Life Cycle-based Approach Research Articles

Assessing the sustainability of Blue Economy activities using an ecosystem and life cycle-based approach: Possibilities, challenges and implications for an informed policy making

The global ocean faces increasing exploitation to meet the demand of a rapidly growing globalisation. Human marine activities are leading to local environmental pressures/benefits, for example on marine ecosystems and their services, but also through their value chains on terrestrial ecosystem services, and to global pressures such as global warming. Effective management of marine activities is essential for the conservation of the natural environment. There is a growing need for holistic sustainability assessment tools capable of quantifying environmental impacts at various geographical scales, alongside evidence-informed policies. This study examines the evolving marine policy landscape, identifies key legislation that supports the sustainable growth of the Blue Economy, traces its historical development, and explores the integration of ecosystem services assessment and life cycle assessment as methodologies for assessing environmental sustainability within this legislation. The review shows that current legislation falls short in providing instructions on how to measure sustainability impacts in a consistent way, i.e., which methods/indicators to use. Therefore, this study supports evidence-informed policy-making by proposing a quantitative and comprehensive environmental sustainability impact assessment methodology, integrating both ecosystem and life-cycle based methods, to a Belgian multi-use case study involving offshore wind energy and mussel farming. Considering the impacts that were possible to assess and the limits of the methodology used, the value of the positive impacts of the MUOF was +61.3 M€ y−, while the negative ones were −4.0 M€ y−1, resulting in a net handprint of +57.0 M€ y−1, primarily attributed to the benefits of the local ecosystem service ‘offshore renewable energy’ However, such a solution is not necessarily scalable, due to cumulative impacts. An analysis was conducted to identify areas for enhancing the methodology to more effectively meet policy needs. The study highlights the importance of using scientifically grounded methods to inform policy decisions.

Decision support model for selecting construction and demolition waste management alternatives: A life cycle-based approach

Construction and demolition waste (C&DW) represents a pressing concern within the European Union, underscoring the urgent need for effective waste management strategies. The selection of these solutions constitutes a complex task, entailing the identification of efficient C&DW management strategies that balance appropriate practices, regulatory compliance, resource conservation, economic feasibility, and environmental considerations. LCA is widely utilized to assess environmental impact, yet the economic aspect has not been adequately incorporated into the LCA process in the field of C&DW management. The life cycle costing (LCC) methodology has been tailored to assess economic performance in conjunction with LCA. The selection of an appropriate multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) method is vital for the C&DW system. This study proposes a novel framework for C&DW management by integrating LCA and LCC outcomes into MCDM, using AHP for weight determination, and applying TOPSIS to identify the favorable alternative. Four waste management alternatives were examined in the Lombardy region of Italy, namely (i) landfill; (ii) recycling for concrete production and road construction, incineration with energy recovery; (iii) recycling for road construction; (iv) recycling for concrete production and road construction. We determine that, with the implementation of various scenarios, the most suitable scenario emerges to be recycled for concrete production and road construction, with a score of 0.711/1; recycling for road construction with final score 0.291/1, ranks second; recycling for concrete production and road construction, incineration with energy recovery scores 0.002/1, ranks third; and landfill (scores: 0/1) is the worst choice, signifying it has the highest environmental impacts and the least economic benefits. Lastly, recommendations were formulated to enhance the environmental performance of the system.

Learnings From the Implementation of an Electronic Human Resource Management System for the Health Workforce in Uttar Pradesh, India.

