Cleaner Production Letters最新文献

Digital battery passports (DBPs) may help support the transition towards more sustainable and circular electric vehicle battery (EVB) value chains by providing respective value chain actors with valuable data in sustainable battery management. To ensure such support, DBPs have to fulfil EVB value chain actors' data needs and requirements. This work sets out to provide initial empirical insight into EVB value chain actors' data needs and requirements in the context of sustainable battery management. The analysis is based on a DBP concept comprising 54 data points and four information categories. The research design encompassed focus group expert workshops, expert interviews, follow-up expert consultation and subsequent qualitative content analyses. The results reveal diverging perspectives regarding data needs and availability. These are attributable to value chain actors' different positions and roles in the value chain, as well as to a lack of well-defined information flows along the EVB value chain. The work augments current DBP research by introducing the first systematic mapping of EVB value chain actors’ data needs in sustainability battery management. It further provides policy makers, and practitioners with guidance on the information content of DBPs, and on how their development and implementation may be supported.

Animal production intensification puts pressure on resources, leads to environmental impacts, animal welfare and biodiversity issues. Livestock products provide key components of the human diet and contribute to rural territories through ecosystem services such as nutrient and biomass recycling. Life cycle assessment (LCA) is key to assess environmental impacts in livestock systems and products. A harmonization of LCA methods is necessary to improve evaluations in these areas as LCA still lacks accuracy and robustness in addressing sustainability across livestock systems and products. Here, a participatory harmonization approach was applied to provide a framework to evaluate LCAs of current and future livestock systems. A total of 29 workshops with targeted discussions among 21 LCA experts were organised, together with two anonymous surveys to harmonise evaluation criteria. First, key research topics for improving LCAs of livestock systems were identified as follows: i) Food, feed, fuel and biomaterial competition, crop-livestock interaction and the circular economy; ii) Biodiversity; iii) Animal welfare; iv) Nutrition; v) GHG emissions. Next, general evaluation criteria were identified for livestock focussed LCA methods, considering livestock systems characteristics: Transparency and Reproducibility, Completeness, Fairness and Acceptance, Robustness and Accuracy. Evaluation criteria specific to each key topic were also identified. This participatory method was successful in narrowing down general and specific evaluation criteria through targeted discussion. Moreover, this study provided a holistic participatory framework for the evaluation of LCA methods addressing the impacts of livestock systems across a range of key topics which can be further used for other sectors.

The Circular Economy is driven by sustainable strategies of management and the reuse of materials and power to try to decrease the demand of resources and minimize the environmental impacts. Aligned to said perspective, the Industrial Symbiosis (IS) is opposite to the linear production's logic, enabling the sharing of resources, waste, and by-products, that is, the circular flow of power, water, materials, and information. In the last few years, to improve these IS strategies, platforms and tools were created to intermediate this process and facilitate the match between those who demand and offer waste and resources, such as the online waste markets or e-marketplaces. From this perspective, the objective of this study is to evaluate how these tools contributed to the IS process, going beyond the problem of the local factor. For this purpose, ten online platforms, found in the literature, were selected. The analysis was made based on the identification of key elements, which enabled the creation of a list with different types of traded materials, sectors and areas served, how wide was the service, the year when the activities started and, ultimately, the business model adopted. As a result, the evaluation shows that these tools enhance the symbiosis process because they approach the parties and facilitate the identification of synergies. Generally, the use of online platforms widens the geographic scope of the IS processes, enabling the interaction of parties from different places and regions. Was observed that these tools are characterized by the use of intelligent systems, based on algorithms that identify and recommend relations, providing greater assertiveness and speed to the decision-making process. Among the research's findings, we must stress that the IS potential extends much beyond the reuse of waste. There are opportunities for other synergies, such as infrastructure and service sharing. Finally, it was highlighted that, although they present many benefits in the social, economic, and environmental scopes, to be implemented on a wider scale, these tools still need to overcome challenges such as the lack of data on available materials and generated waste, the reluctance of some parties to establish synergetic relations, and the prejudice of working with repurposed materials.

