Corrado Topi

Green supply chain management: the development of supply chain carbon maps

In recent times, environmental thinking has become a prominent feature in the design of supply chain networks leading to the concepts of low carbon supply chains and green supply chain management. Understanding the sources and levels of emissions within the supply chain is the first step needed to fully design a low carbon supply chain. This paper helps to develop the concept of supply chain carbon map which provides a visual representation of the sources, levels of emissions and hotspots at a whole supply chain level. This is developed within an extended system framework using the hybrid lifecycle assessment methodology to generate carbon emissions for a mono crystalline silicon PV system and using a multi-regional input-output model to ensure system boundary completeness. The paper also discusses how the development of a whole supply chain perspective of carbon maps ensures that collaborative supply chain networks of firms can be mapped hence firms can gain a better understanding of their supply chain impacts and therefore help its sustainable management.

The Economics of Low Carbon Cities: Approaches to a City-Scale Mini-Stern Review

What is the most effective and efficient way to decarbonize a city? There are hundreds of low carbon options available and although they present a significant opportunity to reduce energy bills and carbon footprints there is often a lack of reliable information on their performance. The higher levels of risk and uncertainty that emerge as a result can be a major barrier to action, making it hard to develop a political, a business or a social case for investment in low carbon options. This in turn makes it harder to set targets, stimulate investment, target interventions, develop new delivery mechanisms and so on. To address this problem, we describe the approach adopted in a city-scale mini-Stern review that reviews the performance and assesses the scope for the deployment of hundreds of low carbon options at the city scale. The review identifies the business case for major scale investments in low carbon options at the city scale, examining the investment needs and payback periods associated with different levels of decarbonization. The results of a case study from the UK are presented. These highlight the presence of very significant and commercially viable opportunities for decarbonization at the city scale – and the potential economic benefits associated with exploiting these. However, it also highlights the scale of the challenge and the need for innovations in a number of areas if major scale investments are to be secured and delivered. To push the debate forward, the chapter concludes by proposing ten key steps to deliver major scale investments in low carbon cities.

The Economic Case for the Circular Economy: From Food Waste to Resource

One of the major challenges decision and policy makers face when trying to introduce sustainable food waste management strategies is to isolate high value waste material. In our paper we assess whether it is logistically, economically and socially feasible to isolate exhaust coffee grounds from the catering industry in one British district and use them as raw material for a novel process to produce alternative high added value products in a near-perfect circular economy cycle making use of reverse logistics and generating near-zero waste. We chose coffee as the product because it is the most traded food commodity in the world, and the second most traded commodity in general, which makes the impact of the outcomes particularly significant. Due to resource and time constraints we had to limit the range of high added value products and to constrain the geographic area, hence we focused on the production of high quality compost for the amateur and professional growers market and on the geographic catchment area of the York municipal waste collection service. To do so, we developed a series of theoretical scenarios corresponding to the different possible logistic and process options that stakeholders could identify and we evaluated the economic indicators. We conclude that the process is technically feasible with available technology within current infrastructure and modest investments and the economic case is very attractive to investors. The outcomes of our research can be used as a model for similar developments in other geographical areas.

GENERALIZED COHERENT STATES FOR DYNAMICAL SUPERALGEBRAS

Coherent states for a general Lie superalgebra are defined following the method originally proposed by Perelomov. Algebraic and geometrical properties of the systems of states thus obtained are examined, with particular attention to the possibility of defining a Kahler structure over the states supermanifold and to the connection between this supermanifold and the coadjoint orbits of the dynamical supergroup. The theory is then applied to some compact forms of contragradient Lie superalgebras.