Environmental impact of EU consumption

The Consumer Footprint and the Consumption Footprint indicators, developed by the European Commission, monitor EU progress towards decoupling economic growth from the use of resources and their environmental impacts, by assessing the environmental impacts of EU consumption. The 2 sets of indicators are essential to understand drivers and impacts in relation to the Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 12 on responsible consumption and production and on SDG 8 on sustainable economic growth.JRC.D.1-Bio-econom

Feasibility study to implement resource dissipation in LCA

The assessment of potential impacts associated to resource use in Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) is a highly debated topic. At present, there is neither a consensus on the safeguard subject of the natural resource Area of Protection (AoP), nor on the approach to use for modeling the impacts in the life cycle impact assessment (LCIA) step. This technical report focuses on the aspects related to dissipative use of resources and explores the feasibility of its implementation for the assessment of abiotic resources. One of the critical aspects of abiotic resource modelling is related to the concept of depletion. Depletion is currently one of the most common aspects taken into account among existing LCIA models addressing resources, assuming that once a resource is extracted from the Earth’s crust, it is considered depleted. However, abiotic resources may remain in the anthropogenic system and may be available for further use for a long time after they have been extracted from the Earth’s crust. When assessing the dissipative use of resources, it is relevant to focus both on the Life Cycle Inventory (LCI) and the Life Cycle Impact Assessment (LCIA): LCIs will require to be modified compared to current practise, in order to exploit the advantages that this new approach may provide. Initial results form this study indicate that a dissipation approach is feasible and can have several advantages, e.g providing more detailed results for several life cycle stages, but also has some drawbacks, e.g. a higher data demand on the life cycle inventory side. Both, advantages and drawbacks of the dissipation modelling will have to be further explored.JRC.D.1-Bio-econom

Towards an overall framework to assess the sustainability of the use of natural resources

Over the years, the sustainable supply of natural resources for the global economy has drawn increasing political interest. The efficient use of resources is a fundamental issue for sustainability assessment, entailing and affecting environmental, economic and social aspects. It is not surprising that they hold a central role in many different sustainability assessment frameworks. In conventional life cycle assessment (LCA), natural resources are considered as one area of protection (AoP). It is well recognized that the typical approach of this AoP starts from the provisioning function of resources, but natural resources however are also dealt with in totally different frameworks. If one starts from an ecological point of view, provisioning services is only one role natural resources fulfill next to regulating, cultural and supporting functions, all captured by the Ecosystems Services framework. The access to certain resources is a further issue of concern for policy. The identification of the so-called Critical Raw Materials for EU took into account their economic importance for specific sectors and supply risk, the latter being focused on concentration of supply from producing countries showing poor governance and low environmental standards, in turn mitigated by substitutability and recyclability of the materials. Further on, there is no doubt that resource exploitation and use may affect several social aspects (e.g. working conditions) as can be identified by the Social Hotspot Database, and that emissions generated along their use in supply chains (from extraction to manufacturing, use and end of life) might affect human health and natural ecosystems, other two areas of protection in conventional LCA. This presentation proposes an integration of the aforementioned frameworks aiming at depicting an overall framework to assess the sustainability of the use of natural resources

Historical trends in abiotic and biotic resource flows in the EU (1990-2010)

In its Communication “Roadmap to a Resource Efficient Europe” the European Commission defined a vision for EU resource consumption by 2050: the economy will have grown compatibly with resource constraints and planetary boundaries, preserving a high standard of living and lowering the environmental impacts. Such vision entails the sustainable management of natural resources, i.e. raw materials, energy, water, air, land and soil as well as biodiversity and ecosystems. In this paper, we focus on analysing the trends of abiotic and biotic resource consumption within the EU27 over the past 20 years, beyond traditional mass-based approaches to resource accounting (e.g. Domestic Material Consumption DMC and total material requirements, TMR). In fact, our assessment is performed at inventory level (thus accounting for the biophysical flows of resources) and at impact assessment level, using different life-cycle impact assessment methods (LCIA) for resource depletion and scarcity. The resources considered in the analysis include only those extracted in EU territory, including: raw materials (metals and minerals), energy carriers, biotic and water resources and the timeframe is 20 years (1990-2010). The final aim is the assessment of the evolution of resource flows in the economy (LCI) and the related resource depletion (LCIA) due to European production and consumption. Trends of resource consumption and associated depletion as well as other existing indicators for monitoring resource efficiency are reported and analysed with the aim of: highlighting the occurrence of decoupling over time, both in absolute and relative terms and giving a comprehensive overview of trends related to different resources, usually handled separately in the existing literature. To complete the sustainability assessment of resource consumption research needs are listed, particularly concerning the need of complementing the study with the analysis of socio-economic drivers underpinning the resource consumption trends.JRC.H.8-Sustainability Assessmen

