Abstract:Many innovative environmental technologies never reach the market because they are new and cannot demonstrate a successful track record of previous applications. This fact is a serious obstacle on their way to the market. Lack of credible data on the performance of a technology causes mistrust of investors in innovations, especially from public sector, who seek effective solutions however without compromising the technical and financial risks associated with their implementation. Environmental technology verification (ETV) offers a credible, robust and transparent process that results in a third party confirmation of the claims made by the providers about the performance of the novel environmental technologies.
A city based on the sustainable development priorities, friendly to its residents, combines human activity, technology challenges, and environmental requirements. The implementation of the idea of smart city should be discussed with regard to specific areas of activity. In order to identify the way of perceiving the activity conducted under this concept, a survey was carried out among employees of the City Office in Zabrze. The cognitive, competence and informational scope was verified. It was found that the overwhelming majority of officials (79%) are convinced that smart city principles are being implemented. The survey participants also provided specific examples of smart-city initiatives undertaken in the city, and a significant part of the respondents (64%) assigned their professional tasks to them. Moreover, three out of four surveyed officials in Zabrze declared that they know the tools supporting the smart urban development. The results presented in the article constitute pilot studies aimed at understanding the extent to which the Smart City idea is known by local government administration employees. In addition, these results serve as a tool for the authorities of Zabrze to disseminate knowledge about smart city among employees of the city hall.
The article describes the effects of the improvement of the production process which one of the industrial enterprises obtained by implementing the method of Autonomous Maintenance (AM), which is one of the pillars of the concept of Total Productive Maintenance (TPM). AM method was presented as an aid to the formation of intelligent, self-improving procesess of the quality management system (QMS). The main part of this article is to present results of studies that have been conducted in one of the large industrial enterprises in Poland, manufacturing for the automotive industry. The aim of the study was to evaluate the effectiveness of the implementation of the AM method as a tool for selfimprovement of industrial processes in the following company. The study was conducted in 2015. The gathering and comparison of data from the period of two years, ie. the year before and the year after the implementation of AM, helped to determine the effectiveness of AM in building intelligent quality management system.
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