The state of Uttar Pradesh (UP), India, has one of the largest single public health systems globally, serving about 235 million people through more than 30,000 public health facilities with approximately 160,000 health personnel. Yet, the UP health system has a shortfall of public health facilities to meet the population's needs, a shortage of clinical and nonclinical health personnel, inequitable distribution of existing health personnel, and low utilization of public health facilities. A robust and effective electronic human resource management system (eHRMS) that provides real-time information about the lifecycle of all health professionals in UP may aid in improving the health workforce, resulting in better health services and improved health outcomes. The Government of UP rolled out Manav Sampada, a comprehensive eHRMS that complied with global norms and requirements. We describe the implementation of Manav Sampada at scale and elaborate on key learnings and adoption strategies. Manav Sampada was based on key principles of integration and data-sharing with other digital systems, included functional components, a minimum dataset, used a lifecycle-based approach, and a workflow-based system, all of which acted to improve human resource data quality. The eHRMS emerged as a valuable tool for key stakeholders in reviewing worker performance, identifying skill-building needs, and allocating resources for training, leading to improved availability and equity in the distribution of a few critical cadres. The eHRMS in UP is well positioned to become an integral part of the Ayushman Bharat Digital Mission, the backbone of India's integrated digital health infrastructure. Linking eHRMS to a planned beneficiary-centric unitized health service delivery system (capturing information at the individual level rather than the aggregate level) will enable the measurement of service delivery and quality, leading to improved workforce management.

Reinforcement Learning Based Approaches to Adaptive Context Caching in Distributed Context Management Systems

Real-time applications increasingly rely on context information to provide relevant and dependable features. Context queries require large-scale retrieval, inferencing, aggregation, and delivery of context using only limited computing resources, especially in a distributed environment. If this is slow, inconsistent, and too expensive to access context information, the dependability and relevancy of real-time applications may fail to exist. This paper argues, transiency of context (i.e., the limited validity period), variations in the features of context query loads (e.g., the request rate, different Quality of Service (QoS), and Quality of Context (QoC) requirements), and lack of prior knowledge about context to make near real-time adaptations as fundamental challenges that need to be addressed to overcome these shortcomings. Hence, we propose a performance metric driven reinforcement learning based adaptive context caching approach aiming to maximize both cost- and performance-efficiency for middleware-based Context Management Systems (CMSs). Although context-aware caching has been thoroughly investigated in the literature, our approach is novel because existing techniques are not fully applicable to caching context due to (i) the underlying fundamental challenges and (ii) not addressing the limitations hindering dependability and consistency of context. Unlike previously tested modes of CMS operations and traditional data caching techniques, our approach can provide real-time pervasive applications with lower cost, faster, and fresher high quality context information. Compared to existing context-aware data caching algorithms, our technique is bespoken for caching context information, which is different from traditional data. We also show that our full-cycle context lifecycle-based approach can maximize both cost- and performance-efficiency while maintaining adequate QoC solely based on real-time performance metrics and our heuristic techniques without depending on any previous knowledge about the context, variations in query features, or quality demands, unlike any previous work. We demonstrate using a real world inspired scenario and a prototype middleware based CMS integrated with our adaptive context caching approach that we have implemented, how realtime applications that are 85% faster can be more relevant and dependable to users, while costing 60.22% less than using existing techniques to access context information. Our model is also at least twice as fast and more flexible to adapt compared to existing benchmarks even under uncertainty and lack of prior knowledge about context, transiency, and variable context query loads.

Water-energy nexus embedded in coal supply chain of a coal-based city, China

Shortage of water and energy, and uneven distribution of coal and water pose great challenges to the sustainable development of coal-based cities. Water and energy has nexus relationship through the coal supply chain and affect the sustainable development of the cities. While few studies consider water-energy nexus embedded in coal life-cycle for the coal-based cities. Here, we incorporated substance flow analysis (SFA) with life cycle assessment (LCA) and nexus theory to firstly construct a coupled layer model of water-energy nexus for coal resource cities. The coal life-cycle includes coal mining, coal processing, product utilization, and waste disposal. Both water consumption and energy consumption include direct consumption in the coal life-cycle layer, and indirect consumption in the water-energy layer. Then, we firstly applied the model to analyze water and energy consumptions in a typical coal-based city, Huainan City from 1990 to 2020. Our results show that both water and energy consumptions increased to 2.26*108 m3 and 2.14*1010 kgce in 2020. In the whole coal life-cycle, direct water use accounted for 84%–89% of the total water use, and direct energy use accounted for almost all of the total energy use. Among the four stages of the coal life-cycle, product utilization accounted for 80%–89% and 90%–95% of total water consumption and total energy consumption, respectively. In product utilization, mining and manufacturing sectors consumed most of the water and energy, while the consumption for services gradually increased. During coal mining and coal processing, all the consumptions of coal, water, and energy consumption firstly increased and then decreased after 2015. Then, we conducted sensitivity analysis and found that electricity generation and coal consumption coefficient of thermal power plant greatly influence the water consumption and energy use. Finally, we conducted scenario analysis and found that water consumption and energy consumption of Sustainability Scenario (SS) will be 6.3% and 9.4% lower than Baseline Scenario (BS), 12.0% and 17.5% lower than Crisis Scenario (CS), respectively. The study hopes to not only provide a research foundation for life cycle-based approaches and nexus theory, but also a demonstration for promoting sustainable development of other resource-based cities in China.

