Climate and environmental issues is now high on the agenda. We live in a generation that must try to solve some major Environmental problems. Buildings and habitations account for approximately 40 % of Sweden's total energy today. To reduce this figure, as needed, more research in the field of energy efficiency is required.This thesis concerns the heating of buildings. The load on district heating is heavy during certain times of the day.

District heating covers most of the residential areas and industries in the twoneighbouring Swedish municipalities Nyköping and Oxelösund. In Nyköping,Vattenfall AB Värme produces heat in a bio-fuelled CHP plant. In Oxelösund,waste heat and use of waste gases from the steel production at SSABOxelösund is the basis in the district heating system.This report examines the environmental consequences of a connection betweenthe two district heating systems. A broad system approach is used and the focusis on environmental effects in the system.A system analysis has been performed on the result of simulations of differentheat and electricity production alternatives. The alternatives simulated wereone where Vattenfall Nyköping covers the base load in the joint district heatingsystem and two where the power plant at SSAB Oxelösund supplies the heatbase load.The conclusion in this report is that the consequences of connecting the twodistrict heating systems can be both positive and negative, depending onsystem boundaries and on the environmental focus.

In a complex and turbulent world, several companies begin to realize the value of information as a strategic resource and try to find strategies to manage this. This master thesis aims to describe the information management at Axis Communications AB. Axis is a fast growing company and due to this they have not been able to manage the flow of information whitin the company. To find out how the information was managed at this time we made a survey and employee interviews at three Axis business units. By analyzing the surveys and interviews we found several problems.

The energy sector of modern time is currently faced with several challenges. These are both production oriented and environmental oriented in nature. The energy of the future is intended to support an increasing demand while at the same time reduce its environmental affection. This stresses a development towards production methods of renewable energy. Among the existing methods, biogas is presented as an attractive alternative.

The purpose of the essay was to discover how homeless persons want to live. Does it matter what it looks like? The method used was a qualitative study including literature and 10 interviews with ten homeless persons, of which seven lived outdoors and three in temporarily residences. The central questions were the following:How do homeless people want to live?In what sort of houses do they want to live and where?How do they look upon their situation and their future?What obstacles can occur if they for example got an apartment to live in?Are there any proposals to solve the problems?Most of them had been living outdoors for five to ten years, perhaps more, and they were worried and sad about their future.

Syftet med studien var att pröva vilka psykologiska mekanismer som påverkar sambandet mellan attityder och beteendeintentioner inför miljöpåverkan hos individer i konsumtionssamhället. Hypotesen var att det finns ett miljömedvetande hos människan, men att det är en skillnad mellan attityd och beteendeintention. Även emotioner inför miljöpåverkan hos deltagarna undersöktes, för att fördjupa studien. Undersökningen har gjorts kvantitativt via en webbaserad enkät, genom utskick via Facebook till vuxna individer i Sverige mellan 18-65 år (N=49). Svarsprocenten var 46 procent. Huvudresultatet visar att det finns en oro hos individer inför miljön och framtiden och 94 procent av deltagarna anser att miljöfrågor är viktiga.

This thesis considers the problems associated with searches in insufficiently geographically tagged data. The thesis was carried out at Booli Search Technologies AB, a company developing a search engine for the Swedish real estate market.The aim of the thesis is to identify some areas of possible improvements of the company?s existing technical platform, perform a benchmarking among similar services, suggest possible solutions and lastly, build a prototype from one of the suggested solutions.The thesis starts out with defining the problems that the search engine faces: some areas are not possible to perform searches on, the users are not presented with the full search result that they expect, some results are placed incorrectly on the map associated with the search results and results are also not described with enough geographical information. These problems are due to the fact that the data retrieved at the indexing stage in the company?s information retrieval process are insufficient and incomplete.As a result of a benchmarking process and after discussing the results, severalinteresting solutions were identified.

The concept of sustainable development is a challenge that demands cooperation from all levels of society for it to be successful. The focus for this thesis is how politicians within the local councils understand the concept of sustainable development and how they implement it in political decision-making.The basis for the study is a questionnaire that was distributed to 303 local politicians in three municipalities of varying size in Southern Sweden. The study concentrates on departments within the local councils that are directly connected to the Swedish environmental law and the Swedish planning and construction law. One of the primary goals with the aforementioned laws is the achievement of sustainable development within one generation.The outcome of the study was that over half of the local politicians could correctly define sustainable development according to the World Commission on Environment and Development?s (WCED) definition.

