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Topic Review
Crystalline Silicon Solar Panel Recycling
The global surge in solar energy adoption is a response to the imperatives of sustainability and the urgent need to combat climate change. Solar photovoltaic (PV) energy, harnessing solar radiation to produce electricity, has become a prevalent method for terrestrial power generation. At the forefront of this shift are crystalline silicon photovoltaics modules (PVMs), the primary tools in PV systems for solar energy capture. This growth is evidenced by a significant increase in installations, with an over 90% surge in the past decade, from 104 to 1053 gigawatts (GWs). These PVMs, predominantly silicon-based and representing 95% of global PV production in 2020, have a lifespan of 20–30 years. Projections indicate that by 2030, worldwide solar capacity might approach 2840 GW, and by 2050, it could climb to 8500 GW.
  • 189
  • 27 Dec 2023
Topic Review
Carbon Footprint Reduction and Climate Change Mitigation
Since the Industrial Revolution, human economic activity and the global development of society in general have been heavily dependent on the exploitation of natural resources. The use of fossil fuels, deforestation, the drainage of wetlands, the transformation of coastal marine ecosystems, unsustainable land use, and many other unbalanced processes of human activity have led to an increase both in the anthropogenic emissions of climate-active gases and in their concentration in the atmosphere. It is believed that over the past ~150 years these phenomena have contributed to an increase in the global average temperature in the near-surface layer of the atmosphere by ~1 °C. Currently, the most pressing tasks facing states and scientific and civil societies are to reduce anthropogenic CO2 emissions and to limit the global air temperature increase. In this regard, there is an urgent need to change existing production systems in order to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and to sequester them.
  • 177
  • 26 Dec 2023
Topic Review
Heat Mitigation Benefits of Urban Trees
Modeling, validating, and simulating are three essential parts in investigating the heat mitigation benefits of urban trees (BUT). Therefore, 81 relevant studies from the last ten years are reviewed, analyzed. Three main ways for urban trees to adjust the environment are summarized, including shade creation and radiation modification, cooling effects of transpiration, and airflow blocking and modification effects. 
  • 113
  • 26 Dec 2023
Topic Review
Innovative Photovoltaic Cooling System (IPCoSy)
The field efficiency of silicon-based solar cells is dependent on various factors, including temperature. An increase in temperature results in a reduced efficiency of a magnitude dependent on the solar cell’s temperature coefficient. Furthermore, an increase in solar cell temperatures beyond levels specified by the manufacturer will result in a reduced lifetime and an increased probability of potential induced degradation and even failure. A patented Innovative Photovoltaic Cooling System (IPCoSy) is presented here. The full-scale prototypes are the same size as commercially available photovoltaic modules, making them easier to integrate in the current market. Designs can be commercially viable, especially when coupled with other systems such as reverse osmosis plants and water heating. 
  • 172
  • 25 Dec 2023
Topic Review
Ecotoxicological Impact of Bioplastics Biodegradation
The emergence of bioplastics presents a promising solution to the environmental impact of the plastics industry. Bioplastics are engineered to degrade in aquatic or soil environments. However, not all bioplastics are completely biodegradable, and some, like petrochemical-based plastics, may contribute to plastic pollution. The biodegradability of bioplastics is significantly different in different environmental conditions such as soil, marine, and composting environments. At the same time, bioplastics produced from natural resources contain a mixture of known and unknown materials and show 32% cytotoxicity, 42% oxidative stress, 67% baseline toxicity, and 23% antiandrogenicity in bioassays. The extensive biodegradation of bioplastics in soil can also change the soil nutrients, leading to eutrophication or stunted plant growth. However, many concerns have arisen, according to which bioplastics may not be an alternative option for global plastic pollution in the long run, and limited studies focus on this scenario. 
