Heavy metals exposure of children from stairway and sidewalk dust in the smelting district, northeast of China

Soil lead (Pb) pollution is wide spread in China. The Chinese government is taking ambitious actions to tackle the soil pollution issue, with the latest soil quality standards and the Soil Pollutio...

Lead contamination in Chinese surface soils: Source identification, spatial-temporal distribution and associated health risks

Building green retrofit in China: Policies, barriers and recommendations

Green retrofit of aged residential buildings in Hong Kong: A preliminary study

Design strategies for sustainable buildings, that improve building performance and avoid extensive resource utilization, should also promote healthy indoor environments. The following paper contains a review of the couplings between (1) building design, (2) indoor environmental quality and (3) occupant behavior. The paper focuses on defining the limits of adaptation on the three aforementioned levels to ensure the energy efficiency of the whole system and healthy environments. The adaptation limits are described for measurable physical parameters and the relevant responsible human sensory systems, evaluating thermal comfort, visual comfort, indoor air quality and acoustical quality. The goal is to describe the interactions between the three levels where none is a passive participant, but rather an active agent of a wider human-built environment system. The conclusions are drawn in regard to the comfort of the occupant. The study reviews more than 300 sources, ranging from journals, books, conference proceedings, and reports complemented by a review of standards and directives.

A Healthy, Energy-Efficient and Comfortable Indoor Environment, a Review

Do energy retrofits work? Evidence from commercial and residential buildings in Phoenix

Energy performance gap refers to the discrepancy between the predicted and the realized energy savings after buildings adopt energy-efficient technologies. This study identifies and analyzes the organizational, behavioral and engineering factors related to the energy performance gap. 117 completed surveys from facility managers in the United States were obtained in 2017. We find that the primary reasons for the energy performance gap are (1) occupants using more energy than designed, (2) more occupants than originally designed, and (3) energy-efficient technology failures. An analysis is conducted using probit models. The results show that LEED and Energy Star buildings are more likely to have tenant lease agreements to eliminate asymmetric information for new tenants. Energy Star buildings are more likely to have sub-metering for air conditioning. However, LEED buildings are associated with factors causing the energy performance gap, such as lack of sub-metering for AC and longer operating hours. Building characteristics such as occupancy rate, building type, ownership and building location influence the impacts of the identified socio-technical factors. Finally, several suggestions to mitigate the energy performance gap are proposed, such as incentives to facility managers, commissioning, energy performance contracting, and occupants’ behavioral change.

Mind the energy performance gap: Evidence from green commercial buildings

Accurate assessment of environmental externalities of particulate air pollution is crucial to the design and evaluation of environmental policies. Current evaluations mainly focus on direct damages resulting from exposure, missing indirect co-damages that occur through interactions among the externalities, human behaviours and technologies. Our study provides an empirical assessment of such co-damages using customer-level daily and hourly electricity data of a large sample of residential and commercial consumers in Arizona, United States. We use an instrumental variable panel regression approach and find that particulate matter air pollution increases electricity consumption in residential buildings as well as in retail and recreation service industries. Air pollution also reduces the actual electricity generated by distributed-solar panels. Lower-income and minority ethnic groups are disproportionally impacted by air pollution and pay higher electricity bills associated with pollution avoidance, stressing the importance of incorporating the consideration of environmental justice in energy policy-making. While electricity production has a significant impact on air quality, the opposite effect has been suspected but not empirically demonstrated. Now, using pollution and electricity consumption data, He et al. show the impact of air pollution on domestic electricity consumption.

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Increase in domestic electricity consumption from particulate air pollution

Lead emissions originate primarily from the anthropogenic lead cycle, and research into their characteristics, such as species type, provides essential information for pollution control. A dynamic model for global lead emissions has been established, and their emissions and temporal accumulations were estimated in this study based on the evolution of the lead cycle over 70 years. An inventory of the emissions species was obtained after identifying their physiochemical transformations. The 2010 emissions were 3.56 Mt, with 65 % coming from waste management and recycling. The main species were PbSO4 (42.5 %), PbO2 (16.2 %), and PbS (8.3 %). Between 1930 and 2010, the total lead emissions were 173.8 Mt, mainly from waste management and recycling (48 %), production (26 %), and use (20 %). The main species were PbSO4, PbO, Pb, and PbS, and together, they accounted for 61.2 % of the total emissions. Over time, species, such as tetraethyl lead and Pb, declined, but PbO2 and PbSO4 increased.

Jing Liang

Papers

Do energy retrofits work? Evidence from commercial and residential buildings in Phoenix

Mind the energy performance gap: Evidence from green commercial buildings

Increase in domestic electricity consumption from particulate air pollution

Source analysis of global anthropogenic lead emissions: their quantities and species

Energy transition, public expressions, and local officials’ incentives: Social media evidence from the coal-to-gas transition in China