Search results for "SUSTAINABILITY ASSESSMENT"
showing 10 items of 23 documents
Investigating Tools for Sustainability Assessment of Road Pavements in Europe
2022
Sustainability assessment (SA) is a method to support decision making processes through the evaluation of system effectiveness, environmental integrity, economic valuation, and social implications [1]. SA can be carried out through the application of life-cycle-based techniques for quantitative assessment, or by performing a mainly qualitative approach via sustainability rating systems (SRS). In the field of civil engineering, many SRS have been proposed, all based on assigning point values to actions that are determined to contribute to the overall sustainability of the project. However, only few of these systems can be applied specifically to compare road pavement technologies and/or main…
Integrating Circularity in the Sustainability Assessment of Asphalt Mixtures
2020
Rising concerns about the impacts that the road engineering industry is imposing to the environment have redirected national road authorities to firmly re-consider the sustainability implications of their operations. Lately, though, sustainability has established a forceful correlation with the Circular Economy and its principles. The road engineering industry, therefore, is moving towards more circular approaches. However, this is occurring without the assessment of the potential impacts of such a transition. For this reason, in this study, a composite indicator, namely, Environmental Sustainability and Circularity indicator (ESCi), for investigating the potential effects that increased ci…
Life cycle energy sustainability assessment: an expanded framework for energy technologies
2018
Life Cycle sustainability assessment is one of the most relevant tools delving in sustainability science, based currently on the triple bottom line idea, that is identified in the use of the three tools of Life Cycle Assessment (LCA), Life Cycle Costing (LCC) and Social Life Cycle Assessment (S-LCA). The methodology is structured on international regulations and is currently being applied to a wide set of products and systems. However, when targeting specifically energy technologies with this methodology some specific issues need to be taken in consideration before applying tout court the standard LCSA methodology. Energy systems – in particular those where fluid streams are used – have an …
Life Cycle Sustainability Assessment al comparto edilizio – teoria e applicazioni pratiche.
2014
Life Cycle Sustainability Assessment: an implementation to marble products
2011
A framework for defining a sustainability rating system for railway track-beds
2017
Railways perform a significant role in the transportation system and they have relevant environmental, economic and social impacts. They are currently engineered optimizing every singular aspect rather than considering a broader system for improving the sustainability of the overall infrastructure. Thus, it is necessary to promote an effort to define a global sustainability framework for conceiving the design, construction and management of railway infrastructure. The Sustainable Rating System (SRS) proposed in this paper is a tool under development that evaluates different alternatives of railway track-bed structure. Inspired by similar efforts in the field of road engineering such as Gree…
Sustainable Development Goals and Performance Measurement of Positive Energy District: A Methodological Approach
2021
The “Positive Energy Districts and Neighbourhoods for Sustainable Urban Development” program launched by the European Union can be considered a milestone towards the clean energy transition and carbon neutrality of urban areas. The achievement of this ambitious transition requires properly defined methodologies and action plans grounded on the main environmental, economic, and social pillars of sustainability. This paper is focused on the definition of a methodology for the characterization of PEDs sustainability assessment in terms of Sustainable Development Goals. In particular, the main research question to be answered regards the allocation of the surplus energy of PEDs to target the su…
The strategic role of external sustainability assessment in the food value chain
2014
Purpose: This research seeks to shed more light on how external sustainability assessment in the food value chain could achieve a more significant strategic impact, as most organizations fail to implement sustainability measures beyond marketing efforts. A model is proposed that aims to clarify the understanding of the process, including the influence of the actors and the way they are affected. Design/methodology/approach: The topic is initially approached rather broadly from the perspective of performance measurement and management due to a lack of relevant literature, creating the link to sustainability and its assessment in a second step. Nine essential themes are developed from the the…
Dynamic Sustainability Assessment Tool: Case Study of Green Biorefineries in Danish Agriculture
2020
In this work, a novel, dynamic sustainability assessment tool is presented and validated in a case study. This tool combines two methods&mdash
Increasing the Circularity of asphalt mixtures: Integrated Sustainability and Circularity Assessment as a progress monitoring tool towards more Circu…
2021
Sustainability and Circular Economy (CE) are two concepts that lately have been profoundly linked to each other. The road engineering industry has gradually been adapting practices that are considered both circular and sustainable. However, not all of these practices entirely consider the whole life environmental and circularity assessment and implications of asphalt mixtures.; which in turn leads to doubtfully circular and sustainable approaches. For this reason in this thesis, after analysing the ways that National Road Authorities implement and communicate CE through questionnaires and web searches, a Material Circularity Index quantifying framework, based on the proposed methodology of …