Identification and assessment of disruption claim management risks in construction projects: a life cycle-based approach

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to propose a disruption claim management (DCM) life cycle and a risk management framework to provide comprehensive guidance to construction practitioners for facilitating effective and efficient DCM.Design/methodology/approachDCM life cycle was initially developed through a focus group discussion (FGD) with the participation of the construction practitioners who have diverse experiences about DCM. The life cycle is comprised of 6 phases and also includes proper reactions of the owners and contractors. Then, 42 risk factors that can impact the deliverables of DCM were identified through a literature review and an additional FGD session. This was then followed by a Fuzzy Analytical Hierarchy Process (FAHP) which was performed to evaluate the importance of each risk factor in terms of the factor's impact on the success of DCM. Additionally, consistency analysis was performed to further maximize the reliability of the results.FindingsFindings revealed that a proactive and systematic approach should be adopted and DCM practices should be initiated before any disruption event is triggered. Accordingly, the proposed framework recommends DCM practices to be initiated early in the contract development phase since compensation for the disruption might be recovered only to the extent that the contract permits. The contract-related risks were given top priority by the experts so that the results of the fuzzy AHP analysis also verified the significance of the contract development phase. Besides contract-related risks, risks related to insufficient site observation, ignorance of the project team, cognitive bias and conflict of interest were determined as the most significant DCM risks, needing an urgent and sophisticated risk response plan. Lastly, results suggested that “Site observation and record-keeping” is the most formidable phase since the phase's implementation on a continuous basis could create unforeseen organizational challenges such as mismanagement of project records, especially in the dynamic and turbulent environment of the construction projects.Originality/valueDisruption – which is caused mostly by change – is inevitable in construction projects due to their sophisticated nature. DCM, therefore, becomes crucial to compensate losses of contractors and eliminate or diminish the prolonged dispute resolution process. Existing studies, however, do not provide a comprehensive theoretical basis for the DCM life cycle and DCM life cycle's potential risks so that DCM life cycle's promising benefits can hardly be materialized. Thus, developing a DCM life cycle and associating DCM life cycle with risk management, this study is highly believed to make a promising theoretical contribution to the DCM domain since this is one of the earliest attempts in the literature. Additionally, this research provides construction practitioners with an insight into the effective implementation of DCM practices in construction projects.

A life cycle-based, sustainability-driven innovation approach in the minerals industry: Application to a large-scale granitic quarry in Rio de Janeiro

Sustainability in mining must be envisioned from a more comprehensive perspective that involves the management of primary and secondary resources and that prioritizes the adoption of innovation beyond a techno-economic mindset. The holistic Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) methodology is useful to diagnose the environmental profile of mining operations seeking a greater contribution to sustainability. This work proposes an enhanced life cycle-based approach for the minerals industry, which is supported by mine-to-product process simulation, scenario analysis, and a comprehensive and context-specific data collection involving the life cycles of the product and the mining project. The convenience of this approach in terms of reducing epistemic uncertainty is demonstrated with a Brazilian case study of a large-scale granitic quarry operation. It is shown that mining can contribute to sustainability by adopting sustainability-driven innovation and circularity principles. The proposed methodology can be applied to other mineral commodities and geographic contexts.

