Som et led i arbejdet med cirkulær økonomi ønsker Kolding Kommune at få skabt en opgørelse af kommunens samlede materiale-, energi- og affaldsflows samt samlede miljøpåvirkninger. De samlede miljøpåvirkninger opgøres i et livscyklusperspektiv, således at der ikke kun tages højde for de direkte udledninger af eksempelvis CO2 i kommunen, men også udledninger fra fremstilling af produkter udenfor kommunen og i andre lande.
Formålet med analysen er:
-At skabe en baseline som fungerer som reference og sammenligningsgrundlag, når fremtidige tiltag i forbindelse med cirkulær økonomi udvælges og prioriteres.
-At skabe et overordnet overblik over de væsentlige materiale- og energistrømme samt miljøpåvirkninger forårsaget af aktiviteter i Kolding Kommune
Opgørelsen af materiale- og energiflows omfatter både, hvad der produceres og bruges i kommunen. Brug af materialer og energi og affaldsgenerering opdeles på henholdsvis kommunens virksomheder og som endeligt forbrug (husholdninger). Masse- og energistrømsanalysen anvendes til at identificere de store strømme i kommunen. Det er ofte her, at de største potentialer for en mere cirkulær økonomi kan findes.
...
‘Green’ business models have received considerable political and financial support, which for the public is a validation of the sustainability of the business models. The sustainability performance seems, however, often questionable, and the purpose of this paper is to investigate the performance of a specific public support programme for green business models.
Based on an analytical framework of key elements of life cycle assessment (LCA), 14 business models supported financially by the Danish Fund for Green Business Development were investigated. This included text analysis and interviews with companies receiving funding.
Results document that despite clear ambitions of improving environmental performance, life cycle assessment and other quantitative methods are rarely applied among supported companies to document the environmental benefits of their green business models. Furthermore, the companies rarely consider substitution and alternatives or apply a holistic perspective in terms of impacts.
There is an urgent need to strengthen credibility of public support programme on the performance of green business models. The LCA community has, as expert community, a special role in pointing at the implications and need of documenting environmental performance.
ShareIt link: https://rdcu.be/b6dxE
As part of the local project 'Det Cirkulære Nordjylland' an inventory is made of North Jutland's total resource flows and environmental impacts. The inventory includes both a socio-economic analysis, mass flow analysis and an inventory of total environmental impacts. In addition, a number of possible, concrete measures for changes in existing mass flows are identified, as inputs to the strategy for a circular approach in North Jutland. The calculation is made from both a production and a consumption perspective.
The production perspective includes a statement of the total material and energy inputs to, as well as product and waste outputs from all companies (both private and public) in North Jutland. In addition, the total environmental impacts from company 'purchases' (materials, energy, services, etc.), direct emissions from the companies, and treatment of the companies' waste are calculated. Environmental impacts are shown as greenhouse gas emissions as well as a selection of other environmental impact categories, eg particulate pollution, biodiversity, nutrient load, etc.
The consumption perspective includes a statement of the total material and energy inputs to, as well as waste outputs from, the citizens of North Jutland. In addition, the same environmental impacts as for companies are calculated for the citizens' total consumption of goods, energy, services, public services and waste treatment services.
The final project report is here (in Danish):Cirkulær Økonomi i Nordjylland – opgørelse af massestrømme og LCA resultater.
Consumers as well as professional players in the grocery and catering industry are increasingly demanding information on the climate footprint of the foods they buy or sell. From the fall of 2020, consumers as well as professional players in the grocery and catering industry will be able to gather knowledge and inspiration in "The Large Climate Database". The project consists of a professional dialogue phase during the spring of 2020, preparation of a climate database of more than 500 foodstuffs, and publishing and dissemination of the database in Danish and English at the end of 2020. "The Large Climate Database" will be a central tool that can be used, for example, as a basis for a simplified climate labeling system, climate-adjusted recipes, apps for calculating a purchase's climate footprint, school curriculums, upgrading kitchen staff, information campaigns and much more.
Visit the database: https://denstoreklimadatabase.dk/
For more information visit Concito's press-release, public service tv channel and
podcast for the Climate Podcast - by the newspaper Information (all in Danish).
