Search results for "Environmental assessment"
showing 5 items of 25 documents
Integrated Methods for Establishing the Sustainability of Urban Policies: Applying Ecological Footprint to the Municipal Solid Waste Management
2018
The Ecological Footprint (EF) method is applied here to assess alternative policies regarding the Municipal Solid Waste (MSW) management. This approach arises from two considerations. First, the MSW management certainly requires a great attention by politicians and technicians, due to its importance for effectively administrating and environmentally controlling urban contexts. On the other hand, the EF method, thanks to its holistic structure of analysis, supposedly provides a synthetic and effective measure of the sustainability of waste management systems, so allowing public administrations to prioritizing policies aimed at implementing environmental actions. Here the EF method is used fo…
Past Objectives and Future Scenarios
2016
The intimate link between landscape and urban planning has long been denied and underestimated. In spite of the “good intentions” of certain scholars, practitioners and policy makers across Italy, Spain and other EU countries, their efforts are undermined by rigidly framed, sector-focused laws and by a concept of landscape defined in purely aesthetic terms. We have established the importance of identifying tools used to integrate the various approaches that “urbanism” and landscape planning adopt in dealing with urban planning to date. In fact, even with the prospect of significant environmental legislation, the discipline is still unable to incorporate the concept of landscape and its asso…
Energy and environmental assessment of retrofit actions on a residential building
2014
Energy and environmental performances of buildings strictly depend on many factors related to the choice of construction materials, technical equipment, installation and use. In the following chapter a set of retrofit actions to improve the thermal performance of an existing conventional building is presented. The energy and environmental assessment of these actions is carried out following a life cycle approach. The embodied energy and the environmental impacts arisen from the production, transportation and installation phases of the required materials and components are calculated. Further, energy saving and environmental benefits and drawbacks concerning the assessed retrofit actions are…
Strategic Environmental Analysis (SEA) of the building Sector: an Annotated List of Indicators and a Simple Methodology
2003
With respect to the SEA of the town planning scheme of the Sicilian region, we will analyse through the paper the most commonly adopted indicators of sustainability and we will select the most promising of them for the purpose. Moreover, a simplified approach will be introduced for the assessment of the SEA by utilising both simple and aggregate indicators: simple indicators (selected among those proposed in the literature) will lead to the “technical” assessment of the SEA, while aggregate indicators (built up by properly grouping the simple ones) will lead to the “political” assessment of the Sicilian urbanistic sector. Simple indicators will refer to official data, essentially concerning…
Lithium-ion batteries for electric vehicles: combining Environmental and Social Life Cycle Assessments
2018
Electric vehicles (xEV) are a key low carbon technology for mobility. Although xEV have no tailpipe emissions, the production of traction batteries leads to environmental and social burdens. In this context, authors assess the environmental and social impacts of a cell of Lithium ion traction battery in order to identify the most relevant aspects and the potential added value of performing both the assessments. Results show the relevance of the resources in terms of both environmental and social impacts. Moreover, the social assessment results pointed out the relevance of the geographical boundaries, often overlooked for in the environmental analysis. The combination of both the assessment …