Suchergebnisse

Due to the large quantities of municipal waste generated, their harmful effects on the environment should be minimized. The rationalization of waste management is therefore necessary to achieve a more sustainable development system. In order to support the decision-making process for municipal waste management, this document focuses on developing models for practical use by local authorities in forecasting and managing the size of waste stream in their area. This action, because of its specificity, is a difficult task, especially because of the systemic changes made and the territorial differentiation and changes in the living level of the population. The work presents studies conducted in 2479 municipalities for which mass accumulation index forecasts were developed, using selected methods based on readily available input variables that have not yet been used (structure municipalities and typology of municipalities by scope of influence). The studies confirmed the hypothesis that the amount of municipal waste collected from households depends both on the administrative type of the municipality and on the factors related to the location and socioeconomic function of the area. The inclusion of localization and socioeconomic factors, which so far were not used to model the municipal waste stream, allowed for the reduction of the prediction error of this indicator. Relevant waste stream forecasts will allow local governments to achieve more effectively the objective of sustainable waste management and thus reduce their environmental impact. The achievement of this objective will be possible not only through the preparation of infrastructure to serve the projected waste volumes ; it will also identify the waste management areas where the municipal waste reception process is inadequate. Thus, it will help to eliminate illegal processing and the landfill of waste.

A public utility facility underwent an energy and economic efficiency audit regarding the photovoltaic system generating electricity for its own needs. The audit included an analysis of the amount of energy produced by the PV generation system, the calculation of the amount of the energy conserved, as well as the economic viability of the project in accordance with the guidelines contained in the Regulation of the Minister of Economy on energy efficiency. Two options for the financing of investments were considered: own resources of the public body or the purchase of the system with the financing from the EU funds — ROP Measure 7.2 – Improving air quality and increase in the use of renewable energy sources. On the basis of the economic analysis, it was determined that the installation of a photovoltaic system is economically justified only if the public body receives funding from external sources — such an investment (taking into account the changing value of money over time) may be recovered after 13 years of use, and the cost incurred to conserve energy will be twice lower than the cost of purchasing electricity from the grid.

Implementation of the conception of sustainable energy requires a progress evaluation, which calls for an indicator system for monitoring sustainable energy. In this paper it is proposed to use simultaneously two systems, one based on a set of specific indicators and the other on a synthetic indicator. The usefulness of proposed indicator methods was checked on the example of rural areas of the Śląskie Voivodship by monitoring sustainable energy in given counties in 2004 and 2014.

The study compared the effectiveness of the rough set theory and artificial neural networks with respect to predicting the rate of waste mass accumulation for recipients in the areas of rural municipalities. Simulations were performed for two variants of input variables. The first of them used all economic, infrastructure and economic indicators as independent variables. The second case was limited only to those whose correlation with the class label attribute exceeded 0,2  and they included: population density, percentage of buildings in the municipality covered by the collection system, the rate of income, and agricultural area. The analysis showed that rough sets' models generate comparable-quality forecasts of mass waste accumulation rate for rural municipalities, such as artificial neural networks. The developed models are characterized by a high forecast error of about 20%–27%. Further research is needed towards finding effective methods or other conditional attributes that describe the rate of mass accumulation of waste in the areas of rural municipalities.

In this study, the effectiveness of classical regression models to forecast the indicator of mass accumulation of waste was investigated. The economic and infrastructural variables were used as explanatory variables. The conducted studies show that applying regression models can produce forecasting models generating errors at an acceptable level although only for the municipalities of urban and urban-rural administrative type. For the models where the following were selected as explanatory variables: income indicator, mean number of persons living in a residential building, proportion of arable land in the structure of land use, percentage of buildings in the municipality covered by the waste collection scheme, and the functional type of municipality, the error in the forecast obtained for the test set amounted to 12%–14%. Using the same set of explanatory variables for the rural municipalities caused the models to display forecasting errors for the test set ranging from 35% to 50%. Also, applying another combination of input variables gathered in the course of the studies did not result in developing models of better quality. Therefore, further studies are necessary in the search for more effective methods or other variables describing the mass waste accumulation indicator in rural municipalities.

Interviews gathered in this section present multilateral vision of Polish Philology, regarded from various perspectives, that concern both chances and risks that Polish Philology is facing at the moment, traditional and modern approaches as two angles shaping its identity, changes in scientific, didactic and legal organization of studies that have either already become (or will become in the nearest future) its part. Speakers also attempt to indicate the importance of closer cooperation between Polish philologists in Poland and abroad in the process of 'reconstructing' the faculty and discipline. Attention has also been paid to the Congress itself as the speakers attempt to answer the question whether it has reached its goals and which postulate raised during the Congress should be regarded as the most important one. In the interview with Professor Danuta Opacka-Walasek the issue of organizing PhD studies and challenges that those responsible for this level of education face at the moment has been discussed. Professor Włodzimierz Bolecki on the other hand discussed the changed imple-mented by the new Law of Higher Education and its consequences for Polonists.