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1. Sustainability of lettuce production: A comparison of local and centralized food production

   https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jclepro.2023.139224  

   Maynard, Reid; Burkhardt, Jesse; Quinn, Jason C (November 2023, Journal of Cleaner Production)

   Communities are considering local food production in response to the pressing need to reduce food system greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. However, local food systems can vary considerably in design and operation, including controlled environment agriculture (CEA), which refers to agricultural production that takes place within an enclosed space where environmental conditions, such as temperature, humidity, and light, are precisely controlled. Such systems require a considerable amount of energy and thus emissions; therefore, this study seeks to quantify these environmental impacts to determine how local CEA systems compare to alternative systems. For this study’s methods, we apply life cycle assessment methodology to quantify the cradle-to-storeshelf GHG emissions and water consumption of four lettuce production systems: local indoor plant factory, local greenhouse, local seasonal soil, and conventional centralized production in California with transportation. Using geographically specific inputs, the study estimates the environmental impact of the different production systems including geospatially resolved growth modeling, emissions intensity, and transportation distances. The results include the major finding that baseline CEA systems always have higher GHG emissions (2.6–7.7 kg CO2e kg−1) than centralized production (0.3–1.0 kg CO2e kg−1), though water consumption is significantly less owing to hydroponic efficiency. In contrast, local seasonal soil production generally has a lower GHG impact than centralized production, though water consumption varies by crop yield and local precipitation during growing seasons. Scenario analyses indicate CEA facilities would need to electrify all systems and utilize low-carbon electricity sources to have equivalent or lower GHG impacts than California centralized production plus transportation. We conclude that these results can inform consumers and policy makers that local seasonal production and conventional supply chains are more sustainable than local CEA production in near-term food-energy-water sustainability nexus decision making. 

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2. Production Scheduling of Supply Chains Comprised of Modular Production Units

   https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ifacol.2020.12.583  

   Allen, R. Cory; Avraamidou, Styliani; Pistikopoulos, Efstratios N. (January 2020, IFAC-PapersOnLine)

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3. Geographies of production III: Global production in/through nature

   https://doi.org/10.1177/03091325211022810  

   Werner, Marion (October 2021, Progress in Human Geography)

   This report draws upon political ecology and nature–society geography to examine the production network–nature nexus. Indebted to these approaches, a growing number of production network and value chain studies are expanding well beyond the field’s traditional remit of environmental governance. This work centers the institutional arrangements of firms, laboratories, workers, and regulations that organize and combine extensive and intensive strategies to appropriate nature’s value. ‘Nature’ is neither input nor output here; rather, it is metabolized in and through the functional coordination of these spatially distributed activities. I explore these themes in recent studies of resource extraction and frontier-making, chemical geographies of biocides, and the material-cum-geographical claims of ethical supply chains. Expanding and deepening the dialogue between conjunctural analyses of states, labor, and supply chains, on the one hand, and how socionatures condition these arrangements, on the other, is both analytically and politically necessary. I offer this, my final report, as a modest contribution to this endeavor. 

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4. Production and purification of anhydrous sodium sulfide

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   Smith, William H.; Birnbaum, Jerry; Wolden, Colin A. (July 2021, Journal of Sulfur Chemistry)

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5. Production and perception of focus in Sümi

   Teo, Amos; Baese-Berk, Melissa (August 2019, Proceedings of the 19th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences, Melbourne, Australia 2019)

   This paper investigates the homophony/polysemy between a morphological agentive marker and a contrastive focus marker in Sümi, a Tibeto-Burman language of Northeast India. Both are realized by a phrasal suffix -no that attaches to grammatical subjects, but the interpretation of the suffix varies by clause type. The present study examines whether transitive and intransitive subjects in contrastive focus receive any special prosodic marking that is recognizable to native listeners. The study has implications for understanding the development of agentive/focus marking in Sümi, as well as other languages of the Himalayas, and in New Guinea and Australia where similar homophony/polysemy between agentive and focus markers has been found. 

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