Fossil fuels continue to exacerbate climate change due to large carbon emissions resulting from their use across a number of sectors. An energy transition away from fossil fuels seems inevitable, and energy sources such as renewables and hydrogen may provide a low carbon alternative for the future energy system, particularly in large emitting nations such as the United States. This research quantifies and maps potential hydrogen fuel distribution pathways for the continental US, reflecting technological changes, barriers to deployment, and end-use-cases from 2020 to 2100, clarifying the potential role of hydrogen in the US energy transition. The methodology consists of two parts, a linear optimization of the global energy system constrained by carbon reduction targets and system cost, followed by a projection of hydrogen infrastructure development. Key findings include the emergence of trade pattern diversification, with a greater variety of end-uses associated with imported fuels and greater annual hydrogen consumption over time. Further, sensitivity analysis identified the influence of complementary technologies including nuclear power and carbon capture and storage technologies. We conclude that hydrogen penetration into the US energy system is economically viable and can contribute toward achieving Paris Agreement and more aggressive carbon reduction targets in the future.

Installed capacity of renewable resources to generate electricity is increasing globally. The global share of renewables is expected to grow sharply in the next decade by replacing fossil fuel-fired power generating stations with hydropower, wind, and solar generation. This increasing trend will help reduce air pollution and greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from fossil fuel combustion, and contribute to limit the global temperature increase by 1.5 °C. Nova Scotia, Canada, is committed to follow this trend by closing the remaining coal-fired power plants by 2030, although it still relies heavily on coal as its major fuel for electricity generation and failed to meet renewable electricity generation targets of 40% in 2020. Although Nova Scotia is still committed to meet a supply of 80% renewables in less than ten years, it is not clear how this will be achieved. This short review analyzes the provincial plan to reduce dependency on coal and provides an overview of recent developments in policies to reduce air emissions from fossil fuel combustion. Existing monitoring and reporting programs revealed that provincial air emission caps on the electricity sector resulted in a reduction of more than 50% emissions of nitrogen oxides and sulphur oxides from 2002 to 2020. These annual caps, which will be progressively reduced until 2025, have already proven to be an effective strategy to reduce harmful air emissions from power stations in the province. However, volatile organic compounds (VOCs) and particulate matter (PM), two harmful air pollutants also relevant to the electricity sector, are not yet regulated by provincial policy. This review recommends a revision in the monitoring and reporting programs and transition to renewables to reduce air pollution.

Given the global sustainability challenges facing humans and nature today, this theoretical paper aims to propose a supply chain view of sustainability management and thereby contribute to elevating the sustainable supply chain management field to the level of theory. This is done by identifying supply chain stakeholders and related sustainability challenges, which reveal the inherent paradoxes and tensions in global consumption and production networks. This perspective supports the urgent need for all supply chain stakeholders to understand sustainability challenges and adopt a sustainability mindset. The focus on reducing supply chain disruptions, improving supply chain resilience, and improving supply chain sustainability performance has neglected and even undermined broader sustainability challenges, such as climate change. Therefore, this paper first provides a discussion on the complementarity between stakeholder theory and sustainable supply chain management (SSCM) from a systems perspective; and, second, develops a novel supply chain theory to enhance sustainability management by identifying supply chain stakeholders and related sustainability challenges. Linking stakeholder theory and SSCM facilitates a holistic understanding of sustainability challenges, making it possible to identify opportunities to improve one's decisions, actions, and current consumption and production patterns. Instead of perpetuating a firm- or client-centred perspective, the supply chain view places the product/service at the center of the stakeholder identification process. It clearly identifies stakeholders upstream, within the focal firm, downstream, or outside the supply chain (SC), as well as the related sustainability challenges. It encourages all organizations and individuals to practise their systems thinking skills in order to improve their sustainability mindset and enhance their subsequent ability to solve sustainability and ethical challenges. The proposed supply chain view supports managers, policymakers, educators, consultant, consumers, and individuals in identifying stakeholders and understanding sustainability challenges related to production and consumption effectively. This extends existing knowledge on sustainability management from a supply chain perspective and opens new research areas, particularly for ethical decision-making and behavioural sciences.

Business models and investors should understand the meaning of ‘value’ from a different perspective if the ultimate goal is to achieve the sustainable development goals (SDGs). New business strategies for pursuing the SDGs and the aptitude to set up cleaner and more collaborative production systems must replace the traditional approaches tied to a value perception that is not coherent with the actual sustainability performance of companies. This outdated but still largely used value perception is often vague, abstract, and lacks more objective models and indicators to avoid misleading choices of investments in companies with low levels of sustainability. Using a mining company in Brazil as an example, this commentary letter aims to provide insights about the need for information rooted in science, considering biophysical perspectives under a systemic approach to fully understand the meaning of value behind companies' performance and support investments in those more sustainable ones. Parameters to quantitatively assess companies' sustainability are presented to start the discussions about how investors can make better choices when putting their money on those really more sustainable companies that, besides returning profits, will support the achievement of SDGs.

