Impact categories for life cycle assessment research of seafood production systems: Review and prospectus

Goal, Scope and Background In face of continued declines in global fisheries landings and concurrent rapid aquaculture development, the sustainability of seafood production is of increasing concern. Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) offers a convenient means of quantifying the impacts associated with many of the energetic and material inputs and outputs in these industries. However, the relevant but limited suite of impact categories currently used in most LCA research fails to capture a number of important environmental and social burdens unique to fisheries and aquaculture. This article reviews the impact categories used in published LCA research of seafood production to date, reports on a number of methodological innovations, and discusses the challenges to and opportunities for further impact category developments. Main Features The range of environmental and socio-economic impacts associated with fisheries and aquaculture production are introduced, and both the commonly used and innovative impact categories employed in published LCA research of seafood production are discussed. Methodological innovations reported in agricultural LCAs are also reviewed for possible applications to seafood LCA research. Challenges and options for including additional environmental and socioeconomic impact categories are explored. Results A review of published LCA research in fisheries and aquaculture indicates the frequent use of traditional environmental impact categories as well as a number of interesting departures from the standard suite of categories employed in LCA studies in other sectors. Notable examples include the modeling of benthic impacts, by-catch, emissions from anti-fouling paints, and the use of Net Primary Productivity appropriation to characterize biotic resource use. Socio-economic impacts have not been quantified, nor does a generally accepted methodology for their consideration exist. However, a number of potential frameworks for the integration of such impacts into LCA have been proposed. Discussion LCA analyses of fisheries and aquaculture call attention to an important range of environmental interactions that are usually not considered in discussions of sustainability in the seafood sector. These include energy use, biotic resource use, and the toxicity of anti-fouling paints. However, certain important impacts are also currently overlooked in such research. While prospects clearly exist for improving and expanding on recent additions to environmental impact categories, the nature of the LCA framework may preclude treatment of some of these impacts. Socio-economic impact categories have only been described in a qualitative manner. Despite a number of challenges, significant opportunities exist to quantify several important socio-economic impacts. Conclusion The limited but increasing volume of LCA research of industrial fisheries and aquaculture indicates a growing interest in the use of LCA methodology to understand and improve the sustainability performance of seafood production systems. Recent impact category innovations, and the potential for further impact category developments that account for several of the unique interactions characteristic of fisheries and aquaculture will significantly improve the usefulness of LCA in this context, although quantitative analysis of certain types of impacts may remain beyond the scope of the LCA framework. The desirability of incorporating socio-economic impacts is clear, but such integration will require considerable methodological development. Recommendations and Perspectives While the quantity of published LCA research for seafood production systems is clearly increasing, the influence this research will have on the ground remains to be seen. In part, this will depend on the ability of LCA researchers to advance methodological innovations that enable consideration of a broader range of impacts specific to seafood production. It will also depend on the ability of researchers to communicate with a broader audience than the currently narrow LCA community.     

环境足迹的核算与整合框架——基于生命周期评价的视角

环境足迹及其与生命周期评价(LCA)的关系是工业生态学关注的新热点。从探讨环境足迹与LCA的关系入手,以碳足迹、水足迹、土地足迹和材料足迹为例,分别对每一项足迹指标两个版本的核算方法进行了比较。根据清单加和过程的特点,将所有足迹指标划分为基于权重因子和基于特征因子两类,总结了两者的适用性和局限性。在此基础上提出了一个环境足迹核算与整合的统一框架。该框架基于LCA视角建立,但对系统边界和清单数据的要求相对灵活,因而也适用于生命周期不甚明确的情形。研究在一定程度上揭示了足迹指标的方法学实质,同时也为环境影响综合评估提供了一条规范化的途径。     

Water Resources in Life-Cycle Impact Assessment: Considerations in Choosing Category Indicators

