ILCD Data Network and ELCD Database: current use and further needs for supporting Environmental Footprint and Life Cycle Indicator Projects.

The aim of this report is to investigate the current use and needs of the ILCD DN and of the ELCD supporting the EF and the LC Indicator projects providing a coherent data basis increasing usability and consistent application in the European context. Some recommended future development have been investigated and reported as well in this report.JRC.H.8-Sustainability Assessmen

Energy use in the EU food sector: State of play and opportunities for improvement

The amount of energy necessary to cultivate, process, pack and bring the food to European citizens tables accounts for the 17 % of the EU's gross energy consumption, equivalent to about 26 % of the EU's final energy consumption in 2013. Challenges and solutions for decreasing energy consumption and increasing the use of renewable energy in the European food sector are presented and discussed.JRC.F.7-Renewables and Energy Efficienc

Life cycle indicators for resources: Resources, resource-efficiency, decoupling

Sustainable development is an underlying objective of the European Union treaties. An important part of sustainable development is its environmental aspect, as reflected in the Europe 2020 strategy and its Resource-efficient Europe flagship initiative. For quantifying and monitoring our progress towards sustainability in terms of the environmental performance, indicators are needed. These indicators should provide an integrated view on the links between consumption, production, resource depletion, resource use, resource recycling, environmental impacts and waste generation. One of the approaches that facilitate such integrated view is life cycle thinking. This integrative approach underlies the development of life cycle indicators for quantifying and monitoring progress towards the sustainable development of the European Union. This report outlines the development of the resource life cycle indicators. These indicators are intended to be used to assess the environmental impact of European resource consumption, efficiency of the use of natural resources, and decoupling of environmental impacts from economic growth.JRC.H.8-Sustainability Assessmen

Life cycle indicators for monitoring the environmental performance of European waste management

To improve the environmental performance of current European waste management is a challenging, yet crucial task towards a more sustainable Europe. New approaches are therefore needed to provide an effective and science-based support to environmentally sound decision-making in waste management. These approaches should be able to complement existing insights and adapt to the increasing complexity of the current waste management systems. As widely recognized by EU legislation, Life Cycle Thinking (LCT) is a viable approach to support sound waste management choices. In this context, the Institute for Environment and Sustainability (IES) of the European Commission Joint Research Centre (JRC) has lead the development of macro-level, life cycle based waste management indicators to quantify and monitor the potential environmental impacts, benefits, and improvements associated with the management of a number of selected waste streams generated and treated in Europe. The waste management indicators consistently complement and support article 4 of the Waste Framework Directive (EC, 2008), according to which any deviation from the waste hierarchy (prevention, re-use, recycling, recovery, and disposal) must be justified by “life cycle thinking on the overall impacts of the generation and management of such waste”. They provide a basis to monitor the progress made with the implementation of the Waste Framework Directive and national policies in relation to reducing the environmental impacts associated with waste and increasing the benefits of waste management strategies. The waste management indicators developed make use of a combination of macro statistical waste management data combined with emissions/resource life cycle data for the different elements of the waste treatment chain. Indicators were initially calculated for the entire European Union (EU-27) and for Germany. The following waste streams were considered: household and similar waste, paper and cardboard, plastic, glass, metals, wood, animal and vegetal waste, and mineral waste. Overall, 11 impact categories were included in the assessment, i.e. climate change, human toxicity, acidification, eutrophication, ionising radiation, ozone depletion, particulate matter/respiratory inorganics, photochemical ozone formation, ecotoxicity, land use and resource depletion. An indicator developed for a given waste stream captures the potential environmental impact associated with the generation and management of that waste stream. The entire waste management chain is considered, i.e. from generation to final treatment/disposal. Therefore, system boundaries for the selected waste streams include also the treatment or recycling of secondary waste (e.g. bottom ash from the incineration of household waste), and secondary products (e.g. recovered paper), as well as energy recovery. The experiences from the development of these life cycle based waste management indicators suggest that more detailed and quality-assured waste statistics are needed, especially covering the many different treatment operations and options. Also, it would be beneficial if waste statistics had a higher disaggregation level of waste categories, as well as more detailed information about waste composition. A further development of the indicators should include an increased number of waste streams, as well as calculation of the results for all Member States.JRC.H.8-Sustainability Assessmen

Estimating environmental impacts from trade – a life cycle indicators approach

In the context of an increasingly fragmentised world production, the analysis of the global production chains is interesting from many perspectives, not the least important being the assessment of the resulting environmental consequences. The life cycle indicators developed within this project are a response to the question about quantification of the environmental impacts related to the country or territory total consumption. The coherent framework of life cycle indicators includes resource indicators, basket-of-product indicators and waste management indicators, so to give the full picture of the environmental impacts related to the European consumption and production. One of the most important features is that the indicators developed are based on a life cycle perspective, thus have a global relevance. Therefore, in the indicators’ framework this is represented by including environmental impacts occurring abroad, but related to national or European demand for imported goods. Only a broad coverage of all relevant impacts ensures that burdens are not shifted, for example, to more land use or more pollutant release while reducing greenhouse gas emissions. The approach followed within the life cycle indicators framework assigns the environmental impact to the country where the consumption of the product occurs. For the production of each product, two components can be distinguished: an imported component and a domestic component. The latter forms the part of the domestic inventory and is treated separately, whereas for each of the imported component the inventory has to be created. When some of the product that is produced with imported and domestic components is further exported, the environmental impacts that are associated to it (be it domestic or imported) are also assigned to the importing country. Addressing the environmental impact related to trade starts with choosing the most important product groups based on the structure of trade. Then, for each of the product group the representative product(s) are chosen together with their source countries (initially 3). Finally, life cycle inventories (LCIs) are linked to the quantities of the traded products. To address the limits posed by the availability of LCI datasets for each traded product, the total inventory is created by up-scaling the inventories created for representative products. The up-scaling is conducted first to reach the total for the representative product, then to reach the total for product groups, and finally to reach the total for the country. Up-scaling – even if already giving interesting insights to the sources of European environmental impacts – should be considered as temporary. As the number of available datasets will grow, the up-scaling will become less and less important in the calculation of the environmental impacts of the European Union trade, although might not necessary be completely eliminated. This paper presents the first attempt to assess the environmental impact of European trade, using the framework of the life cycle indicators as the basis. Understanding the environmental impacts arising from the upstream production of imported goods is of increasing importance in European Union from a strategic point of view. It has made its way to the Roadmap to a Resource Efficient Europe, stemming from the Europe 2020 Strategy and its flagship initiative on resource efficiency, and provides a structured and quantitative basis for future policy making.JRC.H.8-Sustainability Assessmen

