National Institute of Industrial Engineering (NITIE), formerly National Institute for Training in Industrial Engineering, is a graduate business school under Ministry of HRD, Government of India located in Powai near Vihar Lake in Mumbai, and was ranked 12th among B-Schools of India as per NIRF 2020 rankings.
Microplastics (MPs) have emerged as a significant global public health concern, drawing increasing attention in recent years due to their profound impact on terrestrial ecosystems, marine life, and public health. The increasing detection of MPs in agricultural soils poses significant environmental and human health risks due to their small size, persistence, and potential to accumulate in food webs and biomagnify across trophic levels. This review synthesizes existing literature on the sources and distribution of MPs in agricultural soils and examines their multifaceted effects on soil properties, crop yield, food chain transfer, antimicrobial resistance, and human health. We critically evaluate existing MP monitoring and analytical methods and discuss microbial bio-weathering processes mediated by bacteria and fungi, that impact MP fate in soils. Evidence indicates that MP exposure can alter the physical, chemical, and microbial characteristics of farmland, resulting in positive, negative, or negligible effects on crop production, depending on MP types, size, shape, and concentration. Agricultural soils receive MPs and plastic debris from diverse point and nonpoint sources, that degrade into progressively smaller fragments and particles, and environmental weathering processes further accelerate fragmentation. Finally, we propose future research and management priorities for MP-contaminated agricultural systems to improve understanding and mitigate MP accumulation, supporting more sustainable and resilient agro-ecosystems.
Attributional life-cycle assessment was undertaken for a municipal solid waste management (MSWM) facility to benchmark the ecological impacts of the MSW reverse supply chain. The study assesses the performance of an integrated municipal solid waste treatment system with reverse circular supply chain processes like transportation, inspection & sorting, reprocessing, and landfilling, benchmarking with the conventional method for an MSW facility in Mumbai, India. An attributional LCA was conducted to understand the ecological and human-related impacts of the MSW reverse supply chain, using GaBi software. Indicators like marine aquatic ecotoxicity, human toxicity potential, ozone layer depletion potential, terrestrial ecotoxicity potential, ozone creation potential, and abiotic depletion potential were studied. Circularity interventions in energy recovery, material reuse, and recycling were benchmarked across transportation, sorting, biomining, composting, and landfilling operations. Biomining, composting, and transportation caused significant human toxicity-related and ecological impacts, including abiotic resource depletion and aquatic/terrestrial ecotoxicity. Circularity approaches, such as material recovery and landfill gas recovery, mitigate impacts and can be identified as value proposition strategies in MSW waste processing. These are also the hotspots that have the highest mitigation potential, both in terms of ecological and health impacts. The attributional LCA provided decision-making insights into managing recovery processes for the MSW waste stream, reducing reliance on landfilling and enabling more sustainable waste-to-energy systems.
Due to a substantial growth in the world waterborne trade volumes and drastic changes in the global climate accounted for CO2 emissions, the shipping companies need to escalate their operational and energy efficiency. Therefore, a multi-objective mixed-integer non-linear programming (MINLP) model is proposed in this study to simultaneously determine the optimal service schedule, number of vessels in a fleet serving each route, vessel speed between two ports of call, and flow of cargo considering transshipment operations for each pair of origin-destination. This MINLP model presents a trade-off between economic and environmental aspects considering total shipping time and overall shipping cost as the two conflicting objectives. The shipping cost comprises of CO2 emission, fuel consumption and several operational costs where fuel consumption is determined using speed and load. Two efficient evolutionary algorithms: Nondominated Sorting Genetic Algorithm II (NSGA-II) and Online Clustering-based Evolutionary Algorithm (OCEA) are applied to attain the near-optimal solution of the proposed problem. Furthermore, six problem instances of different sizes are solved using these algorithms to validate the proposed model.
Air quality management in India is being studied with more rigor. A detailed chemical analysis of fine particles helps to identify the sources of pollution and to predict potential health effects and climate change. In the present study, fine particles were measured at four locations in Mumbai city, India, during 2007–2008. The fine particles were measured using MiniVol portable air samplers. After gravimetric measurement, ions, elements, elemental carbon and organic carbon were analyzed. The average PM2.5 mass concentrations at control (C), kerb (K), residential (R) and industrial (I) sites were 69 ± 20, 84 ± 31, 89 ± 33 and 95 ± 36 µg/m3 respectively. The average OC contributions at C, K, R and I sites were 30
Small and medium enterprises (SMEs) in India are suffering from the long-standing challenges related to asymmetric information, high transaction costs, SMEs’ opacity and limited access to credit. Blockchain technology, which is still in its infancy in terms of adoption in India, can facilitate SMEs to counter these challenges. Fuelled by this motivation, the study aims to investigate the significant barriers to blockchain adoption in supply chain finance practices by Indian SMEs. Using fuzzy-analytic hierarchy process, sensitivity analysis, and fuzzy-decision-making trial and evaluation laboratory this paper identifies the blockchain barriers, prioritises them and examine their cause and effect relationships. The results of the study indicate that technology barriers are the most influential barriers that impede blockchain adoption. The findings will help the policymakers and practitioners to take suitable measures to overcome these barriers and fuel the adoption of blockchain in Indian SMEs.
