Search Results (34)

The circular economy has emerged as a pivotal strategy for cities to reconcile economic growth with environmental sustainability. However, its implementation in resource-dependent Gulf Cooperation Council contexts remains underexplored. This study is among the first to empirically assess circular economy readiness in a Gulf Cooperation Council industrial hub through a mixed-method approach, bridging the gap between expert perceptions and localized policy implementation. Focusing on the Dammam Metropolitan Area, Saudi Arabia, a critical industrial anchor for Saudi Vision 2030, this study combines a cross-sectional survey of 230 policymakers, industry leaders, and academics with descriptive/inferential statistics (SPSS) and qualitative thematic coding (NVivo). The findings identify renewable energy (mean = 4.10) and municipal waste management (mean = 3.78) as top sectoral priorities, aligning with national sustainability goals. Yet systemic challenges, including fragmented governance, limited public awareness (mean = 3.65), and funding gaps (mean = 3.52), underscore disparities between Vision 2030’s ambitions and localized capacities. Statistical analyses reveal strong associations between institutional fragmentation and financial inefficiencies (χ² = 23.45, * p = 0.010), while mid-career workforce dominance (54.8%) and underrepresentation of policymakers (6.5%) highlight governance gaps. The current study advocates hybrid strategies: stricter waste regulations (40.0% stakeholder priority), circular economy training programs, and public–private partnerships to scale waste-to-energy infrastructure and industrial symbiosis. Despite pragmatic optimism (48.7% foresee 21–40% recycling by 2030), limitations such as reliance on expert perspectives and exclusion of citizen voices necessitate future interdisciplinary and longitudinal research. By aligning regulatory rigor with inclusive governance, the Dammam Metropolitan Area can model a Gulf-centric circular economy transition, advancing regional sustainability while contributing actionable insights for resource-dependent economies globally. Full article

International distribution compels global value chain members to demand highly innovative and technological advancements in their products and processes. The members include small, medium, and large enterprises from both the manufacturing and service categories. Due to short product lifecycles and resource limitations, SMEs are unable to fulfill global value chain requirements in terms of new product development, consequently struggling to sustain manufacturing. In Saudi Arabia, more than 10% of SMEs currently belong to the manufacturing sector, and the majority continue to use conventional manufacturing technologies. Against this backdrop, and to strengthen existing SMEs and enhance their growth, the author conducted a comprehensive literature review on the applicability of additive manufacturing technologies in the manufacturing of various products. The review indicated that the implementation of additive manufacturing technologies faces several difficulties; thus, the author selected two manufacturing SMEs to obtain information on the necessary requirements to implement additive manufacturing technologies. The author interacted with executives from two manufacturing companies, one located in Sudair Industrial City and the other in the industrial center of Dammam. These interactions revealed that better financing, industry–academia collaborations, and stronger inter-company ties boost the adoption of additive manufacturing and support SME growth. Optimizing the use of resources, minimizing the use of materials during the production process through the use of 3D printing technologies, and optimizing time and labor costs help to enhance the economy, which is one of the main components of sustainability. Full article

A drastic level of resource degradation was revealed through a preliminary evaluation (completed in 2016) of water quality in a recreational lake in the second industrial city in Dammam, Saudi Arabia. The primary signs were a foul smell, algal bloom, high turbidity, and lack of aquatic life. This study aims to evaluate the influence of reverse osmosis (RO) on lake water quality. The recreational lake consists of two connected lakes (Lakes 1 and 2), which receive treated effluent from an industrial wastewater treatment plant. Composite samples were collected from the lakes to analyze their physiochemical parameters. Descriptive analyses were performed, and two water quality indices were developed to observe the variations in water quality conditions between the two periods (2016 and 2021). The results indicated that the water parameters of total dissolved solids (TDS), sulphate (SO₄²⁻), biological oxygen demand (BOD), and dissolved oxygen (DO) in 2016 (3356, 4100, 516, and 1.32 mg/L, respectively) were significantly improved in 2021 (2502, 1.28, 9.39, and 7.79 mg/L, respectively). The results of the water quality index (WQI) and comprehensive pollution index (CPI) indicated that the water quality in Lake 1 was significantly enhanced in 2021 (WQI = 85, CPI = 1) in comparison with assessment data from 2016 (WQI = 962, CPI = 8). However, the data from Lake 2 revealed higher pollution levels in 2021 (WQI = 1722, CPI = 18) than those recorded in 2016 (WQI = 1508, CPI = 13). As indicated by the absence of bad smells, algal blooms, and restoration of aquatic life, the RO intervention successfully improved the water quality in Lake 1. The WQI and CPI were helpful tools for evaluating lake water quality. Full article

