch” and “sub-prime” had become so pervasive within a few weeks of the onset of the latest economic crisis that by July 2008, the Concise Oxford Dictionary provided definitions for them. While these terms are now embedded in the language of economics and everyday speech, inevitably the affected economies will recover from the crises and continue to grow. While there is no shortage of reasons posited for the latest crisis and those preceding it, far fewer explanations have been forwarded to tell us why economies survive economic shocks and, despite dire predictions and expressions of gloom, recent crises have not been as disastrous as was once the case, notably as in the Depression years of the 1930s. During the Depression of the Thirties, production fell by a third between 1929 and 1933, unemployment reached 13 million and even by 1938 one person in five were unemployed. No economist has predicted these dire consequences even for the crisis of 2007–2009. In 1999, Paul Krugman published his short book: The Return of Depression Economics in which he not only reminded us of the 1930s Depression but suggested that the then economic crises bore an “eerie resemblance to the Great Depression.”¹ He retreats within a few pages and describes the events as the Great Recession because the global damage has been “well short of Depression levels” (Krugman, 1999). A decade later, Krugman, by then a Nobel laureate for economics in 2008, began his 2009 revised edition of Return of Depression Economics thus: “The world economy is not in depression: it probably won't fall into depression (though I wish I could be completely sure about that)” (Krugman, 2009). By early January 2009, he surprised other economic commentators by using the term “depression” in his New York Times column.

The use of fossil fuels in developing countries places increasing economic, health, and environmental costs on the population. In decentralized and rural communities without existing grid systems, direct solar technologies provide the basis for electricity production, for water pumping and hot water, and for heating of houses. Examples and case studies for each of these direct solar technologies are presented which may be directly applicable or potentially modified for rural development in countries such as Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan, which have ample direct solar resources. Related design involving both daylighting and passive cooling are described as part of the incorporation of passive solar heating techniques.

This chapter provides a taxonomy of key rolling stock types and covers the key engineering principles. This chapter concentrates on the aspects of the rolling stock that make it sustainable in terms of passenger transportation; these aspects are primarily safety and crashworthiness. These are specific items that contribute to make the rolling stock and hence rail system more sustainable; passengers need to be confident that they are travelling in safe rolling stock and the vehicle consist, manufacturing technique or materials used should not compromise the crashworthiness aspects. For this reason, all aspects of this chapter reference vehicle safety and crashworthiness.

A long period of capitalist crisis has amplified uneven and combined development in most aspects of political economy and political ecology in most parts of the world, with a resulting increase in the eco-social metabolism of profit-seeking firms and their state supporters. This is especially with the revival of extraction-oriented corporations, especially fossil fuel firms, which remain the world’s most profitable. What opportunities arise for as multi-faceted a critique of “extractivism” as the conditions demand? With ongoing paralysis of United Nations climate negotiators, to illustrate, the most critical question for several decades to come is whether citizen activism can forestall further fossil fuel combustion. In many settings, the extractive industries are critical targets of climate activists, for example, where divestment of stocks is one strategy, or refusing access to land for mining is another. Invoking climate justice principles requires investigating the broader socio-ecological and economic costs and benefits of capital accumulation associated with fossil fuel use, through forceful questioning both by immediate victims and by all those concerned about GreenHouse Gas emissions. Their solidarity with each other is vital to nurture and to that end, the most powerful anti-corporate tactic developed so far, indeed beginning in South Africa during the anti-apartheid struggle, appears to be financial sanctions. The argumentation for invoking sanctions against the fossil fuel industry (and its enablers such as international shipping) is by itself insufficient. Also required is a solid activist tradition. There are, in 2014, two inter-related cases in which South African environmental justice activists have critiqued multi-billion dollar investments, and thus collided with the state, with two vast parastatal corporations and with their international financiers. Whether these collisions move beyond conflicting visions, and actually halt the fossil-intensive projects, is a matter that can only be worked out both through argumentation – for example, in the pages below – and through gaining the solidarity required to halt the financing of climate change.