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Organic wastes associated with food in urban areas are of critical concern due to the economic costs and environmental impacts associated with transport and disposal. Food wastes could be converted into soil amendments for urban agriculture and landscaping, recycling nutrients, and improving urban resilience and sustainability. Organic wastes can be composted, to produce valuable soil conditioners and fertilisers, or bioconverted, to produce a wide range of products, as evidenced in later chapters. Alternatively, they can be recovered using thermal treatment converting biomass into biochar to amend problematic soils, improve water conservation and purity, decrease crop pollutant accumulation, and increase crop yield. Retaining proportion of organic wastes, potentially supplemented with inert wastes such as paper waste, will encourage and enhance the development of urban agriculture, as well as stimulate other contemporary urban initiatives such as green walls, rooftop farming, vertical farming, and community gardening. Benefits would also include both short- and longer-term utilisation, restoration, and re-activation of marginal, vacant, and derelict land. A more closed urban food cycle would improve food security, socio-economic, and health systems while also enhancing education and societal engagement with nature. Better food waste recycling in urban areas will support and build smart and sustainable urban living.

Green entrepreneurship aims at addressing environmental or social problems through the implementation of innovative entrepreneurial ideas. One such approach to green entrepreneurship is to explore and implement innovative practices for sustainable waste management. This chapter aims to carry out an in-depth study on the green entrepreneurship of converting wastes into renewable energy for sustainable development. The chapter follows a case study approach to explore rural management practices for the reuse of wastes through the adoption of improved technologies.

This chapter describes alternative innovative practices and approaches of sustainable waste management drawn from a case study conducted at Thikekarwadi Gram Panchayat at Pune District in Maharashtra and explores the inherent economic benefits on the adoption of such approaches by the rural populace. The study is beneficial for the green transformation of waste and sustaining the environment.

Despite the difference in tools and application domains, software engineers and knowledge engineers are exploring the same technique. In this reuse-based approach, components developed previously, are abstracted, then adapted for use in the current application. Knowledge engineers and software engineers may call their abstracted components different things (e.g. “ontologies” or “patterns”) but the modeling intent is the same. While much research and practical effort has been applied to reuse-based development, the empirical evidence that it is a cost-effective methodology is not, as yet, convincing.

A Learning Software Organization (LSO) is an organization that learns within the domain of software development, evolution and application. In the context of LSO, knowledge management and learning approaches are complementary views on knowledge handling processes. Learning is based on knowledge and experiences related to the different processes, products, tools, techniques and methods applied to the software development process. The overall objective of an LSO is to improve software processes and products according to the strategic goals of the organization.

Knowledge is considered a crucial resource of each organization and, therefore, needs to be managed carefully. The knowledge management literature usually deals with the mechanisms of knowledge handling, while learning approaches address the process how to gain knowledge. This can be done on an individual, group, or organizational level. Learning extends knowledge and enables decision making for individuals as well as for groups and entire organizations. LSO can only be understood from the interplay between its organizational, content, technology, and methodology dimension.

In this chapter, KM as a prerequisite for organizational learning is described. The basic terminology and core principles of an LSO are characterized in the same way as its enabling techniques: experimentation, modeling, measurement, reuse and collaborative learning.

Most of legacy systems were designed in traditional way with inflexible architecture. Due to improper representations or designs, they are very difficult to understand and maintain. As a result, maintaining these legacy systems is very costly. The objective of software re-engineering is to re-structure or re-write legacy systems into new systems with better maintainability, flexibility, and scalability. Design patterns (DPs) have integrated successful standard design practices and expert experiences into a set of components that exhibit known behaviors with better structures. Re-engineering legacy systems into pattern-based systems not only decreases the cost of further software evolution but also increases their reusability. In this paper, pattern-based technologies will be surveyed. The problems of re-engineering legacy systems into pattern-based systems will then be discussed. The evaluation of the effectiveness of our re-engineering approach through real case studies will be presented.

The practice of software reengineering has not been fully exploited industrially in significant ways. In this paper, we will report our experience with the architecture based reengineering on a Network Planning System (NPS). Our approach for effective reengineering is focusing on architecture recovery and component reuse. The new architecture is built based on the recovered architecture, which is augmented with new architectural requirements, correcting old design flaws, and incorporating design patterns. The presented approach is evaluated with the reengineering of the NPS where performance, productivity, code quality and extensibility are compared with the conventional approach. The experiments show that our strategies are very successful.

A compilation of general information available on existing international standards and studies on this issue is developed in this chapter.We performed a critical evaluation of technologies for wastewater treatment currently recommended for reuse in agricultural irrigation. The productive use of such treated water is an important alternative for agricultural irrigation because of its high content of nutrients and organic matter, which could facilitate an increase in crops and soil improvement.

The most widely recommended treatment technology is the stabilization lagoons, but it is also recognized that there are other available technologies and the need to consider a final stage of disinfection to achieve compliance of the international guidelines that regulate the wastewater quality for reuse. Ozonation of wastewater treatment is an attractive method due to its oxidative and bactericidal power, so its combination with other treatment processes such as coagulation– flocculation allows a considerable reduction of physicochemical and microbiological pollution of municipal wastewater, enabling its reuse in agricultural irrigation.

Sludge accumulates as a residue in all wastewater treatments. Sludge contains the solids and colloids separated from wastewater, as well as substances from biological and chemical operation units. Sludge contains all of the impurities gathered from water or wastewater treatment processes, and thus has a variable nature and must be treated accordingly. This chapter summarizes all aspects of sludge management in practice.

The ultimate solution to the high volume of excess foundry sands generated in metal casting facilities is to beneficially reuse them. A variety of possible reuse programs suit the utilization of foundry sands. These programs mainly relate to civil and agricultural applications, e.g., highway embankment, concrete, backfills, topsoil, and growing amendments. Foundry sand exhibits qualified physical, mechanical, or chemical properties for these end-use products and is acknowledged as a marketable resource. Most often, foundry sand is characterized to match a target material, which has been adopted as a standardized component in an end-use product, e.g. fine aggregate in concrete. If the match gives favorable outcomes, the foundary sand is introduced fully or partially replacing the target material to form a technically competitive end-use product, e.g. foundry sand used in concrete. In addition to its engineering qualifications, foundry sand's environmental safety is also ensured to comply with regulations. The chemical characterization of foundry sand needs to be accomplished to demonstrate that it will not pose a thread to environments and human health during reuse programs. This chapter is organized to present the system (foundry) sand operation, foundry sand generation and management, chemical characterization of foundry sand, reuse applications of foundry sand.