There is a growing interest for ethical consumption, in general as well as in the clothing industry. The consumption of ethical clothes is a complex phenomenon though, where aspects such as quality, style, function, price, time assets, accessibility and ethical attitudes affect the decision making. Researches that have been executed show the diversities in development between different countries. There are fairly strong indications that the ethical clothing market is more advanced in the United Kingdom than in Sweden and therefore these two countries are objects of this research. The aim with this thesis is to describe and explain what have affected the development of the ethical clothing market in the United Kingdom compared to Sweden. For that reason a qualitative approach has mainly been used, where deep interviews with people within the ethical clothing industry have contributed to most of the empirical part. As a complement secondary data such as statistics of the two countries have been used in order to investigate our area. One useful tool, among others, to investigate the macro environment is the SLEPT model.

The interest for children´s clothing has increased in society. More and more children are born and parents are older when they have children. Education has become a natural feature in most people´s life, just as both parents often work today. The households have therefore better economy and thus greater consumption opportunities. Parents are, in greater extent, looking for personal and different clothing with focus on quality and, to some extent, exclusivity rather than just a cheap and functional garment.

This thesis examines the environmental benefits resulting from the choice of environmental certification scheme, with focus on energy. This was carried out by studying the measures that were implemented as a result of the certification of Sweco's three largest office buildings in Stockholm, Gothenburg and Malmö. The office property in Stockholm has been certified with the Swedish Environmental Building, Gothenburg with the British BREEAM and Malmö with the U.S system LEED.The results from the study indicate that an environmental certification can reduce the energy consumption by up to 59 percent and the water consumption by 20 to 66 percent. However; the interviews, literature study and simulations in MATLAB indicate that the size and scope of these environmental benefits depend on several identified factors: the type of building and its conditions, system selection, grade level, the choice of indicators, the ambition of those involved and when in time the certification process begins. The comparison between Environmental Building, LEED and BREEAM showed that Environmental Building for the office property in Stockholm gave the largest environmental benefit in terms of reduced energy consumption thanks to several large measures.

The need of raw material does of course fluctuate but the long term view is an increasing demand due to the growing consumption of sawn timber products, pulp, paper and lately also biomass. This has led to a keener competition for wood. At the same time there is an ongoing structural change of a significant part in the Swedish wood supply market, the private forest owners. In 1992, 22 % of Sweden´s 335 000 private forest owner lived apart from their forest. In 2007 this figure had risen to 36 %.

This essay is a study of the various attitudes and behavioral habits for music consumption and discovery of new music amongst young people in Sweden from a receivers perspective. The aim of the study is to review and map out the current trends, habits and cultural views on music consumption. An online survey was posted and spread on Facebook with 195 respondents as a result. The analyzed result and conclusions of the survey was then to be of use for understanding how to market and spread new music more efficiently. The study showed that there are three dominating sources of music for youth in Sweden.

Svensk Växtkraft is the owner of the biogas plant in Västerås. The company is planning to increase their treatment capacity at their biogas plant. In connection to this work it is also possible to make some energy saving changes to the biogas plant. The objective of this study was therefore to make an electricity and heat survey of the biogas plant, a detailed study of the heat consumption in the sanitation step and also a comparison of energy consumption with the present sanitation method and an alternative strategy where the waste is treated in 55 °C during 10 hours (the current method is heating to 70 °C during 1 hour). The energy survey was conducted in close collaboration with staff at the biogas plant. The current during normal operation was measured, power was calculated and multiplied by the time of usage to obtain the energy consumed.

A future expansion of wind power in the Nordic power system makes the balancing for the transmission system operator Svenska Kraftnät (SvK) more complicated. Up to the hour of delivery the balance responsible parties? (BRP) makes prognoses and plans, for consumption and production, to help maintain the balance in the electrical grid. How well this is accomplished is affected by the setup of the market design. Therefore SvK has proposed the following possible changes in market design: Increase the imbalance costsIntensify the regulation of imbalancesIncrease the temporal resolution on the different marketsPresent the prices for balancing power in real-timeModify the balancing market to simplify auction of consumption bidsA mapping over the BRPs? processes within planning and trading on the day-ahead, intra-day, and the balancing market has been performed in this thesis.

