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...........Due to the short-sighted vision of market economy most of these secondary products are irrationally used or even . .... .. ...totally neglected causing environmental problems.
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Even if this information is available for some resources, the quality of this information is low. In most cases no scientific methodology was applied to access the availability of these resources depending on the species, ecological conditions and conditions of agriculture.
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Over and above, the information on renewable material resources are available, in many cases, in a form, inappropriate for sustainable development. What is needed is to develop community-or province-centered databases giving a clear picture of the local availability of these resources. This is especially important for many renewable material resources, which are either perishable or bulky or both and are thus uneconomic to transport to far sites for further processing. Such databases will help realize the integrated use of locally available renewable resources. It may be uneconomic to establish an industry on a single resource, but the combination of different locally available resources may provide good economics for industrial utilization. On the other hand examples from the Zero Emission Research Institution (ZERI) demonstrate how all side products from a production chain (e.g., production of beer or coffee beans) can be reused.
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The present curricula in science and engineering classes deal mainly with steel and concrete and to lesser extent with other metals, ceramics, plastics and glass. There is a clear negligence of renewable material resources in these curricula. We need to accept the challenge of engineering of renewable material resources, which means the transformation – via imaginative thinking and design and then manufacturing – of these resources from their original state as isentropic materials extracted from nature to, more or less, isotropic materials having reliable and predictable performance. Within this framework we need to begin with developing a new vision of properties of both renewable and non-renewable resources proceeding from clear definition of functionality of use/application of the resource and from understanding of its life cycle.
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