Water is one of many resources, wastes, and pollutants considered in life-cycle assessment (LCA). The widely used indicator for water resources, the total input of water used, is not adequate to assess water resources from a sustainability perspective. More detailed indicators are proposed for water resources in two areas essential to water sustainability: water quantity and water quality. The governing principles for a consideration of water quantity are that (1) the water sources or LCA inputs are renewable and sustainable and (2) the volume of water released or LCA outputs are returned to humans or ecosystems for further use downstream. The governing principle for a consideration of water quality is that the utility of the returned water is not impaired for either humans or ecosystems downstream. Water quantity indicators are defined for water use, consumption, and depletion to reveal the sustainable or nonsustainable nature of the sources. A flexible set of water quality indicators for various factors that may impair water quality are then discussed, including the LCA study choices, technical challenges, and trade-offs involved with such indicators. Indicator selection from this set involves the underlying concern or endpoint represented by the indicator and the level and accuracy of decision-making information that the indicator must provide. With significant differences in emissions among systems studied using LCA and different purposes of the LCA studies themselves, a single, default set of water quality indicators applicable to all systems studied with LCA is problematic. The proposed water quantity and quality indicators for LCA studies are also intended to be compatible with environmental management and reporting systems so that data needs are not duplicated and interpretation for one does not contradict or sow confusion for the other.     

A proposal to measure absolute environmental sustainability in life cycle assessment

Environmental monitoring indicates that progress towards the goal of environmental sustainability in many cases is slow, non-existing or negative. Indicators that use environmental carrying capacity references to evaluate whether anthropogenic systems are, or will potentially be, environmentally sustainable are therefore increasingly important. Such absolute indicators exist, but suffer from shortcomings such as incomplete coverage of environmental issues, varying data quality and varying or insufficient spatial resolution. The purpose of this article is to demonstrate that life cycle assessment (LCA) can potentially reduce or eliminate these shortcomings.We developed a generic mathematical framework for the use of carrying capacity as environmental sustainability reference in spatially resolved life cycle impact assessment models and applied this framework to the LCA impact category terrestrial acidification. In this application carrying capacity was expressed as acid deposition (eq. mol H⁺ ha⁻¹ year⁻¹) and derived from two complementary pH related thresholds. A geochemical steady-state model was used to calculate a carrying capacity corresponding to these thresholds for 99,515 spatial units worldwide. Carrying capacities were coupled with deposition factors from a global deposition model to calculate characterisation factors (CF), which expresses space integrated occupation of carrying capacity (ha year) per kg emission. Principles for calculating the entitlement to carrying capacity of anthropogenic systems were then outlined, and the logic of considering a studied system environmentally sustainable if its indicator score (carrying capacity occupation) does not exceed its carrying capacity entitlement was demonstrated. The developed CFs and entitlement calculation principles were applied to a case study evaluating emission scenarios for personal residential electricity consumption supplied by production from 45 US coal fired electricity plant.Median values of derived CFs are 0.16–0.19 ha year kg⁻¹ for common acidifying compounds. CFs are generally highest in Northern Europe, Canada and Alaska due to the low carrying capacity of soils in these regions. Differences in indicator scores of the case study emission scenarios are to a larger extent driven by variations in pollution intensities of electricity plants than by spatial variations in CFs. None of the 45 emission scenarios could be considered environmentally sustainable when using the relative contribution to GDP or the grandfathering (proportionality to past emissions) valuation principles to calculating carrying capacity entitlements. It is argued that CFs containing carrying capacity references are complementary to existing CFs in supporting decisions aimed at simultaneously reducing environmental impacts efficiently and maintaining or achieving environmental sustainability.We have demonstrated that LCA indicators can be modified from being relative to being absolute indicators of environmental sustainability. Further research should focus on quantifying uncertainties related to choices in indicator design and on reducing uncertainties effectively.     

Extending the Life Cycle Methodology to Cover Impacts of Land Use Systems on the Water Balance (7 pp)

Goal, Scope and Background Whilst initially designed for industrial production systems, environmental life cycle assessment (LCA) has recently been increasingly applied to agriculture and forestry projects. Several authors suggested that the standard LCA methodology needs to be refined to cover the particularities of agri- and silvicultural production systems. Until now, water quantity received little attention in these methodological revisions, notwithstanding the well-known impact of agriculture and forestry on issues like water availability, drought and flood risk. This paper proposes an add-on to existing LCA methods in the form of an indicator set that integrates water quantity impacts of agri- and silvicultural production. Method First, system boundaries are discussed in order to identify the water flows between the production system and the environment. These flows are attributed to impact categories, linked to environmental burdens and to the areas of protection. Appropriate indicators are selected for each potential burden. Results and Discussion At the present, two input related impact categories deal with water quantity: Abiotic resource depletion and land use. The list of output related impact categories presented by Udo de Haes et al. (1999) does not include water quantity impacts like flood and drought risk. A new impact category “regional water balance” is introduced to cover these risks. Exceedance probabilities are used as indicators for these temporal variations in streamflow. Conclusion and Outlook The method presented in this paper can bring a life cycle assessment closer to real world concerns. The main drawback, however, is the increasing data requirement that might hinder the feasibility of the method. Future research should focus on this problem, for instance by applying a relatively simple numerical model that can calculate the indicator scores from more easily accessible data.     

