The issue of food security has affected the well-being of the people for centuries. Academic and industry experts have been constantly developing alternate and better ways to address this issue. One of such innovations is the concept of vertical and zero acreage farming for providing food security and ensuring environmental sustainability. However, this concept has been in its nascent stage, and its development has been sporadic for many years. This paper uses a comprehensive framework to conduct a feasibility analysis of initiating vertical farming on university campuses, which could set an example for using this technique on a large scale. A case study was conducted on a set of 24 canteens across a university in Wuhan, China for accessing the return on investment and food sufficiency using this technique. By using the central limit theorem, a model was developed after investing in 24 canteens in the university, and various scenarios were analyzed. The breakeven on implementing these farms was about 10 to 20 years, with annual profits reaching $92,000 (592,000 RMB).
In the context of ecological building and green building popularity, building sustainability assessment is becoming more and more important. In this paper, a comprehensive evaluation platform by coupled LCA method and energy method was designed, verified, and analyzed to assess the sustainability of the building system. The main results illustrated that the construction stage is the most critical stage in terms of emergy angle. From a sustainability perspective, the Emergy Sustainability Indicator was at a moderate level (1.0141), which can be considered to increase the proportion of renewable energy and reduce the proportion of non-renewable resources to improve the sustainability degree. Of the three scenarios designed, the second scenario has the best sustainability in the building system. The unit emergy value of the whole building was also shown to demonstrate the unit emergy of an individual. In order to verify the accuracy of the data, a sensitivity analysis was conducted. Finally, two types of positive measures are proposed to ameliorate the environmental sustainability in the building system, containing the increasing proportion of renewable energy and using recycled building materials.
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