  • 100
  • 22 Dec 2023
Topic Review
Sustainable Water Resources Management in Saudi Arabia
Saudi Arabia is one of the most water-scarce nations in the world, with a huge demand-supply gap, and the situation is expected to worsen due to climate change. Conventional surface water resources are limited, while nonrenewable groundwater sources are depleted. To build a more resilient and sustainable water sector, the production of non-conventional water resources, specifically desalinated seawater and treated domestic wastewater, has steadily increased in recent years. As the country lacks perennial water resources, such as rivers or water bodies, it relies mainly on nonrenewable groundwater and desalinated water to meet its daily requirements. Although the government is attempting to regulate the agricultural sector, water consumption in agriculture remains relatively high. It presents an environmental challenge due to its heavy reliance on non-renewable groundwater resources. The anticipated increase in temperature and highly uncertain changes in the rainfall patterns in Saudi Arabia could lead to greater uncertainty when attempting to develop effective water resource management plans.
  • 455
  • 22 Dec 2023
Topic Review
Deep Learning Methods for Smoke Recognition
Fire accidents cause alarming damage. They result in the loss of human lives, damage to property, and significant financial losses. Early fire ignition detection systems, particularly smoke detection systems, play a crucial role in enabling effective firefighting efforts. In this paper, a novel DL (Deep Learning) method, namely BoucaNet, is introduced for recognizing smoke on satellite images while addressing the associated challenging limitations. BoucaNet combines the strengths of the deep CNN EfficientNet v2 and the vision transformer EfficientFormer v2 for identifying smoke, cloud, haze, dust, land, and seaside classes. Extensive results demonstrate that BoucaNet achieved high performances. BoucaNet also showed a robust ability to overcome challenges, including complex backgrounds; detecting small smoke zones; handling varying smoke features such as size, shape, and color; and handling visual similarities between smoke, clouds, dust, and haze.
  • 245
  • 21 Dec 2023
Topic Review
Recyclable Design of Wooden Furniture
With the rapid development of the economy and the change in people’s aesthetic concepts, the renewal of furniture has become more and more frequent. Among the huge amount of used furniture, solid wood and wood-based panel furniture account for the vast majority, but the imperfective recycling system and insufficient recycling efforts result in serious waste, which is contrary to the low-carbon transition and sustainable development means. 
  • 362
  • 21 Dec 2023
Topic Review
BCD Datasets and SSL in Remote Sensing CD
The detection of building changes (hereafter ‘building change detection’, BCD) is a critical issue in remote sensing analysis. Accurate BCD faces challenges, such as complex scenes, radiometric differences between bi-temporal images, and a shortage of labelled samples. Traditional supervised deep learning requires abundant labelled data, which is expensive to obtain for BCD. By contrast, there is ample unlabelled remote sensing imagery available. Self-supervised learning (SSL) offers a solution, allowing learning from unlabelled data without explicit labels. Inspired by self-supervised learning (SSL), researchers employed the SimSiam algorithm to acquire domain-specific knowledge from remote sensing data. Then, these well-initialised weight parameters were transferred to BCD tasks, achieving optimal accuracy. A novel framework for BCD was developed using self-supervised contrastive pre-training and historical geographic information system (GIS) vector maps (HGVMs). 
  • 249
  • 21 Dec 2023
Topic Review
Methods Used for Artificial Humification of Animal Wastes
Humification (HF) is the natural process of converting bioorganic matter into humic substances (humus, humate, humic acid, fulvic acid, and humin) via geo-microbiological mechanisms under aerobic and/or anaerobic conditions. Humic substances (HSs) and their composition and concentrations mostly determine the basic properties of soils and play an important role in regulating the growth of plants and soil microorganisms and the accumulation and migration of metal ions, radionuclides, and ecotoxicants in soils. Various processes designed for the humification (HF) of animal husbandry wastes, primarily bird droppings, reduce their volumes, solve environmental problems, and make it possible to obtain products with artificially formed humic substances (HSs) as analogues of natural HSs, usually extracted from fossil sources (coal and peat).
  • 255
  • 19 Dec 2023
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