Interpreting life cycle assessment results for integrated sustainability decision support: can an ecological economic perspective help us to connect the dots?

Life cycle assessment (LCA) is often described as a sustainability decision support tool. In practice, however, the interpretation and application of most LCA studies are restricted to eco-efficiency considerations, which provide an important but incomplete basis for sustainability decision-making. Recent methodological advances in the field enable assessing LCA results against sustainability boundaries or thresholds at planetary or more finely resolved scales. Weighting, although controversial, facilitates consistent, stakeholder-appropriate decision-making that reflects prioritization among multiple and potentially competing sustainability outcomes. Here, we discuss how the three minimum necessary criteria for sustainability (i.e., sustainable scale relative to biocapacity, distributive justice, and efficient allocation), as proposed by ecological economist Herman Daly, may provide an internally consistent basis for integrating these methodological developments, and for subsequently better positioning LCA as a sustainability decision support framework.

     

Geopolitical-related supply risk assessment as a complement to environmental impact assessment: the case of electric vehicles

Purpose

Introducing a geopolitical-related supply risk (GeoPolRisk) into the life cycle sustainability assessment (LCSA) framework adds a criticality aspect to the current life cycle assessment (LCA) framework to more meaningfully address direct impacts on Natural Resource AoP. The weakness of resource indicators in LCA has been the topic of discussion within the life cycle community for some time. This paper presents a case study on how to proceed towards the integration of resource criticality assessment into LCA under the LCSA. The paper aims at highlighting the significance of introducing the GeoPolRisk indicator to complement and extend the established environmental LCA impact categories.

Methods

A newly developed GeoPolRisk indicator proposed by Gemechu et al., J Ind Ecol (2015) was applied to metals used in the life cycle of an electric vehicle, and the results are compared with an attributional LCA of the same resources. The inventory data is based on the publication by Hawkins et al., J Ind Ecol 17:53–64 (2013), which provides a current, transparent, and detailed life cycle inventory data of a European representative first-generation battery small electric vehicle.

Results and discussion

From the 14 investigated metals, copper, aluminum, and steel are the most dominant elements that pose high environmental impacts. On the other hand, magnesium and neodymium show relatively higher supply risk when geopolitical elements are considered. While, the environmental indicator results all tend to point the same hotspots which arise from the substantial use of resources in the electric vehicle’s life cycle, the GeoPolRisk highlights that there are important elements present in very small amounts but crucial to the overall LCSA. It provides a complementary sustainability dimension that can be added to conventional LCA as an important extension within LCSA.

Conclusions

Resource challenges in a short-term time perspective can be better addressed by including social and geopolitical factors in addition to the conventional indicators which are based on their geological availability. This is more significant for modern technologies such as electronic devices in which critical resources contribute to important components. The case study advances the use of the GeoPolRisk assessment method but does still face certain limitations that need further elaboration; however, directions for future research are promising.

     

Development of a Consumer Environmental Index and Results for Washington State Consumers

Consumer choices affect sustainability of societal systems, and state governments increasingly are interested in environmental impacts of consumption. This article describes a Consumer Environmental Index (CEI) to track the impacts of product purchase, use, and disposal and applies this initial CEI to Washington State in the United States. CEI has modules for product and service use, upstream resource extraction and manufacturing, and downstream disposal. CEI uses hybrid life cycle assessment (LCA) methods, combined with purchasing data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) Consumer Expenditure Survey. For Washington State, when human health and ecosystem toxicity impact was assessed with the TRACI/CalTOX methods, weighted aggregate and per consumer impacts in all categories increased during the 6 years from 2000 to 2005. For impacts per real dollar spent, only the CEI's climate change component declined, falling nearly 7% between 2000 and 2005. Purchasing details in the BLS expenditure surveys enable the CEI to track environmental impact details on 700 individual categories of products and services. For example, sugar, motor oil, and wood heat appear to have serious environmental impacts, whereas recycling of paper, cardboard, and food and beverage container discards can be as effective at reducing greenhouse gas emissions as cutting vehicle fuel usage nearly in half. Such results may serve to increase understanding of environmentally effective actions to reduce climate, human health, and ecosystem impacts of consumption.     