An increase in solid waste production may affect sustainable solid waste handling practices such as indirect disposal and sanitary landfilling. The objective of this study was to explore the possibility of Dammam residents’ participation in sorting and recycling by comparing sustainable waste handling practices from different income level groups according to family income levels to determine the impacts of independent variables on the willingness of residents to participate in sustainable waste handling practices. There was a statistically significant difference between low and high levels of awareness and perceived behavior control in Dammam City households’ willingness to sort waste and recycle; however, at the middle level, there was only a significant difference in perceived behavior control. Moreover, there was a statistically significant difference between high and middle levels in government facilitators regarding sorting and recycling willingness in Dammam City. The descriptive analysis comprised 450 participants (37.8%) in middle levels, (44.2%), high levels, and (18%) low levels. The results of the participants’ attitudes consisted of sorting (57.1%) and recycling (55.1%), as well as awareness (46.9%) and sorting and recycling (47.1%) in high-income levels. In perceived behavior control, the participants’ results were 47.7% for sorting and 49.6% for recycling in the middle level. Regarding, MI, SI, and GF, the participants’ results in the high-income levels were greater than the others (44.2%, 51.1%, and 57.1%, respectively) toward sorting and recycling. Only awareness between low-income and high-income groups and between the middle-income and high-income groups was significant; therefore, it was supported in some instances and not in others. Full article

This research work proposes a new hybrid framework to assess suitable sites and technical potentials for large-scale solar photovoltaic (PV) systems by integrating two multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) techniques. The evaluation of sites for PV plants was performed using the MCDM method, taking into account a wide range of variables, including climate, technical, geographical, and economic variables, with factor weights determined using the CRITIC technique. Five Saudi Arabian cities with abundant solar radiation served as illustrations of this study’s framework. For classification, the TOPSIS method was employed to rank the five alternatives. The results show that Riyadh is ranked first with a performance score of 72%, followed by Jeddah with a performance score of 65%, and the remaining three cities, namely, Al Ahsa, Dammam, and Abha scored less than 50%. Lastly, the reliability and robustness of the results obtained were examined using sensitivity analysis. The findings of this study can be used to pinpoint possible places that could be used to build solar power plants and to promote the expansion of generating facilities and electrical grids. Full article

The ethical challenges of pediatric cancer care across Arab countries are not well addressed, despite medical advancements and increased awareness of children’s rights. The ethical challenges related to pediatric cancer in Saudi Arabia were investigated by surveying 400 respondents at King Abdulaziz Medical City in Riyadh, Jeddah, and Dammam, Saudi Arabia, from four groups: pediatricians, medical students, nurses, and parents of children with cancer. Respondents’ characteristics were surveyed across three outcomes: awareness of care, knowledge, and parent consent/child assent, developed from a systematic review and a qualitative analysis. A majority of respondents (89.0%) considered pediatric cancer different from adult cancer. Families considered alternative treatment, according to 64.3% of respondents, while 88.0% emphasized understanding the family’s needs and values. Furthermore, 95.8% of respondents believed physicians should offer time for pedagogy, 92.3% viewed parental consent as essential, and 94.5% thought that sufficient discussion about the plan and type of treatment should precede consent. However, child assent showed lower levels of agreement, with only 41.3% and 52.5% agreeing with getting child assent and having a discussion. Finally, 56% agreed that parents might refuse suggested treatment, while only 24.3% agreed that the child could refuse it. In all these ethical considerations, nurses and physicians showed significantly more positive results compared with other groups. Full article