Development of a weighting approach for the Environmental Footprint

In Life Cycle Assessment (LCA), according to ISO 14044 (ISO 2006), normalisation and weighting are optional steps of Life Cycle Impact Assessment (LCIA). Those steps allow expressing LCA results aggregating the results (up to a single score), giving different weight to the different environmental impacts. The step of prioritising and aggregating the results for the 16 environmental impact categories evaluated in the life cycle based Environmental Footprint (EF) - covering e.g. climate change, acid rain, human and eco-toxicity, particulate matter but also impacts due to the use of water, land and resources – has a high relevance. Weighting supports the identification of the most relevant impact categories, life cycle stages, process and resource consumptions or emissions to ensure that the focus is put on those aspects that matter the most and for communication purposes. Any weighting scheme is not mainly natural science based but inherently involves value choices that will depend on policy, cultural and other preferences and value systems. No “consensus” on weighting seems to be achievable. This situation does not apply only to weighting in a LCA or Environmental Footprint context, but seems inevitable for many multicriteria approaches. The objective of this work therefore was to find a convention suitable for the application in the EF context and to develop a method for weighting the Environmental Footprint Impact Categories according to their relevance for the overall environmental problems. A final recommendation is provided on a weighting set to be used for the EF that includes also aspects of the robustness of the results. This report includes, from page 46 onward, several annexes and the comments from a consultation of the Environmental Footprint Technical Advisory Board in June 2017.JRC.D.1-Bio-econom

Consumer's behaviour in assessing environmental impact of consumption - State of the art and challenges for modelling consumer's behaviour in life cycle-based indicators

The European Commission (EC) has been developing an assessment framework to monitor the evolution of environmental impact associated to the European Union (EU) consumption. The assessment framework should help to support a wide array of policies, such as those related to resource efficiency, eco-innovation and circular economy. The environmental impact of EU consumption is assessed adopting two sets of life cycle-based indicators: the Consumption footprint and the Consumer footprint, which have a complementary role in assessing those impacts. The EU Consumer Footprint is the measurement of the environmental impacts based on the life cycle assessment (LCA) of products (or services) purchased and used in one year by an EU citizen. This is based on the results of LCAs of representative consumed products (and services, where relevant). Within the framework of this project, a dedicated area of research focused on the “Product use phase and consumption scenarios”, aiming at the examination of consumer behaviour types in view of further refinement of product use phase modelling and in support to the definition of scenarios on improved environmental behaviours. Whereas the production-based perspective helps in identifying domestic sectors, product groups and products responsible for emissions and resource use, the consumption-based perspective looks at the overall environmental impact induced by the domestic consumption. Each of the two perspectives on environmental impact has its use for policy-makers. This report is addressing variability in the use phase grounded on consumers' actual behaviour patterns, with reference to the aims presented before. After a brief review of theories and models explaining consumer behaviours, this report discusses the main approaches for measuring the environmental impacts of consumption and the key drivers that influence consumers’ shift towards more envrionmentally friendly consumption choices and behaviours. Moreover, the possible link between behavioural sciences and Life Cycle Assessment, through the development of scenarios on consumer behaviour applied to the Basket of Products (BoPs) is discussed, together with the possibility to capture the rebound effects in these scenarios. Current knowledge gaps and related research needs are illustrated in the concluding section, highlighting possible future paths of research for the integration of behavioural economics into environmental assessment (e.g. to capture the rebound effects induced by household expenditure structure shifting, based on Engel’s curve), and to complement and further improve the approaches discussed herein.JRC.D.1-Bio-econom