Prevalence of Hypertension and Its Associated Factors Among Adults in Areka Town, Wolaita Zone, Southern Ethiopia

BackgroundHypertension is an emerging public health problem in many low- and middle-income countries including Ethiopia. However, there are limited studies and data are scarce in these countries, particularly in Ethiopia. Thus, the aim of this study was to assess the prevalence of hypertension and its associated factors in this study area.MethodsA community-based cross-sectional study was conducted in Areka town. Multi-stage sampling technique was used to select 581 adults. Information on socio-demographic data, behavioral and dietary habits, and family history of hypertension were collected using face-to-face interview. Measurements of weight, height, and blood pressure were taken using digital weighing scale, Stadio-meter, and digital sphygmomanometer respectively. Data were entered and cleaned in Epi-Data version 3.1, and exported to SPSS version 20 for analysis. Binary logistic regressions were done and odds ratios with 95% confidence intervals were calculated to identify associated factors.ResultsThe overall prevalence of hypertension among the study participants was 19.1% (95% CI: 15.9–22.4). Out of these, more than half (57.3%) of the cases were newly screened for hypertension. In a multivariate logistic regression analysis; history of perceived childhood obesity (AOR:2.8 (95% CI:1.6,5.1)), age 55 years and above (AOR=8.90, 95% CI: 3.77–21.02), family history of hypertension (AOR= 2.57, 95% CI: 1.17–5.64), fatty meat intake (AOR=1.96, 95% CI: 1.05–3.65), eating vegetables less than two days per week (AOR=2.81, 95% CI: 1.24–6.37) and being obese (AOR=11.59, 95% CI: 4.7–27.62) were associated factors of developing hypertension.ConclusionThe study revealed that the prevalence was found to be high among adults indicating the hidden burden of the problem in the area. Therefore, the health systems need to develop strategies for community-based screening, strategies that focus on life cycle-based approach because childhood and adolescence are crucial times for the prevention of NCDs including hypertension. Health education on eating behavior and life style modifications to maintain normal body weight are recommended.

The ‘building paradox’: research on building-related environmental effects requires global visibility and attention

The construction and operation of buildings is a major contributor to global energy demand, greenhouse gases emissions, resource depletion, waste generation, and associated environmental effects, such as climate change, pollution and habitat destruction. Despite its wide relevance, research on building-related environmental effects often fails to achieve global visibility and attention, particularly in premiere interdisciplinary journals – thus representing a major gap in the research these journals offer. In this article we review and reflect on the factors that are likely causing this lack of visibility for such a prominent research topic and emphasise the need to reconcile the construction and operational phases into the physical unity of a building, to contribute to the global environmental discourse using a lifecycle-based approach. This article also aims to act as a call for action and to raise awareness of this important gap. The evidence contained in the article can support institutional policies to improve the status quo and provide a practical help to researchers in the field to bring their work to wide interdisciplinary audiences.

The “building paradox”: research on building-related environmental effects requires global visibility and attention

The construction and operation of buildings is a major contributor to global energy demand, greenhouse gases emissions, resource depletion, waste generation, and associated environmental effects, such as climate change, pollution and habitat destruction. Despite its wide relevance, research on building-related environmental effects often fails to achieve global visibility and attention, particularly in premiere interdisciplinary journals – thus representing a major gap in the research these journals offer. In this article we review and reflect on the factors that are likely causing this lack of visibility for such a prominent research topic and emphasise the need to reconcile the construction and operational phases into the physical unity of a building, to contribute to the global environmental discourse using a lifecycle-based approach. This article also aims to act as a call for action and to raise awareness of this important gap. The evidence contained in the article can support institutional policies to improve the status quo and provide a practical help to researchers in the field to bring their work to wide interdisciplinary audiences.

