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The circular economy (CE) concept is gaining traction as a sustainable strategy for reducing waste and enhancing resource efficiency. This concept has been adopted in some countries such as Denmark, Netherlands, Scotland, Sweden, Japan, China, and Germany while it is being considered by others including England, Austria, and Finland. The CE has been employed in the manufacturing, agricultural, textile, and steel industries but its implementation varies. It is against this backdrop that this study seeks to identify CE implementation in three pioneering countries (China, Japan, and Germany). A critical review and analysis of the literature was conducted. The results revealed enabling and core policies/laws for the development of the CE concept. It also identified the implementation structure of the CE in China, Germany, and Japan. In conclusion, the findings of this study are expected to serve as a guide for developing and implementing the CE concept in various sectors of the economy.

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The construction industry is faced with many challenges, among which is waste management. Aside from the fact that wastage contributes to time and cost overrun, it also has environmental implications in the form of pollution. However, the industry has the capacity to effectively manage waste, from generation to disposal. All stages of the management process are important, but scholars and governments have provided the final step, being disposal, unabated attention in order to ensure effective management. Potential waste disposal methods, including incineration, burning, landfilling, recycling, reuse, open dumping, pyrolysis, and shredding have emerged from the literature around the globe. Despite various waste minimisation and sustainable disposal options that are available, construction material waste is still increasing in Nigeria, while disposal remains a major issue for firms and government. Therefore, this study assesses disposal methods among construction firms to determine whether there is a relationship between their practices towards waste disposal. The research followed a concurrent triangulation design in a cross sectional survey, while data were collected via a convergent parallel mixed methods. The quantitative phase employed a structured questionnaire to collect data from 243 building construction firms, while the qualitative phase involved semi-structured interviews with 65 professionals from 10 on-going construction projects in Lagos, Nigeria. The research revealed that landfilling is the most common method of waste disposal, which is closely followed by reuse as backfill and recycling. In addition, the study revealed no association between company’s ownership statuses, age, project specialisation, and disposal methods, except company’s size. In conclusion, the study establishes the need for regulatory policies, such as site waste management plan (SWMP), pay as you throw (PAYT), and landfill ban, which would minimise material waste and divert them from landfills. Recycling and reuse are recommended as sustainable approaches for waste disposal.

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Fingerprint has remained a very vital index for human recognition. In the field of security, series of Automatic Fingerprint Identification Systems (AFIS) have been developed. One of the indices for evaluating the contributions of these systems to the enforcement of security is the degree with which they appropriately verify or identify input fingerprints. This degree is generally determined by the quality of the fingerprint images and the efficiency of the algorithm. In this paper, some of the sub-models of an existing mathematical algorithm for the fingerprint image enhancement were modified to obtain new and improved versions. The new versions consist of different mathematical models for fingerprint image segmentation, normalization, ridge orientation estimation, ridge frequency estimation, Gabor filtering, binarization and thinning. The implementation was carried out in an environment characterized by Window Vista Home Basic operating system as platform and Matrix Laboratory (MatLab) as frontend engine. Synthetic images as well as real fingerprints obtained from the FVC2004 fingerprint database DB3 set A were used to test the adequacy of the modified sub-models and the resulting algorithm. The results show that the modified sub-models perform well with significant improvement over the original versions. The results also show the necessity of each level of the enhancement.