See small video presentation of the project (15 minutes, in English):
The main objective of the LIFE-REthinkWASTE project is to endow municipalities with a “plug and play” governance scheme based on the PAYT (Pay As You Throw) and KAYT (Know As You Throw) paradigms to increase waste separation, reduce waste generation, and increase the effective recovery rates, whilst simultaneously reducing the average household waste bill. This objective will be tackled by adapting and re-addressing the waste management plans and other management/normative drivers (e.g., regulations, financial plans, and service contracts) according to a new paradigm in urban waste policy fares based on a combined approach of PAYT (supported by big data) and KAYT, and inspired by a novel social innovation approach.
A summary of the main results is available in this poster.
EU manufacturing companies are facing increasingly competitive and dynamic markets. To compete in the modern world, companies in the process industry need highly flexible manufacturing environments, capable of continuously adapting to changing conditions by means of advanced technologies and decision-making processes that take advantage of big data in real-time. Enterprises need to harness the knowledge held within their data streams to become more energy and resource-efficient while improving safety and lowering their environmental impact.
Cognitive manufacturing refers to a new manufacturing paradigm where machines are fully connected through wireless networks, monitored by sensors, and controlled by advanced computational intelligence to fine-tune product quality, optimise performance and sustainability, and reduce costs. Read more at http://www.hypercog.eu/ or at https://cordis.europa.eu/project/id/869886
A video giver a overview of the goals of the project, with the various project partners explaining the visions for the project: https://vimeo.com/859690816
Considering the general agreement in the literature that environmental labelling should be based on consequential modelling, while all actually implemented environmental labelling schemes are based on attributional modelling, we investigate the arguments for this situation as provided in the literature, and whether a dual label, representing on the same label the attributional and consequential results for the same product, can be a relevant solution or at least contribute to a more informed discussion.
We developed a dual label for three hypothetical, comparable products and presented this for a small test audience, asking three questions, namely “Which product would you choose?”, “Was the attributional information useful?” and “Would you accept to have only the attributional information?”
From this small pilot exercise, it appears that informed consumers may have a strong preference for consequential information and that the main problem in communicating consequential results is that they are perceived as less trustworthy and more uncertain due to the fact that the consequences are located in the future. It thus appears important to build into a consequential label some increased level of guarantee of future good behaviour.
We propose to apply the above questions to a more statistically representative audience to confirm or refute the findings of this little test exercise.
ShareIt link: https://rdcu.be/bzZFn
The management of ladle refractory material waste in European Steelworks currently has no consistent Best Available Technology (BAT), with most of it being dumped in landfills. At the same time all steelmakers are worried about ladle refractory costs and risks but the improvements are achieved based on partial assumptions or trial and error. This Circular Economy Project answers to this situation based on a "4R" model, combining waste reduction by means of monitoring and optimizing the ladle refractory consumption (via remaining brick thickness) with processes for Reusing/Remanufacturing and Recycling the ladle refractory brick waste. The final optimized application will come from an expert decision tree and accompanied by the corresponding LCA studies. This innovative approach and knowledge aims to be totally transferable to other steel companies with both significant environmental and economic benefits.
The integration of an off-grid solar-assisted heat pump (SHP) and a sequencing batch biofilter granular reactor (SBBGR) for thermal energy recovery from wastewater was assessed by means of a prospective life cycle assessment (LCA) and life cycle costing (LCC), by theoretically scaling up a pilot installation in Bari, Italy, to a full-scale unit designed for 5000 person-equivalents. The LCA and LCC included all activities in the life cycle of the SHP and wastewater treatment plant (WWTP), namely construction, operation and end-of-life. The thermal energy produced by the SHP was assessed as supplying heating and cooling for an air-conditioning system, displacing a conventional air-source heat pump powered by electricity from the grid. This integrated system was compared to a reference situation where wastewater is treated in a conventional WWTP applying activated sludge with no thermal energy recovery system, showing clear environmental benefits in all impact indicators, such as a 42% reduction in greenhouse-gas emissions and a cost reduction of 53%. Several sensitivity analyses confirmed these findings, with the exception of the price rebound effect, which showed that the lower cost of the integrated system could lead to overturning the environmental benefits. As a limitation of the study, the distribution of the supplied air-conditioning to meet a demand off-site the WWTP premises, such as in residential buildings or hotels, was not included. Therefore, our results constitute only a preliminary positive outcome that should be validated in a real-life application.