Promoting life cycle assessment in Azerbaijan

The economic reforms and industrial modernization programs realized in the past two decades have led to rapid economic growth in Azerbaijan during this period. However, transition from pure economic growth to sustainable development that incorporates social and environmental dimensions alongside economic ones will require adoption of sustainable development principles that can be supported through life cycle based-approaches. This study explores the opportunities for supporting life cycle approaches in Azerbaijan and the driving forces that would enable their widespread application. Within this context, international treaties and conventions on sustainable development and climate change, transboundary partnership programs, particularly in energy sector, and projects run by multinational companies are examined as potential drivers of life cycle assessment (LCA) and life cycle management (LCM) application in the country. Additionally, higher education institutions of Azerbaijan are reviewed in terms of their capacity for building life cycle thinking into curricula and establishing LCA collaboration network and incorporating life cycle concepts into national energy and infrastructure projects are evaluated as possible routes for promoting life cycle applications in the country. It is concluded that developing and including LCA and LCM subjects in environment-related programs in higher education that are currently focused on more traditional subjects such as ecological chemistry, environmental law and geographic ecology and establishment of a collaboration network will increase the capacity of local stakeholders who, in turn, may serve as partners in multilateral development projects that would not only contribute to the achievement of national sustainable development targets but also enable widespread application of life cycle approaches in Azerbaijan.

The Use of Life Cycle-Based Approaches in the Food Service Sector to Improve Sustainability: A Systematic Review

With the prevalence of eating out increasing, the food service sector has an increasing role in accelerating the transition towards more sustainable and healthy food systems. While life cycle-based approaches are recommended to be used as reference methods for assessing the environmental sustainability of food systems and supply chains, their application in the food service sector is still relatively scarce. In this study, a systematic review was conducted to examine the use and effectiveness of life-cycle based interventions in improving the sustainability of food services. This review found that life-cycle based approaches are not only useful for identifying hotspots for impact reduction, but also for comparing the performance of different sustainability interventions. In particular, interventions targeting the production phase, such as promoting dietary change through menu planning in which high-impact ingredients (e.g., animal products) are replaced with low-impact ingredients (e.g., plant foods), had the highest improvement potential. Interventions targeting other phases of the catering supply chain (e.g., food storage, meal preparation, waste management) had considerably lower improvement potentials. This review article provides valuable insights on how the sustainability of the food service sector can be improved without the burden shifting of impacts, which interventions to prioritise, and where knowledge gaps in research exist. A key recommendation for future research is to focus on combined life cycle thinking approaches that are capable of addressing sustainability holistically in the food service sector by integrating and assessing the environmental, social and economic dimensions of interventions.

Cost-benefit analysis of alternative vehicles in the Philippines using immediate and distant future scenarios

Alternative vehicle technologies promise a sustainable future by reducing carbon emissions and pollution. However, their widespread adoption tends to be slow due to high costs and uncertainties in benefits. Using a life cycle-based approach, this study calculates ownership savings and societal benefits for various alternative vehicle technologies against their baseline vehicle technology (e.g. gasoline or diesel). The assessment is performed from a developing country context – in the Philippines. Furthermore, immediate and distant future scenarios are modeled. The immediate future scenario assesses costs and benefits if the shift is to happen now, while the distant future scenario considers the effect of widespread autonomous driving and ridesharing. The results of the study echo the significant societal benefits from electric- and fuel cell-powered vehicles found in literature, but they are hindered by high ownership costs. In the immediate future, the diesel hybrid electric vehicle can potentially have both positive societal and operational costs for public transportation. For a gasoline-powered private passenger car, a simple shift to diesel, 20% biodiesel or 85% methanol can be beneficial. In the distant future, it is expected that autonomous, rideshared vehicles can potentially lure people away from driving their own vehicles, because of lower costs per passenger-kilometer while sustaining the privacy and comfort of a private car.

