© 2020 by the author. The contradiction between limited resources and rapid development in the automobile industry has been driving society to seek the supply of recyclable resources from End-of-Life Vehicles (ELVs). It has become an urgent need for vehicle recycling policymakers to have an overall understanding of the end-of-life (EoL) vehicle population, as well as for vehicle producers to note what and how they can benefit from ELV recycling. This paper estimated the potential population of EoL passenger vehicles, all recyclable resources from them, as well as the economic values of these recyclable resources. The results show that in 2030, with a lighter-weight trend of passenger vehicles, more than 26.3 million passenger vehicles will be retired with 19.1 million tons of recyclable steel and 6.2 million tons of plastics. The theoretical economic value of all recyclable resources will reach 101.3 billion yuan ($14.4 billion) in 2030, which is an average of approximately 2.4 thousand yuan ($341.8) for each EoL passenger vehicle. It is time for the vehicle producers to shift to a manufacturing mode considering such large potential of ELV recycling. The scenario analysis suggests that in the context of a light-weighting trend, ELV resource recovery in the future calls for improvement in the recycling and reuse technologies of plastics and rubbers.

© 2019 Elsevier B.V. The rapid economic growth and industrialization in China has induced a large copper demand since 1990, of which only approximately 40% is met by domestic ore deposits. However, a high dependence on imported copper ores, refined copper, or copper scrap can pose great risks to the sustainable copper resource supply and economic development of one country. An assessment of the in-use stock of refined copper is essential to estimate the potential supply of recycled copper, especially for countries with a high external dependence, such as China. A scenario analysis may further evaluate such a supply under different development pathways in the context of the increasingly strict import regulation of copper-containing end-of-use products. We introduced Material Flow Analysis and the Weibull lifetime distribution to estimate the in-use stock of refined copper from 1990 to 2035 in China based on the time-series data for sectoral refined copper consumption. The results show that the amount of generated copper scrap has been increasing from 1990 and reached 3.67 Tg in 2016, with 34.4% from the home appliances sector (mainly air-conditioning)and 26.6% from the power infrastructure sector. In 2035, the total would reach 17.7 Tg, with 42.8% from the power infrastructure sector and 19.7% from the home appliances sector. A scenario analysis was conducted considering different consumption growth rates, waste import regulation standards, and domestic recycling efficiency growth rates. The results show that under both scenarios, a total ban and limited imports of metal-containing scraps, the growth of the domestic recycling efficiency may improve the refined copper supply, which would be 0.867 Tg (67.4%)and 1.04 Tg (80.9%), respectively. With an adequate in-use stock of refined copper and an increasing recycling efficiency rate, domestic recycled secondary copper can cover the shrinking import source of copper scrap and become an essential source to meet the needs of the booming refined copper consumption in China.

© 2018 Elsevier Ltd The national emission trading scheme (ETS) in China, CHN-ETS, was established in 2017 following the start of its regional pilot markets in 2013. It will start with a coverage of electricity supply sector and eight pilot regions. Due to a highly regulated dispatch and pricing system in the electricity supply sector, the additional emission abatement costs brought by the ETS cannot be automatically conveyed between consumers and producers in all regions. This paper modeled the cost transmission of ETS in three scenarios based on the quantification results of regional and sectoral emission flows in the electricity supply sector under consumption-based accounting. The results show that the emissions transferred into pilot cities outweighed the emissions transferred out, not only through direct electricity uses but also through the indirect emissions embodied in other sectors that required intermediate inputs from electricity supply sectors in the pilot cities. Through the cost transmission mechanism, the additional abatement cost caused by the national ETS drove the increases in the household consumption of several energy-intensive sectors, including the metal mining sector in Hebei, the petroleum and gas sector in Heilongjiang, and the nonmetal mining sector in Sichuan, with a sensitive increase of 10.1%, 9.9%, and 3.5%, respectively. However, most sectors (745 of the 810) would suffer an increase rate below 0.1%. As long as the household welfare would be ensured, there is still room for the current average market price in the pilot cities to be further increased toward the official guidance price in the nation-wide market.