European citizens believe they can play a role in protecting the environment through changes in how they buy, consume, and separate waste, but they also believe they are not doing enough. Household refrigerating appliances, such as refrigerators, freezers, and air conditioning systems (at home or in the car), impact severely global warming due to their high energy consumption and the high global warming potential of the most used refrigeration gases. Despite the unequivocal importance of consumers' actions, their behaviours during equipment purchase, use, maintenance, and disposal at the end-of-life have been largely ignored in policy regulatory strategies. In this work, the gap between consumers’ concerns and their behaviours was addressed by assessing their actions specifically related to the refrigeration gases of their domestic refrigeration equipment (refrigerators and air conditioning systems), at every stage of the equipment life cycle. A questionnaire was conducted with a sample of 648 Portuguese, Spanish and French consumers, aiming at diagnosing the importance and risk attributed to refrigeration gases, and their perception of the actions they can take to reduce this risk. The results revealed that, despite attributing great importance to climate change and considering refrigeration gases a high danger to the environment, most consumers did not consider these gases in their decision when purchasing refrigeration equipment. However, in general, consumers have correct behaviours when there is an equipment malfunction, although they have little information relative to the authorized technicians for installation or maintenance of equipment. The results of this work allowed us to identify the topics that need to be reinforced in future awareness campaigns and to provide some recommendations to promote appropriate consumer behaviour.

Public participation in decision-making is one of the core principles of Impact Assessment. However, the mechanisms and processes that communities use to build organizational, consensual and knowledge capacities to get involved in decisions are yet to be better known. This paper aims to explore the implications of self-organized and self-mobilized participation in decision-making processes in the context of the Constitutional Ruling T-622/2016, which recognized the rights of the Atrato River (Colombia) to be healthy and ecologically supportive to the different populations, thus triggering a series of governmental actions supported by Impact Assessment. Through an exploratory approach guided by participant observation and supported by literature review, documentary research and interviews, it was revealed that social inequity and violence resulting both from governmental neglect and the lack of social and environmental rights are the main drivers of mobilization, followed by the violation of the community's traditional ties with the environment and, also, the coordination between grassroots communities and external actors. According to our findings, early meetings among stakeholders grounded on a balanced share of influence on decisions contributed to promote synergies in Impact Assessment and decision-making, thus leading to the previous identification of the likely causes of socio-environmental degradation and alternatives to mitigation.

The last decade has notably witnessed a major impact on our climatic characteristics and way of living across urban and rural areas. Following the intensified effects of the climate crisis as well as the crisis of the COVID19 pandemic, this paper aims to cross silos and explore how the sectors of landscape, digital transformation and the built environment can support a resilient future. In the built environment, the impact of digital tools such as Building Information Modelling (BIM) can be recognised across many processes to deliver better value, improve productivity and drive innovative solutions. It can however be noted that most efforts have looked into the impact of BIM at a micro scale (e.g. buildings and developments) with limited focus at the macro scale (e.g. landscape design and climate change). This paper focuses on the digital technology innovations through the lens of the landscape and the exploration of how such tools could contribute to the form of planning and landscape design. It aims to lay a critical review of the impact of BIM on the landscape with insightfully pointing out evolvements, shortfalls and future opportunities. The paper adopts a hybrid approach that includes a systematic selection of research papers focusing on landscape with particular emphasis on climate change, planning and urban design between 2010 and 2021. Findings suggest that, with relation to BIM's impact on the landscape, most efforts have focused on planning and the small residential scale. Findings also showed that there are limited efforts to investigate landscape design and urbanism and the ways in which digitalization can support sustainable development in open spaces. The area of climate change is significantly overlooked within BIM, raising concerns on the lack of current research on such a critical topic. Using the knowledge from BIM technology, the study provided evidence on the correlation with the landscape and climate change. Evidence demonstrates there is limited connection between BIM and landscape and therefore the study discusses how such tools can improve the understanding of the landscape idea as well as support the creation and visualization of environmentally friendly landscape designs. Future work includes looking into many of the highlighted trends as a result of the study with further investigation on the role that stakeholders can play as part of the digital transformation on landscape.