SUP&R DSS: A sustainability-based decision support system for road pavements

Road pavement community members are increasingly becoming aware of the need to incorporating the principles of sustainable development into the sector. Policies are also going in this direction and as a consequence in the recent years researchers and practitioners are coming up with new materials, technologies and practices designed to reduce the negative impacts of their activities in the surroundings. Within this framework the road pavements sector is witnessing a paradigm shift towards the development of pavement technologies incorporating high-content of recycled materials, as well as best practices to decrease the overall carbon footprint. These are all promising solutions that to the most can sound as sustainable practices. However the whole road pavement community is still investigating methodologies and tools to define what actually sustainable means and thereby performing a sustainable decision-making. It is within this context that the need of a sustainability-based decision support system (DSS) that could help road pavement engineers at the design stage was identified and is here presented. The Sustainable Pavements & Railways DSS (SUP&R DSS) relies on a multi-criteria decision analysis (MCDA) method to rank the sustainability of alternatives. It applies life cycle-based approaches to quantify the values of a set of indicators purposely and methodologically selected to capture the cause-effect link between the general concepts of the three wellbeing dimensions of sustainability, i.e., environmental, economic and social, and the infrastructure construction and maintenance practice. Furthermore, the system allows selecting different weighting for the indicators but offers also a default set of values derived from a survey conducted with over 50 stakeholders in Europe and beyond. Together with the development, structure and features of the SUP&R DSS, this paper present its applicability by means of a case study aiming at identifying the most sustainable asphalt mixture for wearing courses. Several promising options for flexible road pavements were selected, ranging from low to hot temperature asphalt. The results show that a foamed warm mix asphalt mixture with a reclaimed asphalt pavement content of 50% is the most sustainable among the competing alternatives. Furthermore, a sensitivity analysis conducted to investigate the influence of the indicators weights, the parameters of the MCDA method and the long-term performance of the alternative asphalt mixtures on the stability of the ranking showed that its first position in the ranking remained unaffected.

A multiple lifecycle-based approach to sustainable product configuration design

Research on end-of-life (EoL) product recovery has focused on adopting reuse, remanufacturing, and/or recycling after product use. These product EoL strategies need to be considered early during product design in order to reduce the total lifecycle cost, minimize environmental impact, and enhance overall product sustainability. Considering the implementation of such EoL strategies across multiple lifecycles of a product will enable maximum recovery of the materials and embedded energy from previous lifecycle products for use in subsequent lifecycle products. Such practices can help companies increase global manufacturing competitiveness and promote corporate social responsibility for more sustainable economic growth. However, a multi-lifecycle based approach to product configuration design optimization, simultaneously considering conflicting objectives, has not been well addressed in previous studies. In this study, a multi-lifecycle based methodology is proposed to solve multi-objective product configuration design problems considering conflicting economic and environmental objectives. The methodology addresses issues across all the lifecycle stages, from extracting raw materials to product EoL recovery (i.e., pre-manufacturing, manufacturing, use, and post-use), and the entire demand cycle. The multi-objective optimization problem can be solved by introducing a non-dominated sorting genetic algorithm II using which various product design solutions can be generated by considering the tradeoff between several objectives. The proposed methodology is implemented on an industrial case study for the configuration design of toner cartridges. The Pareto optimal solutions yield better economic and environmental performances compared to the performance of the base toner cartridge. The results show that following the multi-lifecycle based approach to implement EoL strategies (i.e., reuse, remanufacturing, and recycling) could provide over 20% savings in total lifecycle cost, total global warming potential, and total water use in comparison to the same product configuration made up with entirely new components.

Sustainability evaluation of retrofitting solutions for rural buildings through life cycle approach and multi-criteria analysis

In an international context that is faced with several environmental issues, especially in relation to energy efficiency, the finding of sustainable solutions for retrofitting existing buildings is a challenging issue. Comprehensive evaluation of the applied materials is required to understand their true impact on the environment as well as their economic suitability. Therefore, a life cycle-based approach is required. This work presents a hybrid method, including energy and comfort optimization, Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) and Life Cycle Costing (LCC) analysis, applied for retrofitting a traditional rural building and then combined together in a multi-criteria approach. The case study considers the assessment of the sustainability of several solutions for roof insulation according to seven criteria derived from the hybrid method developed: energy saving, non-renewable energy, comfort performance, global warming, ozone layer depletion, respiratory inorganics and Net Present Value. The multi-criteria approach used to combine these criteria is the Electre TRI-rC method. The results obtained with this method show the division of the materials into three categories with overall bad, medium or good performance. The stability of results is verified against a two-fold sensitivity analysis.

Relevance of lifecycle management to smart city development

Smart cities are complex ecosystems with interrelated systems or system of systems. Hence, management of smart cities is very important due to the big number of stakeholders, diversity of application domains, heterogeneity of data sources, and complexity of smart systems. Nevertheless, fewer studies have considered management aspect of smart cities compared to other technical aspects. Considering the different phases of smart city development, there is a need for comprehensive vision to manage smart city across lifecycle phases. This work proposes a smart city lifecycle-based approach which consists of two components. First, lifecycle-based representation of smart cities by adding the depth of 'Time' as a new dimension. Second, interaction approach between lifecycle management system and IoT platforms. For this purpose, this paper examines the empirical relevance of lifecycle management to smart city development through a limited case-based survey.

