RESUMO
The recycling of multimaterials such as payment or access cards poses significant challenges. Building on previous experimental work demonstrating the feasibility of chemically recyclable payment cards made from glycol-modified poly(ethylene terephthalate) (PET-G), we use life cycle assessment and techno-economic analysis to investigate two chemical recycling scenarios and evaluate their potential environmental and economic benefits. Recovering all components from the depolymerized products (Scenario 1) achieves substantial environmental benefits across most categories, reducing global warming by up to 67% compared to only recovering major components (Scenario 2). However, the environmental benefits in Scenario 1 incur 69% higher total annualized costs, causing its profitability to be dependent on a minimum selling price of £13.4/kg for cyclohexanedimethanol and less than a 10% discount rate. In contrast, Scenario 2 is less sensitive to discount rate variation and thus a lower risk and more economically feasible option, albeit less environmentally sustainable.
RESUMO
This paper looks at how Macao, the world's most densely populated city, deals with the COVID-19 disease, with a focus on government interventions and responses of the gaming concessionaires who operate integrated resorts. Macao was selected as the case not only because of the background of the authors, but also because Macao has been cited in many media coverage as a "good practice" example when it comes to fighting against this COVID-19 pandemic situation. Since there are already ample of articles on the background, development timeline, and overall commentary, this paper adopts a mixed approach by combining supplementary secondary data on the COVID-19 timeline in Macao (focusing on government interventions that can affect the tourism and hospitality industry) and primary qualitative in-depth interviews with senior management personnel (holding positions of Director or above) from major integrated resorts in Macao to get insights on industry strategic responses and expectation on future. A total of seven interviews were conducted with senior management members of five integrated resorts in May 2020. Four areas of responses were identified. They are 1. Survival; 2. The New Business Norm; 3. Business Rebound Strategies and 4. Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR). The findings indicate a seemingly utopian scenario among the major integrated resorts and gaming concessionaires in Macao towards their compliance and autonomous actions. The mechanism of this utopian-like scenario is explained by adopting the neo-institutional theory.
