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Recently, there has been a shift toward the embodied energy assessment of buildings. However, the impact of material service life on the life-cycle embodied energy has received little attention. We aimed to address this knowledge gap, particularly in the context of the UAE and investigated the embodied energy associated with the use of concrete and other materials commonly used in residential buildings in the hot desert climate of the UAE.

Using input–output based hybrid analysis, we quantified the life-cycle embodied energy of a villa in the UAE with over 50 years of building life using the average, minimum, and maximum material service life values. Mathematical calculations were performed using MS Excel, and a detailed bill of quantities with >170 building materials and components of the villa were used for investigation.

For the base case, the initial embodied energy was 57% (7390.5 GJ), whereas the recurrent embodied energy was 43% (5,690 GJ) of the life-cycle embodied energy based on average material service life values. The proportion of the recurrent embodied energy with minimum material service life values was increased to 68% of the life-cycle embodied energy, while it dropped to 15% with maximum material service life values.

The findings provide new data to guide building construction in the UAE and show that recurrent embodied energy contributes significantly to life-cycle energy demand. Further, the study of material service life variations provides deeper insights into future building material specifications and management considerations for building maintenance.

The purpose of this study is to quantify the impact of electricity power outages on the local housing market in South Africa.

This study uses the autoregressive distributive lag (ARDL) and quantile autoregressive distributive lag (QARDL) models on annual time series data, for the period 1971–2014. The interest rate, real income and inflation were used as control variables to enable a multivariate framework.

The results from the ARDL model show that real income is the only factor influencing housing price over the long run, whereas other variables only have short-run effects. The estimates from the QARDL further reveal hidden cointegration relationship over the long run with higher quantile levels of distribution and transmission losses raising the residential price growth.

Overall, the findings of this study imply that the South African housing market is more vulnerable to property devaluation caused by power outages over the short run and yet remains resilient to loadshedding over the long run. Other macro-economic factors, such as real income and inflation, are more influential factors towards long-run developments in the residential market.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study to examine the empirical relationship between power outages and housing price growth.

Of critical concern to the world is the need to reduce consumption and waste of natural resources. This study provides a multi-level exploration of the ways situational and transformational links between levels and challenges are related to the adoption and utilization of material flow cost accounting in Vietnam, to encourage green productivity.

Based on triangulation of public documents at different institutional levels and a set of semi-structured interviews, situational and transformational links and challenges for material flow cost accounting in Vietnam are examined using purposive and snowball sampling of key actors.

Using a multi-level framework the research identifies six situational and transformational barriers to implementation of material flow cost accounting and suggests opportunities to overcome these. The weakest links identified involve macro-to meso-situational and micro-to macro-transformational links. The paper highlights the dominance of meso-level institutions and lack of focus on micro transformation to cut waste and enable improvements in green productivity.

The paper identifies ways for companies in Vietnam to reduce unsustainability and enable transformation towards sustainable management and waste reduction.

The paper is the first to develop and use a multi-level/multi-time period framework to examine the take-up of material flow cost accounting to encourage transformation towards green productivity. Consideration of the Vietnamese case builds understanding of the challenges for achieving United Nations Sustainable Development Goal number 12, to help enable sustainable production and consumption patterns.

Idea of circular economy defies the classical “make-use-dispose” approach of linear economic model. In the context of health-care industry, it relies heavily on the supply chain practices implemented by industry stakeholders. The purpose of this study is to explore such relationships, study their structure and put it across for attaining sustainability at large.

This study is an empirical research conducted on 145 health-care firms. The collected data is analysed to develop structural and measurement model. The five constructed hypotheses are examined and tested through structural equation modelling.

The study illustrates the latent relationships that exist among the stakeholders involvement, sustainable supply chain practices, sustainable performance and circular economy for health-care industry. It is found that the adoption of sustainable supply chain practices improves health-care performance, which, in turn, have positive influence on circular economy.

The structural and measurement model is developed in the context of circular health-care economy. It can be validated or improvised by conducting similar research in other industry using different methods. This research work fulfils the long existing gap in research by offering a linkage between various constructs to achieve health-care circular economy. Based on the research results, future researchers can build theories of circular economy and sustainability for health-care industry.

The study attempts to study the supply chain ways to achieve circular economy for Indian health-care sector. It considered latent relationships among the set of constructs, which are needed for theory building at later stage.