Economic, Environmental and Moral Acceptance of Renewable Energy: A Case Study-The Agricultural Biogas Plant at Pěčín

Creating 'Local Publics': Responsibility and Involvement in Decision-Making on Technologies with Local Impacts

This paper makes a conceptual inquiry into the notion of 'publics', and forwards an understanding of this notion that allows more responsible forms of decision-making with regards to technologies that have localized impacts, such as wind parks, hydrogen stations or flood barriers. The outcome of this inquiry is that the acceptability of a decision is to be assessed by a plurality of 'publics', including that of a local community. Even though a plurality of 'publics' might create competing normative demands, its acknowledgment is necessary to withstand the monopolization of the process of technology appraisal. The paper presents four ways in which such an appropriation of publicness takes place. The creation of dedicated 'local publics', in contrast, helps to overcome these problems and allows for more responsible forms of decision-making. We describe 'local publics' as those in which stakeholders from the different publics that are related to the process of technology implementation are brought together, and in which concerns and issues from these publics are deliberated upon. The paper will present eight conditions for increasing the effectiveness of such 'local publics'.

Agricultural waste

The management of agricultural waste has become very important because the inappropriate disposal yields negative effects on the environment. The resource recovery from agricultural waste which converts waste into available resources can reduce the waste and new resource consumption. This review summarizes the 2018 researches of over three hundred scholar papers from several aspects: agricultural waste, and, waste chemical characterization, agricultural waste material, adsorption, waste energy, composting, waste biogas, agricultural waste management, and others.

A Review of Commercial Biogas Systems and Lessons for Africa

Many African countries have vast biomass resources that could serve as feedstock for methane production through the adoption of commercial biogas plants. However, due to many inhibiting factors, these resources are under-utilised. This article reviews commercial biogas systems that treat organic waste from municipalities, large livestock farms, large plantations/crop farms, food/beverage production facilities, and other industries, to identify essential lessons which African countries could use to develop/disseminate such biogas systems. The review identified the critical barriers to commercial biogas development to be high initial capital costs, weak environmental policies, poor institutional framework, poor infrastructure and a general lack of willpower to implement renewable energy policies and set challenging targets. In African countries where feed-in-tariffs, quota obligations and competitive bidding programmes have been instituted, implementation has been poor, and most state-owned utilities have been unsupportive. Using knowledge from more experienced countries such as Germany and China, some key lessons have were identified. Among the key lessons is the need to institute and enforce environmental management policies to ensure that waste from medium and large livestock farms and industries are not disposed of indiscriminately, a tool China has recently used to promote commercial biogas plants to a high degree of success.