Buildings' sustainability is one of the crucial parts for achieving urban sustainability. Applied to buildings, life-cycle assessment encompasses the analysis and assessment of the environmental effects of building materials, components and assemblies throughout the entire life of the building construction, use and demolition. Estimate of carbon emissions is essential and crucial for an accurate and reasonable life-cycle assessment. Addressing the need for more research into integrating analysis of real-time and automatic recording of key indicators for a more accurate calculation and comparison, this paper aims to design a real-time recording model of these crucial indicators concerning the calculation and estimation of energy use and carbon emissions of buildings based on a Radio Frequency Identification (RFID)-based system. The architecture of the RFID-based carbon emission recording/tracking system, which contains four functional layers including data record layer, data collection/update layer, data aggregation layer and data sharing/backup layer, is presented. Each of these layers is formed by RFID or network devices and sub-systems that operate at a specific level. In the end, a proof-of-concept system is developed to illustrate the implementation of the proposed architecture and demonstrate the feasibility of the design. This study would provide the technical solution for real-time recording system of building carbon emissions and thus is of great significance and importance to improve urban sustainability.

With the continuous development of Internet, online pharmaceutical channels in many countries have seen rapid expansion. As a result, pharmaceutical supply chain participants can adopt dual channels, namely, both online channels and offline channels. As online channels compete with traditional offline channels, it is of great relevance to study the potential conflicts and coordination between them, which is the focus of this paper. Specifically, this article develops a susceptible-infected-susceptible epidemic model of the dual channels for a pharmaceutical supply chain. Our main findings are that in a competitive situation, there is a positive stable equilibrium. Furthermore, increasing the rate of influence of offline transmission, online transmission, and cross transmission will improve sales. Moreover, improving the transmission influence rate will turn more potential customers into purchasers, increase channel sales, and achieve dual channel coordination. We then conduct numerical analysis to illustrate and complement the findings from the model. Finally, we provide managerial insights for implementing successful dual-channel pharmaceutical supply chains.

Medical waste has a high environmental risk, economic development and medical policies can affect medical waste generation. Per capita gross domestic product (GDP) is an important indicator to measure the macroeconomic development status, and the tiered medical policy plays an important role in the process of China’s medical reform. The study considered the Environmental Kuznets Curve (EKC) of medical waste generation (MWG) in eight cities in China from 2013 to 2019, using economic indicator (GDP per capita) and policy indicator (tiered medical policy) to reveal the impact of economic development and medical policy on MWG. Furthermore, residents, especially the elderly, are the main consumers of medical resources, and medical institutions are the main places where medical waste is generated. Education level can affect waste management practices. Therefore, the research introduced population size, number of medical institutions, aging degree and education level as control variables. The results confirmed the validity of the N-shaped EKC curve between medical waste and GDP per capita. The amount of medical waste would continue to increase with economic growth, but the growth rate was not fixed. Implementing the tiered medical policy had shown a trend towards reducing medical waste. Population size and aging degree positively affected the generation of medical waste. The number of medical institutions negatively affected the generation of medical waste. The effect of education level on MWG could be ignored. Based on the empirical analysis results, this research put forward relevant policy suggestions in the light of medical waste management practice in China.

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