Green doi: 10.3390/green1010003

Authors: Bonface O. Manono

Despite producing much of the world’s food, small-scale farms face severe resource shortages, climate risks, and infrastructure gaps. While digital advances ranging from IoT sensing to AI-driven analytics offer pathways to improve productivity, adoption remains uneven. This integrative review synthesizes evidence on smart-farming technologies specifically for smallholders, identifying primary barriers, enabling conditions, and design principles for successful deployment. Unlike broader smart-farming reviews, the article explicitly evaluates small-farm suitability, evidence quality, and implementation architecture rather than technological capability alone. The synthesis shows that adoption is consistently constrained by clustered barriers, notably high capital and maintenance costs, limited technical capacity, and unreliable electricity or internet access. It also finds that evidence is strongest for modular, offline-capable monitoring and alerting tools, while evidence for durable gains from highly integrated full-platform systems remains thinner and more pilot-dependent. To advance equitable innovation, the review proposes a fit-for-context deployment logic centered on co-design, local repair and advisory capacity, and financing and policy support aligned with small-farm realities. Overall, smart farming can strengthen productivity, resilience, and environmental performance on small farms, but only when technologies are embedded in inclusive service models and implementation systems.

Green doi: 10.3390/green1010002

Authors: Soroush Khakpour Francesco Nocera Alberta Latteri Claudio Tosto Lorena Saitta

In this study, the effect of temperature on thermal-assisted glass delamination was investigated using two treatment conditions differing in the set temperature of the process (100 °C vs. 140 °C). Thermogravimetric Analysis (TGA) confirmed that ethylene-vinyl acetate (EVA) remains thermally stable up to about 280 °C, with degradation onset near 300 °C, ensuring that both treatments operate below decomposition. Differential Scanning Calorimetry (DSC) analysis identified an endothermic transition attributable to the melting of crystalline regions in EVA within the thermal range of 35–65 °C, indicating enhanced polymer chain mobility at elevated temperatures. This endothermic transition corresponds to the melting of polyethylene crystallites within the EVA copolymer and should not be interpreted as a glass transition, since the Tg of EVA is typically located at approximately −30 to −35 °C. Fourier Transform Infrared (FTIR) analysis verified preservation of ester functional groups, confirming the absence of chemical degradation. The morphological analysis performed via Scanning Electron Microscopy (SEM) revealed a clear temperature-dependent morphology of EVA after thermal-assisted delamination. At 140 °C, enhanced polymer softening and viscous flow led to smoother surfaces and more uniform interfacial separation, whereas at 100 °C, limited mobility resulted in heterogeneous, fragmented residues and predominantly cohesive failure. These results highlight that optimizing temperature is key to balancing effective delamination with residue minimization, supporting more sustainable PV recycling.

Green doi: 10.3390/green1010001

Authors: Janusz A. Kozinski

It is with great pleasure that I introduce Green (ISSN 3042-9242) [...]