Integration of life cycle assessment in the environmental information system

Background, aim, and scope  As the sustainability improvement becomes an essential business task of industry, a number of companies are adopting IT-based environmental information systems (EIS). Life cycle assessment (LCA), a tool to improve environmental friendliness of a product, can also be systemized as a part of the EIS. This paper presents a case of an environmental information system which is integrated with online LCA tool to produce sets of hybrid life cycle inventory and examine its usefulness in the field application of the environmental management. Main features  Samsung SDI Ltd., the producer of display panels, has launched an EIS called Sustainability Management Initiative System (SMIS). The system comprised modules of functions such as environmental management system (EMS), green procurement (GP), customer relation (e-VOC), eco-design, and LCA. The LCA module adopted the hybrid LCA methodology in the sense that it combines process LCA for the site processes and input–output (IO) LCA for upstream processes to produce cradle-to-gate LCA results. LCA results from the module are compared with results of other LCA studies made by the application of different methodologies. The advantages and application of the LCA system are also discussed in light of the electronics industry. Results and discussion  LCA can play a vital role in sustainability management by finding environmental burden of products in their life cycle. It is especially true in the case of the electronics industry, since the electronic products have some critical public concerns in the use and end-of-life phase. SMIS shows a method for hybrid LCA through online data communication with EMS and GP module. The integration of IT-based hybrid LCA in environmental information system was set to begin in January 2006. The advantage of the comparing and regular monitoring of the LCA value is that it improves the system completeness and increases the reliability of LCA. By comparing the hybrid LCA and process LCA in the cradle-to-gate stage, the gap between both methods of the 42-in. standard definition plasma display panel (PDP) ranges from 1% (acidification impact category) to −282% (abiotic resource depletion impact category), with an average gap of 68.63%. The gaps of the impact categories of acidification (AP), eutrophication (EP), and global warming (GWP) are relatively low (less than 10%). In the result of the comparative analysis, the strength of correlation of three impact categories (AP, EP, GWP) shows that it is reliable to use the hybrid LCA when assessing the environmental impacts of the PDP module. Hybrid LCA has its own risk on data accuracy. However, the risk is affordable when it comes to the comparative LCA among different models of similar product line of a company. In the results of 2 years of monitoring of 42-in. Standard definition PDP, the hybrid LCA score has been decreased by 30%. The system also efficiently shortens man-days for LCA study per product. This fact can facilitate the eco-design of the products and can give quick response to the customer's inquiry on the product's eco-profile. Even though there is the necessity for improvement of process data currently available, the hybrid LCA provides insight into the assessments of the eco-efficiency of the manufacturing process and the environmental impacts of a product. Conclusions and recommendations  As the environmental concerns of the industries increase, the need for environmental data management also increases. LCA shall be a core part of the environmental information system by which the environmental performances of products can be controlled. Hybrid type of LCA is effective in controlling the usual eco-profile of the products in a company. For an industry, in particular electronics, which imports a broad band of raw material and parts, hybrid LCA is more practicable than the classic LCA. Continuous efforts are needed to align input data and keep conformity, which reduces data uncertainty of the system.     

Non-traditional tools for lca and sustainability

LCA practice focuses on impacts resulting from the release of chemicals into the environment, but consideration of ‘non-chemical impacts’ is as important for LCA, particularly as it relates to sustainability. Methodologies and philosophies exist for addressing non-chemical impacts, particularly in the area of resource depletion and land use, but the problem of comparing or integrating chemical and non-chemical impacts remains. A new approach for identifying and integrating impacts involves the use of an object-oriented modeling and simulation platform, such as Department of Energy Argonne National Laboratory’s Dynamic Information Architecture System (DIAS). LCA and impact categories can be described as ‘objects’ (at any level of detail or specificity) and any combination of objects and behaviors can be brought into a DIAS analysis frame. Related models that address objects’ behavior characteristics are linked only to their respective objects, not to each other. Thus, maximum flexibility and speed is possible. The process of dividing LCA and impact assessment into a hierarchy of objects provides new insights into the complex mixture of dynamic things, activities, and relationships inherent in LCA and sustainability. Ultimately, embracing the complexity of LCA may be the way to simplify it.     

