Search results for "environmental impacts"
showing 10 items of 35 documents
Severe effects of long-term drought on calcareous grassland seed banks
2018
Climate change models project shifts in precipitation patterns at regional and global scales. Increases in dry areas and the occurrence of drought predicted in future scenarios are likely to threaten grassland ecosystems. Calcareous grassland seed banks have proven to be resistant to short-term drought, but their responses to long-term drought are unknown. Here we show that 14 years of summer drought changed calcareous grassland seed bank composition, reducing its size and richness, and that these responses do not simply reflect patterns in the above-ground vegetation. Moreover, the effect of drought was larger on seed banks than on vegetation, and above-ground responses mediated by soil de…
Impact Analysis Using Life Cycle Assessment of Asphalt Production from Primary Data
2020
Road construction and maintenance have a great impact on the environment, owing to the huge volumes of resources involved. Consequently, current production procedures and technologies must be properly investigated, for identifying and quantifying the life cycle environmental impacts produced. In this paper, primary data, i.e., site-specific data directly collected or measured on a reference plant, are analyzed for calculating the impact of the production of a hot mix asphalt. The analysis is performed in a from &ldquo
Artificial Neural Networks to assess energy and environmental performance of buildings: An Italian case study
2019
Abstract Approximately 40% of the European energy consumption and a large proportion of environmental impacts are related to the building sector. However, the selection of adequate and correct designs can provide considerable energy savings and reduce environmental impacts. To achieve this objective, a simultaneous energy and environmental assessment of a building's life cycle is necessary. To date, the resolution of this complex problem is entrusted to numerous software and calculation algorithms that are often complex to use. They involve long diagnosis phases and are characterised by the lack of a common language. Despite the efforts by the scientific community in the building sector, th…
Mitigating the Climate Change Impacts of Aviation through Behavioural Change
2020
Aviation plays a crucial role for economic development and social welfare, but at the same time it also significantly contributes to climate change. Therefore, if the industry wants to follow the same growth path as it has in the past, it will need to mitigate its environmental impacts more seriously or it may otherwise face regulatory restrictions. The current literature has discussed five mitigation strategies. These are technological changes, market-based changes, operational changes, regulatory changes and behavioural changes. While several authors have regarded behavioural changes as the measure with the greatest mitigation potential, it is also the measure that has received far less a…
Life cycle assessment of storage systems: the case study of a sodium/nickel chloride battery
2014
This study assesses the energy and environmental impacts of sodium/nickel chloride batteries, one of the emerging battery technologies for energy storage and smart grids. The analysis was conducted using the Life Cycle Assessment methodology according to the standards of the ISO 14040 series. The study system was one sodium/nickel cell battery providing electric storage for a photovoltaic system, and the manufacturing, operation, and end-of-life steps were analysed. The results indicated that the operation step has the greatest energy impact (55-70% of the total), with the manufacturing step, particularly cell manufacturing, contributing the greatest environmental impact (>60% of the total)…
Evaluation of the Economic and Environmental Performance of Low-Temperature Heat to Power Conversion using a Reverse Electrodialysis – Multi-Effect D…
2019
In the examined heat engine, reverse electrodialysis (RED) is used to generate electricity from the salinity difference between two artificial solutions. The salinity gradient is restored through a multi-effect distillation system (MED) powered by low-temperature waste heat at 100 °C. The current work presents the first comprehensive economic and environmental analysis of this advanced concept, when varying the number of MED effects, the system sizing, the salt of the solutions, and other key parameters. The levelized cost of electricity (LCOE) has been calculated, showing that competitive solutions can be reached only when the system is at least medium to large scale. The lowest LCOE, at a…
Energy and Environmental Life Cycle Assessment of asphalt pavements: A Scenario Analysis for Urban Roads
2018
This paper aims at calculating the life-cycle energy and the environmental impacts pertaining to roads management, including materials production, transportation, construction, maintenance, and rehabilitation. A life-cycle approach is applied to assess energy and environmental impacts of a typical Italian urban road, according to the ISO 14040 series. In more detail, the Authors assess the energy and environmental profile of different optimized scenarios of bituminous mixtures. The aim of scenario analysis is to identify the less impacting scenario from an energy and environmental point of view. For each analysed scenario, the contribution of each life-cycle step to the total impacts and th…
LCA of an Asphalt Mixture Produced in a Southern Italian Plant: Analysis and Perspectives
2021
In recent years, a growing attention on environmental issues affecting all fields and procedures of the productive sectors has raised, aiming to reduce energy and raw-material consumptions and pollution effects on environment. Due to the involved volumes and to the nature of the related materials and productive processes, the civil and road sectors have been strongly invested by this change of perspective. Therefore, a proper estimation of the environmental impacts for the entire life cycle of the asphalt mixtures for road construction and maintenance activities is extremely important. For performing similar investigations, Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) has become one of the most reliable and…
Embodied energy and environmental impacts of a biomass boiler: a life cycle approach
2015
The 2030 policy framework for climate and energy, proposed by the European Commission, aims towards the reduction of European greenhouse gas emissions by 40% in comparison to the 1990 level and to increase the share of renewable energy of at least the 27% of the European's energy consumption of 2030. The use of biomass as sustainable and renewable energy source may be a viable tool for achieving the above goals. However, renewable energy technologies are not totally clean because they cause energy and environmental impacts during their life cycle, and in particular they are responsible of air pollutant emissions. In this context, the paper assesses the energy and environmental impacts of a …
Towards more sustainable airfield pavements using life-cycle assessment of design alternatives
2020
Airports are critical infrastructures and their success is paramount to development through tourism, trade and connectivity. Within the airport, the runway pavement must always be in a pristine condition. Consequently, pavement design and maintenance decisions are vital. Authorities must make decisions concerning preferred materials for design and maintenance. Decisions should be balanced by both economic and environmental factors. This paper considers a case study at Falcone Borsellino Airport (PMO), Palermo, Italy, where air traffic has been steadily increasing. Different pavements are proposed: flexible Asphaltic concrete designs with both traditional Asphaltic concrete and using reclaim…