Search results for "Life Cycle Analysi"
showing 10 items of 15 documents
Life cycle assessment of building materials: A comparison by electre methodology
1996
There is a growing awareness that in selection of building materials the designer must also consider environmnental impacts, either in global and local scale. Unfortunately, design community has an inadequate knowledge about the factors that affects environmental consequences of producing and operating buidings. To increase understanding on selection criteria and comparison of building alternatives in an “energy and environmental point of view”, is a significant goal for restraining gloabl enevironmental degradation. An interesting approach for assessing comparable products is the so called “multicriteria decision making”, but there is much debate about aggregation of criteria and weights a…
Inequalities in Consumption Patterns over the Life Cycle and during the Great Recession
2015
The aim of the study is to analyse the relationship between recession, population structure and consumption behaviour over the life cycle. To this aim, we consider three clusters of non-durable expenditures such as food at home, work-related and core expenditures. The analysis has been performed on micro data on the Household Budgets for the period 1997-2013. Based on life cycle theory, two statistical models has been estimated, viz. a pre-crisis (1997-2007) and a great recession period (2008-2013) model. The study shows that the recession has entailed a reduction of the average expenditure for each category of consumption, and the intensity of the reduction is different among households an…
Sensitivity analysis to quantify uncertainty in Life Cycle Assessment: The case study of an Italian tile
2011
Abstract The results of a Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) study can be affected by several uncertainty sources, mainly due to the methodological choices, the initial assumptions, i.e. allocation rules, system boundaries and impact assessment methods, and the quality of the available data. Then, the experts should estimate the extent of the above-mentioned sources of uncertainty for improving the reliability and the representativeness of the obtained eco-profiles. To estimate the uncertainty is necessary to obtain reliable, transparent and representative LCA results and to correctly support decision-makers in the selection of different product or process options. The following paper starts from …
A Life Cycle Environmental Impact Comparison between Traditional, Hybrid, and Electric Vehicles in the European Context
2021
Global warming (GW) and urban pollution focused a great interest on hybrid electric vehicles (HEVs) and battery electric vehicles (BEVs) as cleaner alternatives to traditional internal combustion engine vehicles (ICEVs). The environmental impact related to the use of both ICEV and HEV mainly depends on the fossil fuel used by the thermal engines, while, in the case of the BEV, depends on the energy sources employed to produce electricity. Moreover, the production phase of each vehicle may also have a relevant environmental impact, due to the manufacturing processes and the materials employed. Starting from these considerations, the authors carried out a fair comparison of the environmental …
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…
SUP&R DST: SUstainable pavement & railways decision support tool
2018
6th International Symposium on Life-Cycle Civil Engineering, IALCCE 2018; Ghent; Belgium; 28 October 2018 through 31 October 2018, GHENT, BELGIQUE, 28-/10/2018 - 31/10/2018; In order to help the decisions makers to efficiently address eco-design for transport infrastructure technologies, a decision support toll (DST) was developed in the scope of the training-through-research programme Sustainable Pavements & Railways Initial Training Network (www.superitn.eu). It consists of a computational platform that implements a conceptual framework developed to quantify sustainability. It comes with a set of sustainability indicators tailored to both road and railway systems as well as several ob…
Economic and environmental sustainability of submerged anaerobic MBR-based (AnMBR-based) technology as compared to aerobic-based technologies for mod…
2015
[EN] The objective of this study was to assess the economic and environmental sustainability of submerged anaerobic membrane bioreactors (AnMBRs) in comparison with aerobic-based technologies for moderate-/high-loaded urban wastewater (UWW) treatment. To this aim, a combined approach of steady-state performance modelling, life cycle analysis (LCA) and life cycle costing (LCC) was used, in which AnMBR (coupled with an aerobic-based post-treatment) was compared to aerobic membrane bioreactor (AeMBR) and conventional activated sludge (CAS). AnMBR with CAS-based post-treatment for nutrient removal was identified as a sustainable option for moderate-/high-loaded UWW treatment: low energy consump…
Economic and environmental sustainability of an AnMBR treating urban wastewater and organic fraction of municipal solid waste
2016
[EN] The objective of this study was to evaluate the economic and environmental sustainability of a sub- merged anaerobic membrane bioreactor (AnMBR) treating urban wastewater (UWW) and organic fraction of municipal solid waste (OFMSW) at ambient temperature in mild/hot climates. To this aim, power requirements, energy recovery from methane (biogas methane and methane dissolved in the effluent), consumption of reagents for membrane cleaning, and sludge handling (polyelectrolyte and energy consumption) and disposal (farmland, landfilling and incineration) were evaluated within different operating scenarios. Results showed that, for the operating conditions considered in this study, AnMBR tec…
Layered dry envelope insulated with sheep wool-lime mix
2014
This poster describes the results of a research aimed to design and assess a new layered envelope component that might be implemented on buildings of the Mediterranean area, in order to improve the energy efficiency and the environmental sustainability. These goals have been achieved by means of the use of local and natural building materials or arising from renewable resources. In particular, thermal insulating has been realize utilizing a mix of natural and mineral materials, obtaining a biocomposite with comparable building physics and mechanical properties to commonly used building materials. Among natural materials, the sheep wool was chosen since it is, on the hand, a waste to exploit…
LCA of a solar heating and cooling system equipped with a small water–ammonia absorption chiller
2012
The development of renewable energy technologies is a critical tool for reducing climate change and the reliance on fossil fuels. However, renewable energy technologies cannot be considered totally clean because they require energy consumption and have environmental impacts that cannot be neglected during their life cycle. In this paper, the life cycle assessment methodology was applied to assess resource use and other environmental burdens related to the entire life-cycle steps of a solar cooling plant. The investigated system works with an absorption chiller assisted by a solar plant. Two back-up configurations (hot back-up and cold back-up) were examined in two localities: Palermo (south…