Relevance of lifecycle management to smart city development

Smart cities are complex ecosystems with interrelated systems or system of systems. Hence, management of smart cities is very important due to the big number of stakeholders, diversity of application domains, heterogeneity of data sources, and complexity of smart systems. Nevertheless, fewer studies have considered management aspect of smart cities compared to other technical aspects. Considering the different phases of smart city development, there is a need for comprehensive vision to manage smart city across lifecycle phases. This work proposes a smart city lifecycle-based approach which consists of two components. First, lifecycle-based representation of smart cities by adding the depth of 'Time' as a new dimension. Second, interaction approach between lifecycle management system and IoT platforms. For this purpose, this paper examines the empirical relevance of lifecycle management to smart city development through a limited case-based survey.

Understanding the role of waste prevention in local waste management: A literature review.

Local waste management has so far been characterised by end-of-pipe solutions, landfilling, incineration, and recycling. End-of-pipe solutions build on a different mind-set than life cycle-based approaches, and for this reason, local waste managers are reluctant to consider strategies for waste prevention. To accelerate the transition of waste and resource management towards a more integrated management, waste prevention needs to play a larger role in the local waste management. In this review article, we collect knowledge from the scientific community on waste prevention of relevance to local waste management. We analyse the trends in the waste prevention literature by organising the literature into four categories. The results indicate an increasing interest in waste prevention, but not much literature specifically concerns the integration of prevention into the local waste management. However, evidence from the literature can inform local waste management on the prevention potential; the environmental and social effects of prevention; how individuals in households can be motivated to reduce waste; and how the effects of prevention measures can be monitored. Nevertheless, knowledge is still lacking on local waste prevention, especially regarding the methods for monitoring and how local waste management systems can be designed to encourage waste reduction in the households. We end the article with recommendations for future research. The literature review can be useful for both practitioners in the waste sector and for academics seeking an overview of previous research on waste prevention.

Chemical footprint: A methodological framework for bridging life cycle assessment and planetary boundaries for chemical pollution

The development and use of footprint methodologies for environmental assessment are increasingly important for both the scientific and political communities. Starting from the ecological footprint, developed at the beginning of the 1990s, several other footprints were defined, e.g., carbon and water footprint. These footprints-even though based on a different meaning of "footprint"-integrate life cycle thinking, and focus on some challenging environmental impacts including resource consumption, CO2 emission leading to climate change, and water consumption. However, they usually neglect relevant sources of impacts, as those related to the production and use of chemicals. This article presents and discusses the need and relevance of developing a methodology for assessing the chemical footprint, coupling a life cycle-based approach with methodologies developed in other contexts, such as ERA and sustainability science. Furthermore, different concepts underpin existing footprint and this could be the case also of chemical footprint. At least 2 different approaches and steps to chemical footprint could be envisaged, applicable at the micro- as well as at the meso- and macroscale. The first step (step 1) is related to the account of chemicals use and emissions along the life cycle of a product, sector, or entire economy, to assess potential impacts on ecosystems and human health. The second step (step 2) aims at assessing to which extent actual emission of chemicals harm the ecosystems above their capability to recover (carrying capacity of the system). The latter step might contribute to the wide discussion on planetary boundaries for chemical pollution: the thresholds that should not be surpassed to guarantee a sustainable use of chemicals from an environmental safety perspective. The definition of what the planetary boundaries for chemical pollution are and how the boundaries should be identified is an on-going scientific challenge for ecotoxicology and ecology. In this article, we present a case study at the macroscale for the European Union, in which the chemical footprint according to step 1 is calculated for the year 2005. A proposal for extending this approach toward step 2 is presented and discussed, complemented by a discussion on the challenges and the use of appropriate methodologies for assessing chemical footprints to stimulate further research and discussion on the topic.