Research on value pathways for organic wastes has been steadily increasing in recent decades. There have been few considerably broad overview studies of such materials and their valuation potential in the bio-based economy in part because of the vast multitude of materials and processes that can be used to produce energy carriers, chemicals, and materials of value. This article explores how automated data analysis approaches can help in analyzing large bodies of text to distill and present potential value pathways for secondary (waste) bio-based materials. The study employed multiple methods (literature collection, topic modelling, and co-occurrence analysis) on a collection of abstracts from 53,292 academic articles covering technologies, applications, and products (TAPs) for bio-based wastes. The results of both the topic modelling and co-occurrence analysis are presented as online interactive web pages. The topic modelling presented an overview of research clusters related to secondary organic resources, processes, and disciplines. The co-occurrence analysis helped to understand which TAPs are researched in relation to a broad spectrum of organic wastes. Co-occurrences were evaluated using the Normalized Pointwise Mutual Information measure to locate terms which co-occur more frequently than would be expected by chance. Through the use of detailed lists of organic wastes and TAPs, the co-occurrence method mapped out 7118 unique intersections between 473 specific wastes and 228 TAPs. This technique enables us to find seemingly non-obvious valorization pathways such as the re-use of oyster shells as catalysts for bio-diesel production and bioplastic production from brewery waste. While a proof-of-concept, this work points the way for using Big Data to suggest novel pathways for implementing the Circular Economy.@en

Connections between load-bearing glass components play a major role in terms of the structural integrity and aesthetics of glass applications. Recently, a new type of adhesive connection, known as embedded laminated glass connections, has been developed where a metallic insert is embedded within a laminated glass unit by means of transparent polymeric foil interlayers and assembled through an autoclave lamination process. In this study, a novel variant of this connection, consisting of a thin steel insert encapsulated by a transparent cold-poured resin, is proposed and examined. In particular, the axial tensile mechanical response of this connection is assessed via numerical (FE) analyses and destructive pull-out tests performed on physical prototypes at different displacement rates in order to assess the effect of the strain rate-dependent behaviour of the resin interlayer. It was found that the pull-out stiffness, the maximum load-bearing capacity and the failure mode of the connection are significantly affected by the imposed displacement rate. The numerical (FE) analysis of the pull-out tests, performed in Abaqus, showed that the complex state of stress in the vicinity of the connection is the result of two load-transfer mechanisms and that the relative contribution of these mechanisms depends on the insert geometry and the relative stiffnesses of the constituent materials. Overall, it is concluded that the prototypes are promising in terms of manufacturability, aesthetics and structural performance and thus the novel variant connection considered in this study offers a promising alternative to existing load-bearing connections for laminated glass structures, but further investigations are required to ascertain its suitability for real-world applications.@en