© 2018 Elsevier B.V. The world food price crisis in 2007/08 has aroused worldwide attention to the global food price volatility and food self-sufficiency issues. This paper modelled the entire environment of food production and transaction from a holistic view by a Food-Energy-Water (FEW) nexus in order to reveal the hidden connections related to the food self-sufficiency issue, including the interdependencies of food production with its restraining factors (hybrid energy, hybrid water), other production sectors, and international exchanges. This paper mapped all direct and indirect flows in the FEW nexus and projected a potential Emission Trading Scheme (ETS) to figure out the impacts of policies on FEW nexus flows, nexus robustness, total input of all sectors, and household expenditures in Japan and China. The results show that the pattern of food-related extraction flows was more imbalanced than the pattern of hybrid energy flows, due to the high dependence of Japan on the food supply of China (16.11% of total food-related extractions). An ETS may increase Japan's total household expenditure on imported goods from China in the fields of sugar refining (1.3096%), processing vegetable oils and fats (0.1164%), processing of meat cattle (0.1010%), as well as slightly decrease the system robustness of the total nexus.

© 2019 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. The sustainable development of the western region of China has always been essential to the national development strategy. The Western region has undertaken an industrial transfer from the Eastern and Central regions. Therefore, the CO2 emission intensity in the western region is higher than those of the Eastern and Central regions of China, and consequently its low-carbon development pathway has an important impact for China as a whole. Sichuan Province is not only the province with the highest CO2 emissions, but also the most economically developed province in Western China in 2018. In order to promote low carbon development in the western region, it is important to understand the features of emissions in Sichuan Province and to formulate effective energy strategies accordingly. This paper uses the IPCC regional emission accounting method to calculate the carbon emissions of 15 cities in Sichuan province, and to comply with the city-level emission accounts. The results show that the total carbon emissions of Sichuan province over the past 10 years was 3258.32 mt and reached a peak in 2012. The smelting and pressing of ferrous metals, coal mining and dressing were the leading sectors that contributed to the emissions, accounting for 17.86% and 15.82%, respectively. Raw coal, cleaned coal, and coke were the most significant contributors to CO2 emissions, accounting for 43.73%, 9.55%, and 6.60%, respectively. Following the above results, the Sichuan provincial government can formulate differentiated energy structure policies according to different energy consumption structures and carbon emission levels in the 15 cities. By controlling the level of total emissions and regulating larger industrial emitters in Sichuan province, some useful information could be provided as an essential reference for low-carbon development in Western China, and contribute to the promotion of emissions mitigation from a more holistic perspective.

© The Author(s) 2017. Due to its long-term negative health effects and increasing emissions, the PM2.5 issue has caused rising concerns in recent years. Although official media from East Asian countries tend to avoid blaming PM emission sources on their neighboring countries, researches have proved the existence of pronounced long-range trans-boundary particulate matters transported by nature force and by human activities. In this con-text, this paper included the structural path analysis (SPA) to quantify trans-boundary PM2.5 at sector level, track its transaction paths and figure out the linkages between consumption and production responsibilities of China, Japan and Korea. Based on the results and policy reviews of current environmental cooperation mechanisms, this paper found that: Considering the China–Japan and China–Korea trades, China’s net exportation of embodied PM2.5 emissions has exceeded the importation rates over 10 times (CHN → JPN, 56.53 kt, JPN → CHN, 3.58 kt; CHN → KOR, 59.19 kt, KOR → CHN, 5.31 kt). Japan and Korea benefited from importing raw materials with high emission intensity from China to meet domestic consumption needs and keep a low national emission level. China, the largest emitter in the world, should first take the responsibility to mitigate its huge domestic PM2.5 emission. However, the relocated emissions from its neighboring countries should not be ignored. For Japan or Korea, due to the close economic interdependence and geographical position, any contribution to the reduction of the trans-boundary emissions or to the solution of atmosphere problems within China also helps those countries themselves. In the long run, all three countries would benefit from enhancing subregional environmental cooperation.