How to monitor environmental pressures of a circular economy: An assessment of indicators

Understanding how a circular economy (CE) can reduce environmental pressures from economic activities is crucial for policy and practice. Science provides a range of indicators to monitor and assess CE activities. However, common CE activities, such as recycling and eco‐design, are contested in terms of their contribution to environmental sustainability. This article assesses whether and to what extent current approaches to assess CE activities sufficiently capture environmental pressures to monitor progress toward environmental sustainability. Based on a material flow perspective, we show that most indicators do not capture environmental pressures related to the CE activities they address. Many focus on a single CE activity or process, which does not necessarily contribute to increased environmental sustainability overall. Based on these results, we suggest complementing CE management indicators with indicators capturing basic environmental pressures related to the respective CE activity. Given the conceptual linkage between CE activities, resource extraction, and waste flows, we suggest that a resource‐based footprint approach accounting for major environmental inputs and outputs is necessary—while not sufficient—to assess the environmental sustainability of CE activities. As footprint approaches can be used across scales, they could aid the challenging process of developing indicators for monitoring progress toward an environmentally sustainable CE at the European, national, and company levels.     

Emergy as a Life Cycle Impact Assessment Indicator

Founded in thermodynamics and systems ecology, emergy evaluation is a method to associate a product with its dependencies on all upstream environmental and resource flows using a common unit of energy. Emergy is thus proposed as an indicator of aggregate resource use for life cycle assessment (LCA). An LCA of gold mining, based on an original life cycle inventory of a large gold mine in Peru, is used to demonstrate how emergy can be incorporated as an impact indicator into a process‐based LCA model. The results demonstrate the usefulness of emergy in the LCA context. The adaptation of emergy evaluation, traditionally performed outside of the LCA framework, requires changes to the conventional accounting rules and the incorporation of uncertainty estimations of the emergy conversion factors, or unit emergy values. At the same time, traditional LCA boundaries are extended to incorporate the environmental processes that provide for raw resources, including ores. The total environmental contribution to the product, doré, is dominated by mining and metallurgical processes and not the geological processes forming the gold ore. The measure of environmental contribution to 1 gram (g) of doré is 6.8E + 12 solar‐equivalent Joules (sej) and can be considered accurate within a factor of 2. These results are useful in assessing a process in light of available resources, which is essential to measuring long‐term sustainability. Comparisons are made between emergy and other measures of resource use, and recommendations are made for future incorporation of emergy into LCA that will result in greater consistency with existing life cycle inventory (LCI) databases and other LCA indicators.     

Combined application of life cycle assessment and data envelopment analysis as a methodological approach for the assessment of fisheries

Background, aim, and scope  

The synergistic use of life cycle assessment (LCA) and data envelopment analysis (DEA) is proposed as a new methodological approach to link environmental and socioeconomic assessments of fisheries. Therefore, the goal is to combine LCA and DEA in order to increase the assessment ability of both tools when applied to these fisheries. Specifically, the joint inclusion of economic aspects and the consideration of currently underrepresented environmental impact categories are tackled.     

Integrating triple bottom line input–output analysis into life cycle sustainability assessment framework: the case for US buildings

Purpose

With the increasing concerns related to integration of social and economic dimensions of the sustainability into life cycle assessment (LCA), traditional LCA approach has been transformed into a new concept, which is called as life cycle sustainability assessment (LCSA). This study aims to contribute the existing LCSA framework by integrating several social and economic indicators to demonstrate the usefulness of input–output modeling on quantifying sustainability impacts. Additionally, inclusion of all indirect supply chain-related impacts provides an economy-wide analysis and a macro-level LCSA. Current research also aims to identify and outline economic, social, and environmental impacts, termed as triple bottom line (TBL), of the US residential and commercial buildings encompassing building construction, operation, and disposal phases.

