Environmental impact assessment of China’s primary aluminum based on life cycle assessment

Assessing and accounting for material consumption and environmental impact are necessary to measure environmental externalities of the aluminum industry and to construct an ecological civilization.In this research,life cycle assessment(LCA)theory was used to assess the environmental impact of primary aluminum based on the lime soda Bayer process and different power generation modes,and the sources and distributions of the four selected impact categories were analyzed.The results show that,(1)Negative environmental impact of aluminum industry generally occurs from alumina extraction,carbon anode fabrication and electrolysis,particularly electrolysis and alumina extraction.Primary energy demand(PED),water use(WU),global warming potential(GWP)and freshwater eutrophication potential(FEP)are main environmental impact categories.(2)The environmental load with thermal power is higher than that with hydropower,e.g.,for the former,the greenhouse gas emission coefficient of 21800 kg CO2 eq/t(Al)will be generated,while for the latter,4910 kg CO2 eq/t(Al)will be generated.(3)Both power mode methods reflect the energy structure,whereas direct emissions reflect the technical level,indicating the potential for large energy savings and emission reductions,and some policies,related to clean power,energy efficiency and technological progress,should be made for emission reduction.

Time-varying impact of political risk on copper prices

Using the International Country Risk Guide(ICRG)index to represent countries’political risk,the time-varying effect of political risk on copper prices was examined based on the time-varying parameter structural vector autoregression with stochastic volatility(TVP-SVAR-SV)model.The empirical results show that the impact of political risk on copper prices is time-varying and has tended to increase gradually in recent years.There are significant country-level differences in the impact of political risk on copper prices.Political risk has a stronger and longer-lasting impact on copper prices in exporting countries.In terms of risk sources,external and internal conflicts contribute most to international copper price fluctuations in the sample period.The impact of political risk on copper prices reaches an extreme level during the international financial crisis,the European debt crisis,and the election of Donald Trump.

Prediction of metal futures price volatility and empirical analysis based on symbolic time series of high-frequency

The metal futures price fluctuation prediction model was constructed based on symbolic high-frequency time series using high-frequency data on the Shanghai Copper Futures Exchange from July 2014 to September 2018,and the sample was divided into 194 histogram time series employing symbolic time series.The next cycle was then predicted using the K-NN algorithm and exponential smoothing,respectively.The results show that the trend of the histogram of the copper futures earnings prediction is gentler than that of the actual histogram,the overall situation of the prediction results is better,and the overall fluctuation of the one-week earnings of the copper futures predicted and the actual volatility are largely the same.This shows that the results predicted by the K-NN algorithm are more accurate than those predicted by the exponential smoothing method.Based on the predicted one-week price fluctuations of copper futures,regulators and investors in China’s copper futures market can timely adjust their regulatory policies and investment strategies to control risks.