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The European Commission (EC) has been developing an assessment framework to monitor the evolution of environmental impact associated to the European Union (EU) consumption. The assessment framework should help to support a wide array of policies, such as those related to resource efficiency, eco-innovation and circular economy. The environmental im...
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Maintenance
is an important conservation activity in ensuring the survival of heritage
buildings for future generations. Knowledge and practices in this field have
essentially shifted toward the sustainability framework, comprised of economic,
societal, and environmental parameters. Regarding the environment, low carbon
repair became the main item...
Citations
... However, this integration has been scarcely implemented (Polizzi di Sorrentino et al. 2016). In 2017, the Joint Research Centre (part of the European Commission) published a Technical Report on integrating behavioural sciences into LCA to estimate consumer footprints (Nita et al. 2017). They identified several steps within the LCA method where behavioural science knowledge could be integrated, including the functional unit, system boundaries, scenario analysis and result communication. ...
... Rebound effects can be defined as an unintended behavioural change (in overall consumption and production) induced by a change in the provision of a service, for example, a change in the energy efficiency of a household appliance (Vivanco and van der Voet 2014) or unintended effects of alternative business models (Tunn and Ackermann 2020). These effects are hard to estimate and depend on multiple variables such as the economic context, the infrastructure, regulations, consumer preferences and established practices (Nita et al. 2017). Although rebound effects have been identified as particularly relevant when assessing the environmental impacts of behavioural changes (Nita et al. 2017), none of the reviewed case studies included them in their analysis. ...
... These effects are hard to estimate and depend on multiple variables such as the economic context, the infrastructure, regulations, consumer preferences and established practices (Nita et al. 2017). Although rebound effects have been identified as particularly relevant when assessing the environmental impacts of behavioural changes (Nita et al. 2017), none of the reviewed case studies included them in their analysis. Nevertheless, the field of rebound effects in the CE is gaining increasing attention, with recent literature aiming at identifying their Content courtesy of Springer Nature, terms of use apply. ...
Purpose
The impact of applying circular strategies to products is often measured through life cycle assessment (LCA). While LCA estimates and compares the impacts of circular products, its ability to integrate consumer behaviour is currently limited. The integration of consumer behavioural insights is especially relevant in the packaging sector, where consumer actions at the end-of-life are crucial for the success of circular strategies. This study explores integrating behavioural insights from consumer behaviour sciences (including psychology, sociology and socio-technical approaches) into LCA for a better assessment and design of circular packaging.
Methods
Through a scoping review, scientific literature was mapped to (1) investigate the current integration of consumer behaviour aspects within packaging LCAs and (2) explore the behavioural determinants influencing the recycling and reusing of circular packaging. By building on the insights from these reviews, this study provides recommendations on how to integrate behavioural insights with LCA to assess the impact of circular packaging systems.
Results and discussion
The results indicate that LCA studies for packaging are generally based on assumptions on consumer behaviour, reducing their utility for circular decision-making. The main methods currently used to integrate behaviour variability are scenario and sensitivity analysis, with some studies using consumer profiles and behaviour research to support LCA modelling. Socio-technical approaches, e.g. agent-based modelling or system dynamics, have not been applied yet to integrate a behavioural perspective into the LCA of circular packaging, while this may be a promising avenue. The behaviour science literature covered several predictors found to be important to understand packaging reuse and recycling behaviour. Our review shows that attitudinal and value dimensions have consistently been found to influence both packaging reuse and recycling behaviour, while the latter is also strongly driven by control factors. While LCA modellers can obtain behavioural insights from the behavioural literature, the step of transforming these insights into quantifiable behaviour patterns still needs to be taken. Such endeavours can help to translate individual behaviour predictors into behavioural patterns regarding packaging reuse and recycling.
Conclusions
Consumer behaviour is currently not widely considered in the LCA of circular packaging. Insights from consumer behaviour sciences can contribute to LCA studies in two main ways: defining consumer profiles and modelling socio-technical parameters. Consumer profiles could be drawn from the psychological behaviour literature, while socio-technical approaches can provide models of system behaviour where the interaction of different system actors and items is quantitatively modelled and coupled with LCA models.
