A lot of mine waste rock and tailings arise from all mining processes and have to be stored in an appropriate way. Tailings are deposited in impoundments retained by tailings dams. The objective of tailings dams is to retain the slurry from the mining process and in that way prevent spill into the surroundings that might be harmful for the environment. Tailings dams are often constructed as staged embankments so that construction costs and demand of materials are spread more evenly over the period of deposition.The objective of this thesis has been to compile information about and evaluate events at Swedish tailings dams and also to develop a collective database for all Swedish mining companies for all tailings dams and all events that occur at tailings dams.Information about 60 events at Swedish tailings dams has been gathered and evaluated. The evaluation has been performed by comparison between and analysis of individual parameters and also by use of a multivariate statistical method called PLS.

Interest in alternative energies is high in Sweden today, particularly in the agricultural sector. According to the Swedish lantbruksbarometern (2009), almost all respondents consider the use of some form of alternative energy from the farm. While interest in alternative energies is large, attention to the alternative energy straw has fallen and is almost nowhere mentioned in the literature today. Three years ago, in the Lantbruksbarometern nearly 44% of the farmers would be willing to invest in straw as heating system on the farm. How do the farmers decide to invest in alternative energies? With this information a problem is presented for this paper.

In Stockholm, Johanneshov the Slaughterhouse area (Slakthusområdet) can be found. A number of companies have gathered there providing the Stockholmers with meat products. This area has a great need for cooling to supply large cold storages. To facilitate this, a central cooling system has been built, supplying the area with effective and safe cooling.The aim of this master thesis study is to give hints to energy efficient and reliable changes that can be put in place at a low marginal cost depending on the future activities in the area. The suggested changes will be presented to the company Bravida (managing the system), which also desires a deeper understanding of the energy flows through the central cooling system.Firstly visiting the site with proper guidance, we have then tried to understand the function of the system including which machines and media that are used.

ADORABLE CHILD OF ITS TIMEThis text will describe a inovative project about material, traditions and someideas about furniture for work in an home inviroment. The content is partlyabout exploring ancient marine- and textile techniques to find somethinguseful for furniture of the twenty first century. It is also about the designprocess of creating a sustainable piece of furniture that questions the paradigmathicsabout usage and the context about manufacturing furniture.The text will briefly describe the design process and then reason about theresult in a deeper sense. Questions that has been considered from the verybeginning of the project as well as those one stumbled across during theevolution of the work will be objectives for the discussion. The result will bein focus as a foundation for the discussion and also the values and issuesabout that.

The purpose of this study is to increase the understanding of activities, flows and waste in a company's production process. By performing a value stream analysis, non-value adding activities are identified in a production process and then the suggested improvements that can reduce lead times will be stated. The value-stream mapping identifies the flow of information and the flow of material in a production process and this provides the basis for the identification of non-value adding activities.We conducted the study at Lammhults Möbel AB in Lammhult Sweden, where the production flow of Spira-21 has been investigated. This to identify any non-value adding activities that affect the flow negative and consumes time and money in a non-value adding way.A reasonable approach for the project was taken by studying the methodologies and theories. We conducted interviews and site surveys at Lammhults Möbel AB where the flow of information and material in the production process were investigated.

Uppsala University is involved in a large international collaborationto build the Laser heater system for the European Xray Free-electronlaser in Hamburg, Germany. In this thesis I describe a laser incouplingdevice into the vacuum chamber of this laser heater all the way fromthe specifications to a completed design.The laser heater is a very important part of the XFEL and thepart described here is a part of the vacuum system needed to couplean external laser into the electron vacuum system and align it withthe electron bunches in order to heat them. The task was started by studying the literature about the basic theory andthe design of vacuum systems. After this study and collection of ideaswith colleagues I started to prepare different concepts to solve thetask. The ideas can be put into two categories, in one case the couplingmirror is located inside the vacuum chamber and in the second caseoutside.

 The purpose with this thesis was to develop a designguideline which will simplify the development of new products that will be laser welded. The need for this thesis has come forward from the quality problems that Volvo Construction Equipment, Components Division is having with their laser welding manufacturing unit. The reason for the problems emerges from the bad communication between the development unit and the manufacturing unit within the company when the products produced today was developed. This resulted in products that were hard to and in some cases almost impossible to weld. To avoid these problems from occurring again it was needed to gather the experiences within this area and compile it and present in a brief a pedagogical manner. The information for the groundwork of our results has been gathered by interviews of several key persons in Volvo Construction Equipment, Components Division.

The debate on the future of Nuclear power in Sweden has increased with the discussion on global warming. The uncertainty of fossil fuel- and carbonprices the latest years has aroused considerable interest in Nuclear from power companies, industry and politicians. Nuclear power plants have negligible CO2 emissions and are not directly affected by increased price of emission rights and fossil fuels. The future power production needs to reduce its emissions of greenhouse gases to become sustainable. The purpose of this study is to examine the value for power producers to have the option to invest in Nuclear power and how a Nuclear power venture would affect future electricity prices. The study uses two methods, a traditional cash flow model and real option analysis, to estimate the value of Nuclear power.

The purpose of this paper is to understand the climate of the street and how it can be modified to better meet the needs of the street and the user groups. At the same time the conditions of the street and its surroundings also has to be taken into account. To accomplish this it is necessary to have a broad knowledge of the climate conditions in the city. Therefore an overview of the climate elements and how these are modified in the built-up areas are given. The part of the paper which deals with the city climate has a global approach to be able to give an as complete picture as possible.

Companies become more and more aware of the added values of the packaging. A well chosen and developed packaging can reduce the costs for the companies through reduced costs for transports, reduced quantity of waste and discards and increased goodwill for example. The companies? costs for salaries can also be reduced due to the increased packaging handling efficiency and the reduced costs for sick leave, reduced work capacity and rehabilitation etc. that can arise when handling poorly developed products and packaging.

This masters thesis concerns a modeling project performed at Volvo Technology in Gothenburg, Sweden. The main purpose of the project has been to develop a physical model of the climate in construction vehicles that later on can be used in the development of an electronic climate controller. The focus of the work has been on one type of wheel loader and one type of excavator. The temperature inside the compartment has been set equal to the notion climate. With physical theories about air flow and heat transfer in respect, relations between the components in the climate unit and the compartment has been calculated.

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 voluntary none-financial sustainability report has become a trend within accounting. The environmental issues used to be driven by activists only, but lately it has moved in to the general agenda in many companies. Investors are starting to put more attention to the sustainability reporting as it is considered to add value to the company. There are several standard guidelines to be used when producing a sustainability report, one example is the GRI´s Guidelines that takes the following three dimensions in consideration: economy, environment and social. This Guideline is from an international perspective considered to be of good accounting practice (Ljungdahl 2008).

As for today, a large quantity of protein feeds is imported from other countries to be used in the Swedish dairy production. The main import is soya from Brazil. The soya-production in Brazil results in negative consequences for the natural environment in the area, and the long transport of the feeds requires a lot of energy. The organic dairy production in Sweden is, with the highest probability going to be forced to use 100 % organic feed to the cows in the year 2005, due to new EU-rules. These are some of the causes why there are reasons to look closer at the possibilities to feed Swedish cows with only Swedish feeds. In this study, I have looked at the KRAV-rules for organic feeding, where the goal is feeding with only KRAV-approved feeds.

This thesis consider alternatives for heating and cooling planned office buildings at Arlanda airport. The thesis is divided into three parts where the third part is a shorter synthesis of the two first. In the first part the energy demands of the buildings are modelled in a computer program. Two different building models are created, one more conventional and one with good energy properties. The results shows that with proper construction and ventilation systems etc.