SammanfattningKonsumtion och ekonomi är områden som på olika sätt påverkar människors liv. Forskning visar att värderingar, identiteter och idéer grundas på konsumtion. Syftet med denna studie var att undersöka elevernas attityder, kunskaper och beteenden inom konsumtion och ekonomi som är ett kunskapsområde inom ämnet hem- och konsumentkunskap. Författaren var även intresserad av att undersöka om det fanns skillnader mellan två skolor bland elever i årskurs nio som skiljer sig åt vad gäller upptagningsområde och skolans geografiska läge. 153 enkäter delades ut och resultatet analyserades med dataprogrammet IBM Statistics Version 20 (SPSS 2010).

Energy efficiency has become a very topical issue that has been discussed throughout the European Union for preventing negative environmental impacts that have been associated with the consumption of energy. In the residential sector have mainly municipalities set strict requirements for the reduction of energy consumption while the renewable energy has been asked. Different concepts of low-energy buildings have been developed to reduce the cost of operation and maintenance in existing buildings such as in new ones.This thesis has aimed to minimize the energy cost of a large building which has had low energy consumption features originally. Energy reviews has been initiated in order to be able for showing how the house electricity could be carried out even more efficiently.The work was initiated through a literature study to clearly increase the reliability on the energy subject. Different concepts of low-energy buildings have been treated in connection with its specifications, afterward those have been compared with the obtained results.

Simulations of simulink models using Kalman filters are often very time-consuming. This problem depends mainly on the fact that the Kalman correction has to be performed at each sample instance through the whole simulation. The goal for this thesis work is to reduce that time-consumption for the filtering part (the integration partis treated in a complementary report) of a simulation. Furthermore a Matlab routine to perform parameter tuning and finally a graphical user interface is developed.The filtering part of the simulation in this thesis is based on an Extended Kalman Filter (EKF). The time optimization of this filter considers searching for the possibility to replace the today?s existing Matlab functions that is used to perform the filtering calculations.

In this essay, we have compared a conventional house to a passive house. The housesshared the same local conditions; they have the same living area and the same layout. Thedifferences between the houses were the different construction solutions for the roof, theouter walls, the floor and the heating system. Both the houses qualify the standards fromBBR and the passive house also lives up to FEBY?s special conditions.The purpose with the essay was to examine if it really is profitable to build small hoses aspassive houses.

One of the most important components of a harvester is the crane. Most harvester cranes are only possible to pivot (or horizontally rotate) at the crane pillar. Cranab in Vindeln, Sweden, has developed a new type of harvester crane which has an extra pivot point on the outer boom. This makes it possible to reach around residual trees, easing thinning work in dense stands. The aim of the study was to analyze if the use of a pivoting outer boom (POB) crane gave an increase in thinning production and if there were any differences in time consumption between the work elements for the POB crane and a conventional crane. A Valmet 911.3 equipped with a POB crane was used in the study.

How can a vacuum cleaner motivate you to use it? From a sustainability perspective,the author asked the question of how such a solution would looklike? These where issues that the project tackled and devised solutions for. Theproject wanted to explore the physical modeling and a large part of the finalresult consisted of a full scale model. The project found that the problem ofvacuuming largely consisted of the problem of storage the product. The projectfound that the motivation for the job, therefore, could be resolved by a betterdesigned vacuum cleaner with a built-in hose, folding handles, which couldbe stored integrated within the vacuum cleaner.

The aim of this paper was to examine which discourses of women that could be found in Swedish policy documents concerning alcohol from the seventies until today. The questions asked were in which ways women?s drinking was described and how these descriptions could be analyzed and understood by critical discourse analysis and gender theory. The results indicated two main discourses, one replacing the other over time. According to the first discourse, most clearly expressed in the official report from the seventies, women were not consumers of alcohol to the same extent as men.

To be able to handle tomorrows need for limited energy consumption we need to reduce our use of energy. The building sector stands for around 40 % of all energy consumption in the society. The government has put up a goal to reduce the energy consumption in our buildings with 20 % by year 2020 and 50 % by year 2050 compared with year 1995. To be able to do reach that goal we need a more energy efficient building stock.The main part of the energy used in our buildings is used for space heating. By installing ventilation systems with heat recovery on the exhaust air it is possible to use the heat-energy in the exhaust air to warm up the incoming air.