... In the outcome document of the Rio +20, "The Future We Want"; green economy is acknowledged as a major contributor to the eradication of poverty, enhancing social inclusion, creating employment opportunities and decent work for all, improving human welfare and sustained economic growth, while preserving the healthy functioning of the earth's ecosystems (Olivia, 2015). Further, the Rio +20 conference also highlighted the urgent need for actions against unsustainable patterns of production and consumption to address environmental sustainability and promoting conservation of biodiversity and ecosystems (Nita et al, 2017). ...
... More so, it can be argued that the model of green growth has evolved from being a guideline of "greening" a "brown" economy to one that focuses on driving economic development (Nita et al, 2017). This transition has contributed to an increase in environmental consciousness and an emergent demand for products and services that are environmentally friendly and environmentally enhancing. ...
... The consumption of a myriad of products and services provides an essential link between economic development and environmental impact; and as a locus of analysis a polarised view that considers consumption as the only problem of ecological decadence needs to be avoided (Nita et al, 2017). The CE paradigm is disputed that it will lead to what the neoclassical economists like Herman Daly called a 'Steady-State Economy' described as an economy made up of a continuous stock of physical wealth and constant demographics (Jackson, 2014). ...
The world is in abysmal crisis of macro-economic instabilities and ecological degradation due to rapid increases in waste and pollution generation. A clarion call has been made on the need to balance the economy and ecology by shifting towards an economic system that result in enhanced human welfare, social justice and equity while reducing environmental risks and ecological imbalances; that is towards green growth. Despite the several benefits that plastics offer, the pervasiveness of plastic
waste and its negative effects on the ecosystem and human health has spurred the need to rethink and revisit its production, consumption and disposal patterns.
Arguably, urban spaces overwhelmingly exhibit linear flows of plastic products and represent significant hotspots of unsustainable plastic consumption and waste discharge. Using a mixed research method approach and a descriptive research design, this study carried out a survey in Glen View suburb of Harare, one of Zimbabwe’s most populous urban areas in exploration of the prospects and opportunities for a circular economy to achieve green growth.
Publikacja dotyczy bieżącej sytuacji i perspektyw rozwoju jednego z największych obszarów wykluczenia społecznego w Europie
Life cycle assessment (LCA) and environmentally extended input output analysis (EEIOA) are two widely used approaches to assess the environmental impacts of products and services with the aim of providing decision support. Here, we compare carbon footprint (CF) results for products and services in the ecoinvent 3.4 cut‐off and the hybrid version of EXIOBASE. While we find that there is good agreement for certain sectors, more than half of the matched products differ by more than a factor 2. Best fits are observed in the energy, manufacturing, and agricultural sectors, although deviations are substantial for renewable energy. Poorer fits are observed for waste treatment and mining sectors. Both databases have a limited differentiation in the service sector. Differences can, to some degree, be explained by methodological differences, such as system boundaries and approaches used to resolve multi‐functionality, and data differences. The common finding that, due to incomplete economic coverage (truncation error), LCA‐based CFs should be lower than EEIOA‐based CFs, could not be confirmed. The comparison of CFs from LCA and EEIOA databases can provide additional insights into the uncertainties of CF results, which is important knowledge when guiding decision makers. An approach that uses the coefficient of variation to identify strategic database improvement potentials is also presented and highlights several product groups that could deserve additional attention in both databases. Further strategic database improvements are crucial to reduce uncertainties and increase the robustness of decision support that the industrial ecology community can provide for the economic transformations ahead of us. This article met the requirements for a gold‐gold JIE data openness badge described at http://jie.click/badges.
By using text mining techniques, this study identifies the topics of sustainable consumption that are important during the COVID-19 pandemic. An Application Programming Interface (API) streaming method was used to extract the data from Twitter. A total of 14,591 tweets were collected using Twitter streaming API. However, after data cleaning, 13,635 tweets were considered for analysis. The objectives of the study are to identify (1) the topics users tweet about sustainable consumption and (2) to detect the emotion-based sentiments in the tweets. The study used Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) algorithm for topic modeling and the Louvain algorithm for semantic network clustering. NRC emotion lexicon was used for sentiment analysis. The LDA model discovers six topics: organic food consumption, food waste, vegan food, sustainable tourism, sustainable transport, and sustainable energy consumption. While the Louvain algorithm detects four clusters—lifestyle and climate change, responsible consumption, energy consumption, and renewable energy, sentiment analysis results show more positive emotions among the users than the negative ones. The study contributes to existing literature by providing a fresh perspective on various interconnected topics of sustainable consumption that bring global consumption to a sustainable level.
