The application of LCA impact assessment to environmental performance indices : a comparative study

A wide variety of assessment techniques are presently available to quantify the environmental performance of an organisation. They are predominantly site- or area-specific, making them sensitive to differences in the environmental capacity of an area, and they exclude a number of global impacts. A more generic level-plane assessment tool, which quantifies the environmental burden, may therefore be needed to make a valid comparison between organisations. Furthermore, the generic process data used in these assessment tools, to inform policy decisions on a material or product, does not recognise the potential variation in burden of a sector. This thesis develops a corporate level-plane assessment tool using the techniques available from Life Cycle Assessment. This generic tool, the Total Environmental Potency Index (TEPI), is then compared with the Environment Agency's Integrated Environmental Index (IEI), to assess the significance of site location on compliance based site-specific indices like the IEI. The two indices are compared using realworld emission data from seven industrial collaborators in five sectors. Two of these, paper manufacture and power generation, are used to assess the potential variability among processes within the same sector. The potential use of the indices is also determined by examining the accessibility to the required data at each of the participating companies. The results show that site location significantly affects the IEI and that the TEPI can provide a useful generic impact assessment tool to compare sites from different locations or sectors. The burdens from processes within the same sector were highly variable, suggesting that process-specific data will be important if valid policy decisions are to be made in the future. The TEPI and its categories can provide a standard format for aggregating and presenting the required emission data in a way that protects its commercial sensitivity. Although the accessibility to this data was low to moderate, the potential for deriving emission data using mass balance studies was high, with a large amount of accessible input data available. The implications of these results for the use of internal and external impact assessment techniques within an organisation are discussed. A framework is provided to guide the use of process data and impact assessment techniques in the wide range of assessments made by organisations to manage and report on their environmental performance. Finally, the experiences gained from using the IEI and TEPI are used to make recommendations for their improvement, and further development by research

Multi-source statistics:Basic situations and methods

Many National Statistical Institutes (NSIs), especially in Europe, are moving from single‐source statistics to multi‐source statistics. By combining data sources, NSIs can produce more detailed and more timely statistics and respond more quickly to events in society. By combining survey data with already available administrative data and Big Data, NSIs can save data collection and processing costs and reduce the burden on respondents. However, multi‐source statistics come with new problems that need to be overcome before the resulting output quality is sufficiently high and before those statistics can be produced efficiently. What complicates the production of multi‐source statistics is that they come in many different varieties as data sets can be combined in many different ways. Given the rapidly increasing importance of producing multi‐source statistics in Official Statistics, there has been considerable research activity in this area over the last few years, and some frameworks have been developed for multi‐source statistics. Useful as these frameworks are, they generally do not give guidelines to which method could be applied in a certain situation arising in practice. In this paper, we aim to fill that gap, structure the world of multi‐source statistics and its problems and provide some guidance to suitable methods for these problems

Gendered self-views across 62 countries: a test of competing models

Social role theory posits that binary gender gaps in agency and communion should be larger in less egalitarian countries, reflecting these countries’ more pronounced sex-based power divisions. Conversely, evolutionary and self-construal theorists suggest that gender gaps in agency and communion should be larger in more egalitarian countries, reflecting the greater autonomy support and flexible self-construction processes present in these countries. Using data from 62 countries (N = 28,640), we examine binary gender gaps in agentic and communal self-views as a function of country-level objective gender equality (the Global Gender Gap Index) and subjective distributions of social power (the Power Distance Index). Findings show that in more egalitarian countries, gender gaps in agency are smaller and gender gaps in communality are larger. These patterns are driven primarily by cross-country differences in men’s self-views and by the Power Distance Index (PDI) more robustly than the Global Gender Gap Index (GGGI). We consider possible causes and implications of these findings

Influencermarketing 2.0: Het succes van eigen merken van beauty-YouTubers [Influencer marketing 2.0: The success of own brands of beauty-YouTubers]

De laatste tijd is er naast pr-pakketten, affiliate codes, branded content en co-branding een vijfde, nieuwe vorm van influencermarketing te herkennen: influencerproducten of zelfs influencermerken. Deze interviewstudie focust zich op de betekenisgeving van consumenten aan influencerproducten van YouTubers uit de beautycommunity. Consumenten blijken veelal betekenis te geven aan influencerproducten in termen van bekendheid met de YouTuber, de vergelijking met samenwerkingsproducten en als gevolg van ervaren affiniteit of relatie met de YouTuber

The Content of Personalised Network-Based Case Formulations

Case formulation is at the heart of personalised care in psychotherapy. Scientific research into case formulations can provide new insights in the heterogeneity of psychopathology which are relevant for advances in personalised psychopathology research and practice. This mixed-methods study examined the content of 483 fully personalised network-based case formulations in psychotherapy in terms of uniqueness (i.e., frequencies of concepts) and commonality (i.e., the presence of common themes over the different case formulations). In a real-world clinical care setting, patients co-created network-based case formulations with their therapist as part of their routine diagnostic process. These case formulations feature concepts that are relevant to individual patients and their current situation. We assessed how often concepts were used by different patients to quantify uniqueness. We applied a bottom-up thematic analysis to identify patient-relevant themes from the concepts. The case formulations of 483 patients diagnosed with mood and/or anxiety disorders contained a total of 4908 interpretable concepts of which 4272 (87%) were completely unique. Through thematic analysis, we identified seven overarching themes in the concepts: autonomy, connectedness, emotions, self-care, identity, self-efficacy, and bodily sensations. Case formulations were highly unique, thereby illustrating the importance of personalised diagnostics. The unique concepts could be grouped under seven overarching themes which seem to encompass basic human needs. Current advancements in personalised diagnostics and assessment should have a broader scope than symptoms alone, and could use the themes identified here as part of a topic list in the generation of (network-based) case formulations

Bioelectrochemical treatment and recovery of copper from distillery waste effluents using power and voltage control strategies

Copper recovery from distillery effluent was studied in a scalable bioelectro-chemical system with approx. 6.8 L total volume. Two control strategies based on the control of power with maximum power point tracking (MPPT) and the application of 0.5 V using an external power supply were used to investigate the resultant modified electroplating characteristics. The reactor system was constructed from two electrically separated, but hydraulically connected cells, to which the MPPT and 0.5 V control strategies were applied. Three experiments were carried out using a relatively high copper concentration i.e. 1000 mg/L followed by a lower concentration i.e. 50 mg/L, with operational run times defined to meet the treatment requirements for distillery effluents considered. Real distillery waste was introduced into the cathode to reduce ionic copper concentrations. This waste was then recirculated to the anode as a feed stock after the copper depletion step, in order to test the bioenergy self-sustainability of the system. Approx. 60–95% copper was recovered in the form of deposits depending on starting concentration. However, the recovery was low when the anode was supplied with copper depleted distillery waste. Through process control (MPPT or 0.5 V applied voltage) the amount and form of the copper recovered could be manipulated