Search results for "Eco-efficiency"
showing 10 items of 19 documents
Assessing the impact of agri-environmental schemes on the eco-efficiency of rain-fed agriculture
2012
This paper analyses the impact of the Agri-environmental Extensification Scheme for the Protection of Flora and Fauna (F&F Scheme) on the eco-efficiency of a sample of dryland farms in the Spanish region of Castile and Leon. Using Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) and the so-called program decomposition approach to efficiency measurement, we explore whether or not the production technology of the farms included in the F&F Scheme is more eco-efficient than the technology used by farms that are not included in the Scheme. The re-sults obtained confirm the foregoing hypothesis, providing evidence that environmental pres-sures could be reduced if all farms adopted the F&F Scheme technology. Furth…
Assessing farming eco-efficiency: a Data Envelopment Analysis approach.
2010
This paper assesses farming eco-efficiency using Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) techniques. Eco-efficiency scores at both farm and environmental pressure-specific levels are computed for a sample of Spanish farmers operating in the rain-fed agricultural system of Campos County. The determinants of eco-efficiency are then studied using truncated regression and bootstrapping techniques. We contribute to previous literature in this field of research by including information on slacks in the assessment of the potential environmental pressure reductions in a DEA framework. Our results reveal that farmers are quite eco-inefficient, with very few differences emerging among specific environmental …
Assessing eco-efficiency with directional distance functions
2012
Abstract Eco-efficiency is a matter of concern at present that is receiving increasing attention in political, academic and business circles. Broadly speaking, this concept refers to the ability to create more goods and services with less impact on the environment and less consumption of natural resources, thus involving both economic and also ecological issues. In this paper we propose the use of directional distance functions and Data Envelopment Analysis techniques to assess eco-efficiency. More specifically, we show how these functions can be used to compute a wide range of indicators representing different objectives regarding economic and ecological performance. This methodological ap…
Improving eco-efficiency of a swimming hall through customer involvement
2013
Abstract Findings from a project aiming to improve eco-efficiency of a swimming hall in Finland are presented in this article. There are various opportunities for eco-efficiency improvements for a swimming hall, many of which belong to responsibilities of the staff. However, there are aspects where also customers could participate. Consequently, changes in the current behavior of the swimming hall management, staff and customers are required. Results from customer survey and staff interviews suggest that lack of knowledge about the swimming hall-specific environmental impacts and possibilities of the respondent (either staff or customers) to actively engage in pro-environmental work at the …
Assessing the dynamic eco-efficiency of Italian municipalities by accounting for the ownership of the entrusted waste utilities
2021
Abstract This study evaluates and compares the dynamic eco-efficiency of municipalities with publicly owned, privately owned, and mixed ownership solid waste utilities by estimating the Meta-frontier Malmquist-Luenberger productivity index for a sample of 68 major Italian towns. On average, the eco-productivity of Italian waste service providers increased by 8% from 2016 to 2019. Although municipalities with private utilities improved their eco-productivity most, the differences among the three clusters reflecting utility ownership are not statistically significant. The results show that publicly owned waste operators drive technology and that the technological levels of private utilities h…
Assessing eco-efficiency: A metafrontier directional distance function approach using life cycle analysis
2017
Sustainability analysis requires a joint assessment of environmental, social and economic aspects of production processes. Here we propose the use of Life Cycle Analysis (LCA), a metafrontier (MF) directional distance function (DDF) approach, and Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA), to assess technological and managerial differences in eco-efficiency between production systems. We use LCA to compute six environmental and health impacts associated with the production processes of nearly 200 Spanish citrus farms belonging to organic and conventional farming systems. DEA is then employed to obtain joint economic-environmental farm's scores that we refer to as eco-efficiency. DDF allows us to deter…
Understanding water energy nexus in drinking water provision: an eco-efficiency assessment of water companies
2022
Producción Científica
Eco-Efficiency of the English and Welsh Water Companies: A Cross Performance Assessment
2021
Analyzing costs and greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions could be of great importance for the water utilities to supply water services in a healthy and sustainable manner. In this study, we measured the eco-efficiency of several water utilities in England and Wales by incorporating GHG as an undesirable output. For the first time, we evaluated the eco-efficiency of the water production process using robust cross-efficiency data envelopment analysis (DEA) techniques. The further use of clustering and regression techniques allowed us to better understand the drivers of eco-efficiency. The results showed that the mean eco-efficiency of the water sector was 0.748, which indicates that costs and GHG e…
Evaluating the Eco-Efficiency of Wastewater Treatment Plants: Comparison of Optimistic and Pessimistic Approaches
2020
The assessment of wastewater treatment plant (WWTP) performance has gained the interest of water utilities and water regulators. Eco-efficiency has been identified as a powerful indicator, as it integrates economic and environmental variables into a single index. Most previous studies have employed traditional data envelopment analysis (DEA) for the evaluation of WWTP eco-efficiency. However, DEA allows the selection of input and output weights for individual WWTPs for the calculation of eco-efficiency scores. To overcome this limitation, we employed the double-frontier and common set of weights methods to evaluate the eco-efficiency of a sample of 30 WWTPs in Spain. The WWTPs were ranked b…
Eco-efficiency assessment of wastewater treatment plants using a weighted Russell directional distance model
2016
Abstract Improving the performance of wastewater treatment plants is essential to ensuring their long-term sustainability. Most of the previous studies on this topic have assessed the techno-economic efficiency of wastewater treatment plants and ignored the emission of greenhouse gases. For the first time, the weighted Russell directional distance model was applied to estimate the eco-efficiency of a sample of real wastewater treatment plants. Moreover, this approach allowed an inefficiency score to be obtained for each variable (cost factors, pollutant removal and greenhouse gases) involved in the model. Subsequently, a second stage of analysis was applied to identify factors influencing t…