Chemical Footprint: A Methodological Framework for bridging life cycle assessment and planetary boundaries for chemical pollution

The development and use of footprint methodologies for environmental assessment are increasingly important for both the scientific and political communities. Starting from the ecological footprint, developed at the beginning of the 90s, several other footprints were defined, namely carbon and water footprint. These footprints - even though based on different meaning of “footprint” - integrate life cycle thinking, and focus on some challenging environmental impacts, namely: resource consumption, CO2 emission leading to climate change, and water consumption. However, they usually neglect a relevant sources of impact, as those related to the production and use of chemicals. This paper presents and discusses the need and relevance of developing a methodology for assessing the chemical footprint, coupling a life cycle-based approach with methodologies developed in other contexts, such as ecological risk assessment and sustainability science. Furthermore, different concepts underpin existing footprint and this could be the case also of chemical footprint. At least two different approaches and steps to chemical footprint could be envisaged, applicable at the micro as well as at the meso and macro scale. The first step (1) is related to the account of chemicals use and emissions along the life cycle of a product, sector or entire economy, in order to assess potential impacts on ecosystems and human health. The second step (2) aims at assessing to which extent actual emission of chemicals harm the ecosystems above their capability to recover (carrying capacity of the system). The latter step might contribute to the wide discussion on planetary boundaries for chemical pollution, the thresholds that should not be surpassed in order to guarantee a sustainable use of chemicals from an environmental safety perspective. The definition of what the planetary boundaries for chemical pollution are and how the boundaries should be identified is an on-going scientific challenge for ecotoxicology and ecology. In the present paper, we present a case study at macro scale for European Union, in which the chemical footprint according to step (1) is calculated for the year 2005. A proposal for extending this approach towards step (2) is presented and discussed, complemented by a discussion on the challenges and the utility of appropriate methodologies for assessing chemical footprint in order to stimulate further research and discussion on the topic.JRC.H.8-Sustainability Assessmen

Towards stronger measures for sustainable consumption and production policies: proposal of a new fiscal framework based on a life cycle approach

Purpose. The sustainable development challenge that many economies are facing worldwide requires stronger measures because some environmental issues (e.g. global warming) are becoming exponentially worse. If we do not act at once, this negative trend has the potential to keep on radically changing the living conditions on the Earth. One of the most effective ways to address this challenge might be developing new Market Based Instruments (MBIs) by adopting a life cycle perspective. In this paper we propose a new taxation framework based on Value Added Tax (VAT) and life cycle thinking. This framework might have the potential to drastically change the current consumption and production patterns towards a product life-cycle oriented economy. Methods. To identify the elements of a new framework enabling to improve the eco-efficiency of the current consumption and production patterns, firstly we have screened the potential of MBIs to face the sustainable development challenge in relation to the existing EU policy framework. Among MBIs, particular emphasis was given to VAT due to its potential to affect market prices. The key research advances for establishing a green VAT framework were then tracked down to outline the state-of-the-art. Moreover, how to use Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) results for differentiating VAT rates has been investigated. On this basis, a range of methodology proposals to change the current VAT framework have been outlined. A hypothetical case study has been simulated to test these proposals. Results. Some relevant changes to the current VAT taxation system are proposed in this paper bearing in mind the LCA principles and the “getting prices right” policy. Special emphasis was given to the methodological framework needed to differentiate VAT rates according to environmental performance of products. In this context, fiscal neutrality issues related to State budgets have been also taken into account by conceptualising more cautious approaches for differentiating VAT rates. Conclusions. This piece of research has identified life cycle thinking as possible perspective on which basis product VAT rates might be differentiated. Further studies and an impact assessment procedure are needed to evaluate the actual feasibility of this new taxation framework. If the response of this assessment were positive, policy makers, companies and other stakeholders concerned should set out a suite of measures to further fine-tune, test, establish, and facilitate the implementation of this green VAT framework.JRC.H.8-Sustainability Assessmen

Towards a life-cycle based european sustainability footprint framework: theory, concepts, applications

Sustainability is central to the policy objectives of the European Commission, but an integrated sustainability assessment framework in support of policy analysis and development is currently lacking. Arriving at an integrated sustainability assessment framework requires clearly articulated definitions of sustainability and sustainable development. Here, we describe the conceptual basis for the proposed European Sustainability Footprint - an integrated sustainability assessment framework for establishing a baseline and tracking trends with respect to the sustainability of European production and consumption, as well as scenario modelling the impacts of policy alternatives. Specifically, the European Sustainability Footprint is comprised of a selection of life-cycle based indicators (environmental, social, and economic) which can be assessed against defined sustainability targets and thresholds.JRC.H.8-Sustainability Assessmen