Search results for "environmental impact assessment"
showing 10 items of 179 documents
Vegetation fire emissions and their impact on air pollution and climate
2009
Gaseous and particulate emissions from vegetation fires substantially modify the atmospheric chemical composition, degrade air quality and can alter weather and climate. The impact of vegetation fire emissions on air pollution and climate has been recognised in the late 1970s. The application of satellite data for fire-related studies in the beginning of the 21th century represented a major break through in our understanding of the global importance of fires. Today the location and extent of vegetation fires, burned area and emissions released from fires are determined from satellite products even though many uncertainties persist. Numerous dedicated experimental and modeling studies contri…
Life Cycle Assessment for Supporting Eco-Design: The Case Study of Sodium–Nickel Chloride Cells
2021
The European Union is moving towards a sustainable, decarbonized, and circular economy. It has identified seven key value chains in which to intervene, with the battery and vehicle value chain being one of them. Thus, actions and strategies for the sustainability of batteries need to be developed. Since Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) is a strategic tool for evaluating environmental sustainability, this paper investigates its application to two configurations of a sodium–nickel chloride cell (planar and tubular), focusing on the active material and the anode, with the purpose of identifying the configuration characterized by the lowest environmental impacts. The results, based on a “from cradle…
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)…
An integrated energy simulation and life cycle assessment to measure the operational and embodied energy of a Mediterranean net zero energy building
2022
Abstract Net Zero Energy Buildings can play a key role in reducing the energy use, greenhouse gas emissions and the use of natural resources associated to the built environment. It is widely recognized that in low energy building a shift in relevance may occur from the operational to the embodied impacts. However, building performance assessment focus mostly on the operational phase and on primary energy consumption. This study aims to assess the energy and environmental impacts of a residential net zero energy building expanding the analysis to the full life cycle and to a wide range of environmental impact categories. The methodological approach integrates a non-steady state building ener…
Cost-benefit analysis: A comparison between conventional and organic olive growing in the Mediterranean Area
2015
The conversion from conventional to organic management of olive growing has many benefits, such as increase of biodiversity, reduction of soil erosion and lower environmental impact. Since olive represents a main crop in the Mediterranean area, from a social, economic as well as environmental point of view, the aim of this paper has been to determine if the conversion from conventional to organic olive growing can increase the profitability of the farmer in Sicilian farms. Economic analysis has been carried out by means of cost-benefit analysis and financial indicators (NPV, B0/C0, IRR) show that organic growing would allow a better profitability for organic olive farms respect to conventio…
Stakeholders’ Attitudes about the Transplantations of the Mediterranean Seagrass Posidonia oceanica as a Habitat Restoration Measure after Anthropoge…
2021
Anthropogenic impacts on Posidonia oceanica meadows have led to a decline of this ecosystem throughout the Mediterranean. Transplantations have often been prescribed as a compensation measure to mitigate the impacts caused by coastal maritime works. Here a Q methodology approach was used to investigate the stakeholders’ attitudes in four case studies of P. oceanica transplants realized in Italian waters. Twenty-two respondents were asked to score 37 statements, and the resultant Q-sorting was analyzed via an inverse PCA using the KADE software. Four discourses, corresponding to the significant axes in the factorial analysis were identified: science and conservation (F1), oriented at a rigor…
Towards More Sustainable Pavement Management Practices Using Embedded Sensor Technologies
2019
Road agencies are constantly being placed in difficult situations when making road maintenance and rehabilitation decisions as a result of diminishing road budgets and mounting environmental concerns for any chosen strategies. This has led practitioners to seek out new alternative and innovative ways of monitoring road conditions and planning maintenance routines. This paper considers the use of innovative piezo-floating gate (PFG) sensors and conventional strain gauges to continuously monitor the pavement condition and subsequently trigger maintenance activities. These technologies can help develop optimized maintenance strategies as opposed to traditional ad-hoc approaches, which often le…
Competitiveness of short sea shipping: the case of olive oil industry
2016
Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to analyse the economic benefits of short sea shipping (SSS) in the shape of Motorways of the Sea (MoS) compared to road transport. The study cover a gap in agro-food economics and analyses the economic benefits of sea transport mode compared to road transport in the food trade between Spain and Italy for a specific product: olive oils. Design/methodology/approach – Three different transportation scenarios are considered (road only, road combined with accompanied SSS and road combined with unaccompanied SSS) linking the main olive oil production and consumption areas in Spain and Italy. In each scenario the cost per unit shipped have been calculated. …
Covering the Gap for an Effective Energy and Environmental Design of Green Roofs: Contributions from Experimental and Modelling Researches
2021
AbstractGreen roofs are components of the building envelope that have become increasingly popular in urban contexts because other than providing numerous environmental benefits they are also capable of reducing building energy consumption, especially in summer. However, despite all these advantages, green roofs are still affected by some limitations. Specifically, there are some gaps affecting the energy modelling consisting in the absence of a proper database, information (growth stage, leaf area index, and coverage ratio) relative to the different green roof plant species, which technicians could use in case of lack of actual field data to perform energy analysis of buildings equipped wit…
Raising environmental awareness through education
2016
This paper presents a method for involving learners in awareness-raising and real changes in consumption. The described method is a teaching assignment comprising a self-audit of household chemicals' consumption, system thinking to find the main causes and consequences, finding solutions and taking action. Findings about students' household chemicals consumption patterns and their reactions one month and six months after the assignment are presented and analysed. We found that the students' households use considerable amounts of chemicals and in most cases do not pay attention to their health and environmental impacts when making purchasing decisions. When doing this, students were able to …