This bachelor's thesis is a study of operative approach and attitude to espaliered fruit trees in home gardens. Through qualitative interviews the informants give their view of problems which might arise, and to some extent how the problems can be solved. In addition, which benefit can be obtained from growing these different types of trained trees and for whom they might be suitable. Thematic analyses were used to find themes and patterns for deeper understanding. The conclusion was that these kinds of trees would be beneficial to use to a greater extent than is done today you can use more species and varieties, fit more trees in a small garden, and enhance the trees esthetical appearance.

Det talas om översvämningar - hur processen med att ta fram översiktsplaner, samt dess styrmedel skall förändras så att den fysiska miljön kan möta klimatförändringarna, är ett examensarbete som redogör för hur anpassande och förebyggande klimatarbete lättare skall implementeras i fysisk planering. Fyra kommuner och två länsstyrelser har studerats genom litteratur och kvalitativa intervjuer med fysisk planerare. Två kommuner har kartlagt översvämningsriskerna, varav en har arbetat med att säkra staden..

Purpose: In order to curb the prevalence of undeclared work and to improve competi-tion within the building and construction business, reversed charge audit will from July 1, 2007 onwards be applied within the building sector. The new rules entail a consider-able amount of delimiting problems as regards both businesses and services.The aim of this essay is to study the rules as well as direct the light upon various consequen-tial delimiting problems. Furthermore, we will investigate what the effects are on the busi-nesses, as well as their view regarding this. Apart from this, we will also investigate who will benefit and who will be disfavourably affected, respectively, by the new lawMethod: The investigation has been conducted with a combination of qualitative and quantitative methods. Firstly, an opinion poll was carried out, directed towards Swedish construction companies, and this was then deepened using three interviews.Result & Conclusions: The essay demonstrates that the new rules have entailed more work to a varying degree for the companies.

The population growth and urbanisation in low-income countries bring issues of poor living standards and miserable sanitation conditions onto the agenda. If well-functioning waste management systems were developed, this could master some of the problems. The already existing local informal waste handling system that is common in many low-income countries, needs to be developed with proper sorting and composting solutions to decrease the environmental burden and improve the overall situation in the dense cities. This master?s thesis project is performed with the intention of developing functional decentralised waste management units in the city of Pune, India.

The aim of this essay is to examine how parents to children with large undiagnosed behaviour problems experience the parent role and the support they can obtain in their role as parents.To get a deeper description of the parent?s situation a qualitative method is used for the study. The interview carried out through a personal meeting and a question schedule with opened questions where used.The answers of the interview show that parents experience lot of problems. The children don?t get the support in school that the parent think they need because the child don?t have diagnose.

As a small and land scarce country, effective waste management is ofoutmost importance in Singapore. In this study the production of biogasthrough anaerobic digestion from the organic fraction of municipal solidwaste (OFMSW) was compared to incineration of the waste. At the momentalmost all of the OFMSW in Singapore is incinerated. Three differentscenarios were compared to the reference scenario (incineration): one with alarge scale biogas plant that can treat half of all OFMSW in Singapore, onewith a medium scale biogas plant about 15 times smaller than the large oneand one with a small scale biogas plant that can treat waste from e.g. ashopping center or a food center.By using life cycle assessment (LCA) the different scenarios were comparedin terms of global warming potential (GWP), acidification, eutrophication,energy use and land use.

Background:When the patient is critically ill the family is in a vulnerable position. The nurse's role is to support and help the family to find meaning in the difficult situation and to provide realistic hope. Balancing between the patient's and the family's needs is difficult. Knowledge about how nurses experience difficulties in the interaction with family is required in order to grant good care too critically ill patients and their family-members.Aim:To describe nurses' perceived difficulties in the interaction with family-members of critically ill patients.Method:The study is a qualitative literature-based study based on qualitative research. Results: The analysis resulted in four main themes; difficult disunion, environmental constraints, interpersonal difficulties and communicative difficulties.