The Saudi government targets building eight solar plants across the country by 2030, which are expected to produce more than 3600 MW, enough to power more than 500,000 homes. However, the vast desert environment in Saudi Arabia increases dust and aerosol loading in the atmosphere, which affect the performance of photovoltaic systems due to scattering and absorption of the solar radiation by dust particles. In this work, ground-based data from weather stations located in six Saudi cities, Dammam, Hafar Al Batin, Riyadh, Jeddah, Najran, and Arar, along with data from the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) are used to examine the effects of dust loading on aerosol optical parameters, air temperature, and solar irradiance. The effects of three major dust storms that blew over different regions in Saudi Arabia on 20 March 2017, 23 April 2018, and 15 April 2021 have been investigated. It is found that there is a strong correlation between dust loading and aerosol optical parameters. The maximum Aerosol Optical Depth (AOD) was recorded over Jeddah on 19 March 2017 (about 2), over Riyadh on 20 March 2017 (about 2.3), over Riyadh on 24 April 2018 (about 1.5), and over Najran on 15 April 2021 (about 0.9). Strong dust events are found to reduce air temperature by a few degrees in high dust loading regions. The study found that such large dust loading decreases the direct and global solar irradiance components, while it increases the diffuse component over the cities of Jeddah, Riyadh, and Najran. This could be an indication that scattering from dust particles can play a significant role in the solar irradiance intensity. Full article

Potentially harmful elements (PHEs) associated with dust generated from anthropogenic sources can be transported into mosques and deposited on the filters of the air-conditioners (AC); thereby, children and adults are exposed to such PHEs while visiting mosques. Data dealing with the assessment of PHEs pollution and its human health risk in mosques dust in Saudi Arabia are scarce. Therefore, this work aims to examine the levels and pollution status of PHEs in AC filter dust (ACFD) of mosques and their associated human health risk in three Saudi cities: Jubail, Jeddah, and Dammam metropolitan. A similar concentration pattern of PHEs is observed in three cities’ mosques with noticeably higher concentrations than both global crustal and local background values for Zn, Cu, Pb, As, and Cd only. Except for Fe, Al, and Mn, the highest PHEs concentrations were found in Jeddah (1407 mg/kg), followed by Dammam (1239 mg/kg) and Jubail (1103 mg/kg). High PHEs’ concentrations were also recorded in mosques located near workshops and suburban areas compared to urban areas. Based on the spatial pattern, enrichment factor, geo-accumulation index, pollution load index, and ecological risk values, Jubail, Jeddah, and Dammam have shown moderate pollution levels of Cd, As, Pb, and Zn. On the other hand, Cu. Zn, Cu, Cr, Pb, Ni, As, and Cd had degrees of enrichment levels that varied from significantly enriched to extremely highly enriched in the ACFD of the three cities. Heavy pollution is found in Jubail, which posed a higher potential ecological risk than in Jeddah and Dammam. Cd presents the highest ecological risk factors (ER) in the three cities. Carcinogenic and non-carcinogenic risks for children and adults follow the order: Jeddah > Dammam > Jubail, and the ingestion pathway was the main route for exposure. Carcinogenic and con-carcinogenic risks in the mosques of the various studied cities were generally within the acceptable range. Full article