Methods

To achieve this goal, TBL economic input–output based hybrid LCA model is utilized for assessing building sustainability of the US residential and commercial buildings. Residential buildings include single and multi-family structures, while medical buildings, hospitals, special care buildings, office buildings, including financial buildings, multi-merchandise shopping, beverage and food establishments, warehouses, and other commercial structures are classified as commercial buildings according to the US Department of Commerce. In this analysis, 16 macro-level sustainability assessment indicators were chosen and divided into three main categories, namely environmental, social, and economic indicators.

Results and discussion

Analysis results revealed that construction phase, electricity use, and commuting played a crucial role in much of the sustainability impact categories. The electricity use was the most dominant component of the environmental impacts with more than 50 % of greenhouse gas emissions and energy consumption through all life cycle stages of the US buildings. In addition, construction phase has the largest share in income category with 60 % of the total income generated through residential building’s life cycle. Residential buildings have higher shares in all of the sustainability impact categories due to their relatively higher economic activity and different supply chain characteristics.

Conclusions

This paper is an important attempt toward integrating the TBL perspective into LCSA framework. Policymakers can benefit from such approach and quantify macro-level environmental, economic, and social impacts of their policy implications simultaneously. Another important outcome of this study is that focusing only environmental impacts may misguide decision-makers and compromise social and economic benefits while trying to reduce environmental impacts. Hence, instead of focusing on environmental impacts only, this study filled the gap about analyzing sustainability impacts of buildings from a holistic perspective.     

Significance of the use of non-renewable fossil CED as proxy indicator for screening LCA in the beverage packaging sector

Purpose

This study discusses the significance of the use of non-renewable fossil cumulative energy demand (CED) as proxy indicator in the beverage packaging sector, in order to detect those situations in which companies can benefit from the use of proxy indicators before a full life cycle assessment (LCA) application. Starting from a case study of two milk containers, the objectives of this paper are to assess if the use of this inventory indicator can be a suitable proxy indicator both (1) to decide which is the packaging alternative with the lowest environmental impact and (2) to identify the most impacting process units of the two products under study.

Method

The analysis was made according to ISO14040-44. The goal of the comparative LCA was to evaluate and to compare the potential environmental impacts from cradle to grave of a laminated carton container and a HDPE bottle. The results of the comparative LCA obtained with the non-renewable CED indicator are compared with a selection of impact categories: climate change, particulate matter formation, terrestrial acidification, fossil depletion, photochemical oxidant formation. A further analysis is made for the two products under study in order to determine which are the environmental hot spots in terms of life cycle stages, by the means of a contribution analysis.

Results and discussion

From the comparative LCA, the use of non-renewable CED revealed to be useful for a screening as the results given by the non-renewable CED indicator are confirmed by all the impact categories considered, even if underestimated. If the aim of the LCA study was to define which is the packaging solution with a lower environmental impact, the choice of this inventory indicator could have led to the same decision as if a comprehensive LCIA method was used. The contribution analysis, focusing on the identification of environmental hot spots in the packaging value chain, revealed that the choice of an inventory indicator as non-renewable CED can lead to misleading results, if compared with another impact category, such as climate change.

Conclusions

As in the future development of beverage packaging system, LCA will be necessarily integrated in the design process, it is important to define other ways of simplifying its application and spread its use among companies. The LCI indicator non-renewable fossil CED can effectively be used in order to obtain a preliminary estimation of the life cycle environmental impacts of two or more competing products in the beverage packaging sector.     

Extended Life Cycle Assessment of Southern Pink Shrimp Products Originating in Senegalese Artisanal and Industrial Fisheries for Export to Europe

Southern pink shrimp (Penaeus notialis) are an important Senegalese export commodity. Artisanal fisheries in rivers produce 60%. Forty percent are landed in trawl fisheries at sea. The shrimp from both fisheries result in a frozen, consumer‐packed product that is exported to Europe. We applied attributional life cycle assessment (LCA) to compare the environmental impact of the two supply chains and identify improvement options. In addition to standard LCA impact categories, biological impacts of each fishery were quantified with regard to landed by‐catch, discard, seafloor impact, and size of target catch. Results for typical LCA categories include that artisanal fisheries have much lower inputs and emissions in the fishing phase than does the industrial fishery. For the product from artisanal fisheries, the main part of the impact in the standard LCA categories occurs during processing on land, mainly due to the use of heavy fuel oil and refrigerants with high global warming and ozone depletion potentials. From a biological point of view, each fishery has advantages and drawbacks, and a number of improvement options were identified. If developing countries can ensure biological sustainability of their fisheries and design the chain on land in a resource‐efficient way, long distance to markets is not an obstacle to sustainable trading of seafood products originating in artisanal fisheries.     

