When the Background Matters Using Scenarios from Integrated Assessment Models in Prospective Life Cycle Assessment

Bio-ethylene from sugarcane as a competitiveness strategy for the Brazilian chemical industry

The urgency with which the world economy needs to be decarbonized could lead to the emergence of regions with the capacity to produce renewable feedstock such as biomass. The competitiveness of these regions could result from their ability to produce high value-added chemicals at the lowest cost. The biomass embodied in a chemical product could...

Sustainable Furniture that Grows with End-Users

Economically and environmentally it might be more responsible or even feasible to combine products and services to elongate product lifetime. Gispen, a major office furniture producer in the Netherlands, has embraced circular economic principles to create new business, extend product life time and improve the adaptability of their products. In...

Development of an environmental performance assessment tool for carbon capture & storage chains

This paper reports the development of a tool to assess the environmental performance of carbon dioxide capture and storage (CCS) chains. The environmental assessment is done for the whole CCS chain. The tool has been designed to produce transparent and traceable results and is easy to work with. The tool is meant for a broad group of...

Comparison of environmental impact and energy efficiency of desalination processes by LCA

In this study two desalination technologies have been compared by means of LCA with the focus on energy supply with a variety of scenarios based on different assumptions. The studied technologies are reverse osmosis and the newly developed technology Memstill where electrical energy demand is reduced by using external thermal energy source and...

Towards a global multi-regional environmentally extended input-output database

This paper presents the strategy for a large EU-funded Integrated Project: EXIOPOL ("A New Environmental Accounting Framework Using Externality Data and Input-Output Tools for Policy Analysis"), with special attention for its part in environmentally extended (EE) input-output (IO) analysis. The project has three principal objectives:(a)to...

Environmental impacts of products: Policy relevant information and data challenges

The research and analysis presented in this special issue shows that the same limited number of consumption categories are consistently revealed to be responsible for the largest share of environmental impact: mobility (automobile and air transport), food (meat, poultry, fish, and dairy followed by plant-based food), and residential energy use...