Context: Airborne particulate matter (PM) attracts heightened attention due to its implication in various diseases, especially cardiovascular diseases. Although numerous epidemiological studies have been published worldwide in developing countries on risks associated with exposure to PM, such studies are still scarce in developing countries such as Saudi Arabia. Objective: To examine the association between the concentration of airborne particulate matter (PM) and hospital admissions resulting from cardiovascular diseases (CVD) in the Eastern Region of Saudi Arabia, specifically in the cities of Dammam and Khobar. Methodology: The daily concentrations of PM₁₀ and PM_2.5 were obtained from 10 monitoring stations distributed around the two hospitals. There was an examination of the discharge data of patients diagnosed with cardiac arrhythmias, acute myocardial infarction, and heart failure as their primary diagnoses. The data were obtained from two big governmental hospitals in the Eastern Region. The primary cause of hospital admission of 259 patients was identified as acute cardiac condition. Results: For PM₁₀ and PM_2.5, the 24 h mean was calculated as 101.2 and 37.1 µg/m³, respectively; such means are considered higher than the Air Quality Guidelines (AQGs). We found evidence of an increased risk of cardiovascular events for long-term exposure to PM_2.5–10 concentrations, and a correlation with the IHD hospital admission within 6 days of the peak PM₁₀ or PM_2.5 concentration. In addition, the increased PM_2.5 concentration also had a correlation with hospital admissions; however, analysis shows an increase in mortality at lag1, lag2, and lag3 prior to hospital admission. Conclusions: Hospital admissions for several cardiovascular diseases acutely increase in response to higher ambient PM concentrations. It is recommended that residents need to use personal protection, especially those residents with cardiovascular disease, while the government needs to strengthen the governance of air pollution in areas with lighter air pollution. Full article

Job recommender systems (JRS) are a subclass of information filtering systems that aims to help job seekers identify what might match their skills and experiences and prevent them from being lost in the vast amount of information available on job boards that aggregates postings from many sources such as LinkedIn or Indeed. A variety of strategies used as part of JRS have been implemented, most of them failed to recommend job vacancies that fit properly to the job seekers profiles when dealing with more than one job offer. They consider skills as passive entities associated with the job description, which need to be matched for finding the best job recommendation. This paper provides a recommender system to assist job seekers in finding suitable jobs based on their resumes. The proposed system recommends the top-n jobs to the job seekers by analyzing and measuring similarity between the job seeker’s skills and explicit features of job listing using content-based filtering. First-hand information was gathered by scraping jobs description from Indeed from major cities in Saudi Arabia (Dammam, Jeddah, and Riyadh). Then, the top skills required in job offers were analyzed and job recommendation was made by matching skills from resumes to posted jobs. To quantify recommendation success and error rates, we sought to compare the results of our system to reality using decision support measures. Full article

The present study used Litchi chinensis peel extract to synthesize silver nanoparticles (AgNPs). This technique is eco-friendly and can be performed in a single step; thus, it has attracted great attention for NPs biosynthesis. Herein, we biosynthesized AgNPs with L. chinensis peel extract and examined their anticoccidial activity in rabbit hepatic coccidiosis induced by E. stiedae infection. Thirty-five rabbits were allocated into seven groups: a healthy group (G1), an infected control group (G2), four groups infected before treatment with 10 mg/kg L. chinensis peel extract-biosynthesized AgNPs (G3, G5) or 50 mg/kg amprolium (G4, G6), and rabbits infected after two weeks of pretreatment with 10 mg/kg L. chinensis eel extract-biosynthesized AgNPs (G7). In this study, both pre-and post-treatment with AgNPs produced a substantial reduction in fecal oocyst output, liver enzyme levels, and histopathological hepatic lesions relative to the infected group. In conclusion, L. chinensis peel extract-prepared AgNPs should be considered harmless and efficient in the cure of hepatic coccidiosis in rabbits. Full article