Integrated municipal waste management systems: An indicator to assess their environmental and economic sustainability

Tools based on Life Cycle Thinking (LCT) are routinely used to assess the environmental and economic performance of integrated municipal solid waste (MSW) management systems. Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) is used to quantify the environmental impacts, whereas Life Cycle Costing (LCC) allows financial and economic assessments. These tools require specific experience and knowledge, and a large amount of data.The aim of this project is the definition of an indicator for the assessment of the environmental and economic sustainability of integrated MSW management systems. The challenge is to define a simple but comprehensive indicator that may be calculated also by local administrators and managers of the waste system and not only by scientists or LCT experts.The proposed indicator is a composite one, constituted by three individual indicators: two of them assess the environmental sustainability of the system by quantifying the achieved material and energy recovery levels, while the third one quantifies the costs. The composite indicator allows to compare different integrated MSW management systems in an objective way, and to monitor the performance of a system over time.The calculation of the three individual indicators has been tested on the integrated MSW management systems of the Lombardia Region (Italy) as well as on four of its provinces (Milano, Bergamo, Pavia, and Mantova).     

Extending effectiveness to efficiency: Comparing energy and environmental assessment methods for a wet cooling tower

Improving the environmental performance and energy efficiency of cooling towers requires systematic evaluation. However, methodological challenges emerge when applying typical environmental assessment methods to cooling towers. Hence, this paper compares the methods, analyzes their strengths and weaknesses, and proposes adaptions for evaluating cooling towers. As a case study, we applied five methods for assessing the wet cooling system of the high-performance data center in Stuttgart. These are material flow analysis (MFA), life cycle inventory, life cycle assessment (LCA), exergy analysis, and life cycle exergy analysis (LCEA). The comparison highlights that the LCA provides the most comprehensive environmental evaluation of cooling systems by considering several environmental impact dimensions. In the case of the wet cooling tower, however, electricity and water consumption cause more than 97% of the environmental impacts in all considered impact categories. Therefore, MFA containing energy flows suffices in many cases. Using exergy efficiency is controversially debated because exergy destruction is part of the technical principle applied in cooling towers and, therefore, difficult to interpret. The LCEA appears inappropriate because construction and disposal barely affect the exergy balance and are associated with transiting exergy. The method comparison demonstrates the need for further methodological development, such as dynamic extensions or the efficiency definition of cooling towers. The paper highlights that the methodological needs depend on the specific application.     

Ecosystem Services in Life Cycle Assessment while Encouraging Techno‐Ecological Synergies

Life cycle assessment (LCA) has enabled consideration of environmental impacts beyond the narrow boundary of traditional engineering methods. This reduces the chance of shifting impacts outside the system boundary. However, sustainability also requires that supporting ecosystems are not adversely affected and remain capable of providing goods and services for supporting human activities. Conventional LCA does not account for this role of nature, and its metrics are best for comparing alternatives. These relative metrics do not provide information about absolute environmental sustainability, which requires comparison between the demand and supply of ecosystem services (ES). Techno‐ecological synergy (TES) is a framework to account for ES, and has been demonstrated by application to systems such as buildings and manufacturing activities that have narrow system boundaries. This article develops an approach for techno‐ecological synergy in life cycle assessment (TES‐LCA) by expanding the steps in conventional LCA to incorporate the demand and supply of ecosystem goods and services at multiple spatial scales. This enables calculation of absolute environmental sustainability metrics, and helps identify opportunities for improving a life cycle not just by reducing impacts, but also by restoring and protecting ecosystems. TES‐LCA of a biofuel life cycle demonstrates this approach by considering the ES of carbon sequestration, air quality regulation, and water provisioning. Results show that for the carbon sequestration ecosystem service, farming can be locally sustainable but unsustainable at the global or serviceshed scale. Air quality regulation is unsustainable at all scales, while water provisioning is sustainable at all scales for this study in the eastern part of the United States.