Public building energy efficiency - an IoT approach

Buildings play an important role in energy consumption, mainly in the operation phase. Current development on IoT allows implementing sustainable actions in building towards savings, identify consumption patterns and relate consumption with space usage. Comfort parameters can be defined, and a set of services can be implemented toward the goals of saving energy and water. This approach can be replicated in most buildings and considerable savings can be achieved thus contributing to a more sustainable world without negative impact on building users’ comfort.info:eu-repo/semantics/acceptedVersio

Use of life cycle assessment methodology in the analysis of ecological footprint assessment results to evaluate the environmental performance of universities

The assessment of the environmental performance of an organization is an essential part of the decision making process of an Environmental Management System. Having robust indicators enables a reliable assessment. The Ecological Footprint Assessment is used in different types of organizations, including universities. Its ability to clearly communicate over-consumption by using a land-base unit is an advantage when involving the university community in achieving better environmental performance. However, its lack of standardization makes it difficult to use as an indicator. It is believed that Life Cycle Assessment offers a framework with which to standardize the Ecological Footprint Assessment. In this paper, an Ecological Footprint Assessment considering Life Cycle Assessment methodology is developed as a case study for Universitat Politecnica de Valencia. Findings regarding the critical decisions of the methodology are compared with 23 Ecological Footprint Assessments of universities using a Life Cycle Assessment framework. Only 26% of the studies analyzed reference the Life Cycle Assessment methodology. Critical decisions such as defining a Functional Unit were relevant but not standardized, while the definition of the product system was the most standardized and homogeneous decision. The difficulty of gathering information when Environmental Management Systems are not available makes the Ecological Footprint Assessment a weak indicator. Nevertheless, results show that Life Cycle Assessment can guide an Ecological Footprint Assessment methodology where comparability and reliability is possible. (C) 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.Lo-Iacono-Ferreira, VG.; Torregrosa López, JI.; Capuz-Rizo, SF. (2016). Use of life cycle assessment methodology in the analysis of ecological footprint assessment results to evaluate the environmental performance of universities. Journal of Cleaner Production. 133:45-53. doi:10.1016/j.jclepro.2016.05.046S455313

Online calculators of 'ecological footprint': do they promote or dissuade sustainable behaviour?

Ecological footprint (EF) indices estimate the impact of an individual's lifestyle on the planet by converting levels of consumption into the amount of land needed to sustain production levels and lifestyle choices. Several popular organizations (e.g. WWF, Global Footprint Network) now offer personalized EF calculators to help inform consumers of the impacts of their personal consumption habits. In this paper, we evaluate the most popular online EF calculators and find that, even when the most environmentally friendly options are adopted, for the majority of available indices, one still exceeds the planet's biocapacity levels. The absence of options to fully offset one's environmental impacts implicitly suggests that there is no truly sustainable level of consumption at current population levels, even under the most prudent consumer choices. Although all online EF calculators claim to be a tool for education to promote sustainable behaviour, their calculations suggest, to the contrary, that as consumers we may postpone but not necessarily prevent environmental catastrophes

Metrics for optimising the multi-dimensional value of resources recovered from waste in a circular economy: A critical review

© 2017 The Authors - Established assessment methods focusing on resource recovery from waste within a circular economy context consider few or even a single domain/s of value, i.e. environmental, economic, social and technical domains. This partial approach often delivers misleading messages for policy- and decision-makers. It fails to accurately represent systems complexity, and obscures impacts, trade-offs and problem shifting that resource recovery processes or systems intended to promote circular economy may cause. Here, we challenge such partial approaches by critically reviewing the existing suite of environmental, economic, social and technical metrics that have been regularly observed and used in waste management and resource recovery systems' assessment studies, upstream and downstream of the point where waste is generated. We assess the potential of those metrics to evaluate ‘complex value’ of materials, components and products, i.e., the holistic sum of their environmental, economic, social and technical benefits and impacts across the system. Findings suggest that the way resource recovery systems are assessed and evaluated require simplicity, yet must retain a suitable minimum level of detail across all domains of value, which is pivotal for enabling sound decision-making processes. Criteria for defining a suitable set of metrics for assessing resource recovery from waste require them to be simple, transparent and easy to measure, and be both system- and stakeholder-specific. Future developments must focus on providing a framework for the selection of metrics that accurately describe (or at least reliably proxy for) benefits and impacts across all domains of value, enabling effective and transparent analysis of resource recovery form waste in circular economy systems.We gratefully acknowledge support of the UK Natural Environ-ment Research Council (NERC) and the UK Economic and SocialResearch Council (ESRC) who funded this work in the context of‘Complex Value Optimisation for Resource Recovery’(CVORR)project (Grant No. NE/L014149/1)

Alien Registration- Venetoulis, Meneloas (Bath, Sagadahoc County)

https://digitalmaine.com/alien_docs/8754/thumbnail.jp

Alien Registration- Venetoulis, Meneloas (Bath, Sagadahoc County)

https://digitalmaine.com/alien_docs/8754/thumbnail.jp