The housing market is a crucial economic indicator to which the government must pay special attention because of its impact on the lives of freshly minted city inhabitants. As a guide for government regulation, individual property purchases, third-party evaluation, and understanding how housing prices are distributed geographically may be of great practical use. Therefore, much research has been conducted on how to arrive at a more accurate and efficient way of calculating housing prices in the current market. The goal of this study was to use the artificial neural network (ANN) technique to correctly identify real estate prices. The novelty of the proposed research is to build a prediction model based on ANN for predicting future house prices in Saudi Arabia. The dataset was collected from Aqar in four main Saudi Arabian cities: Riyadh, Jeddah, Dammam, and Al-Khobar. The results showed that the experimental and predicted values were very close. The results of the proposed system were compared with different existing prediction systems, and the developed model achieved high performance. This forecasting system can also help increase investment in the real estate sector. The ANN model could appropriately estimate the housing prices currently available on the market, according to the findings of the assessments of the model. Thus, this study provides a suitable decision support or adaptive suggestion approach for estimating the ideal sales prices of residential properties. This solution is urgently required by both investors and the general population as a whole. Full article

One of the modern methods for enhancing the efficiency of photovoltaic (PV) systems is implementing a solar tracking mechanism in order to redirect PV modules toward the sun throughout the day. However, the use of solar trackers increases the system’s electrical consumption, hindering its net generated energy. In this study, a novel self-tracking solar-driven PV system is proposed. The smart solar-driven thermomechanical actuator takes advantage of a solar heat collector (SHC) device, in the form of a parabolic trough solar concentrator (PTC), and smart shape memory alloy (SMA) to produce effective mechanical energy for solar tracking applications from sun rays. Furthermore, a thermal–optical analysis is presented to evaluate the performance of the solar concentrator for the simulated weather condition of Dammam City, Saudi Arabia. The numerical results of the thermal and optical analyses show the promising feasibility of the proposed system in which SMA springs with an activation temperature between 31.09 °C and 45.15 °C can be utilized for the self-tracking operations. The work presented adds to the body of knowledge an advanced SMA-based SHC device for solar-based self-actuation systems, which enables further expansions within modern and advanced solar thermal applications. Full article

This research aims to present a state-of-the-art cleaning technology solution that effectively overcomes the dust accumulation issue for conventional photovoltaic systems. Although continuous innovations and advanced developments within renewable energy technologies have shown steady improvements over the past years, the dust accumulation issue remains one of the main factors hindering their efficiency and degradation rate. By harvesting abundant solar thermal energy, the presented self-cleaning system uses a unique thermomechanical property of Shape Memory Alloys to operate a solar-based thermomechanical actuator. Therefore, this study carries out different numerical and experimental validation tests to highlight the promising practicability of the developed self-cleaning system from thermal and mechanical perspectives. The results showed that the system has a life expectancy of over 20 years, which is closely equivalent to the life expectancy of conventional photovoltaic modules while operating under actual weather conditions in Dammam city. Additionally, the thermal to mechanical energy conversion efficiency reached 19.15% while providing average cleaning effectiveness of about 95%. The presented outcomes of this study add to the body of knowledge an innovative methodology for a unique solar-based self-cleaning system aimed toward smart and modern photovoltaic applications. Full article

Despite the importance of integrated recreation cities (IRC) to the wellbeing of individuals, families, and society, there is only one IRC which is under development in Saudi Arabia (KSA). This research aims to study the potential contributions of IRCs to sustainable development in KSA, the constraints facing them, and effectuation policies to support their applications. To achieve this goal, the research used a documentary inductive approach, which includes a review of related literature and an applied approach that includes field surveys of a random sample of 160 experts and officials. In addition to articulating the most significant contributions of IRCs and the most important constraints facing them, the research was able to provide a number of policies and measures useful in guiding the development of new IRCs in KSA and Dammam Metropolitan Area (DMA) in support of sustainable development. The contributions of this research are aligned with that put forward by the 2030 Vision of KSA, which considers the promotion of “recreational development” a necessary step to achieve environmental, economic, and social sustainability for the Saudi society. Full article