Consumer Footprint. Basket of Products indicator on Food

The EU Consumer Footprint aims at assessing the potential environmental impacts due to consumption. The calculation of the Consumer footprint is based on the life cycle assessment (LCA) of representative products (or services) purchased and used in one year by an EU citizen. This report is about the subset indicator of the basket of product (BoP) on food. The BoP food is built to assess the impact associated to food consumption in Europe from raw material extraction to end of life. The reference flow is the amount of food consumed by an average citizen in a reference year. It consists of a process-based life cycle inventory model for a basket of products that represent the most relevant food product groups, selected by importance in mass and economic value. The 19 products in the basket are: pork, beef and poultry meat, milk, cheese, butter, bread, sugar, sunflower oil, olive oil, potatoes, oranges, apples, mineral water, roasted coffee, beer, pre-prepared meals, wine, and pasta. The consumer footprint for the BoP food is assessed using 15 environmental impact categories as for the ILCD LCIA method and running a sensitivity for a number of impact categories with updated models. Results show that agriculture is the life cycle stage of the food system with the larger contribution to most of the impact categories. The product groups that emerge as hotspots in most of the impact categories are meat products, dairy products, and beverages. The main impact for the life cycle of meat products comes from the emissions due to agricultural activities for the production of feed. Direct emissions from animal husbandry (methane, dinitrogen oxide, ammonia, etc.) contribute as well. Normalized results show that the BoP food contributes significantly to several impact categories, with a different ranking depending upon the adopted normalisation reference (European or global). Ecotoxicity, human toxicity, eutrophication, acidification, water depletion and climate change are among the leading impacts. Since many LCA study on food are limited to the assessment of climate change related emissions, the BoP food baseline aims at helping to understand the wider array of impacts associated to the food system of production and consumption. Moreover, the Consumer Footprint BoP food baseline has been assessed against 5 scenarios, referring to improvement options related to the main drivers of impact. In fact, the scenarios act on the hotspots identified within the baseline and refer to the most relevant eco-innovations and behavioural changes identified through a review of the scientific literature. Scenario 1 and Scenario 4 act on the nutrients cycle, with the aim of recovering nutrients either at the production stage or the end of life stage. Scenario 2 acts at the end of life stage as well, by assuming an improvement of the efficiency of the waste water treatment in Europe. Scenario 3 is a first attempt to address the benefits of behavioural changes, with an example of reduced amount of meat consumed. Scenario 5 regards the topic of food waste prevention, and entails a number of prevention measures, acting at different stages of the food supply chain, including the use phase. The scenarios tested on the baseline of the BoP food provided insights on the potential for reducing environmental impacts of food consumption in Europe. Each scenario acts on a different component of the BoP (in term of either products, life cycle stages or composition of the basket). As the scenarios are different in type it was found out that the was a large difference on the different scores and savings among the investigated impact categories. In general, among the scenarios assessed, the options that allow for a higher reduction of impacts are the ones acting on the drivers of freshwater eutrophication, such as recovery of nutrients from urine or improvement of the wastewater treatment. It is important to highlight that results of scenarios shall be analysed considering a certain “uptake factor” across EU (it is not realistic to assume 100% change across EU27). It is also recommended to consider the combination of improvement actions, to cover a wider range of impacts and to maximize the potential of impact reduction, both at the scale of the single citizen and of the whole Europe. An example has been provided in the case of combined actions for the scenario on food waste prevention.JRC.D.1-Bio-econom

Research findings and decision making: the case of renewable energy

Energy policies from local to global scale are increasingly questioned in terms of sustainability. Evidence-based and science-based decision making in this field need a robust and transparent integrated assessment of policy options. Nevertheless, scientific findings do not lead straight to political conclusions, and the relationship between science and decision making is a debated issue. The article discusses the main barriers to effective interaction and communication between scientific enquiry and decision making and proposes some effective ways to overcome these barriers, starting from experiences in the biomass energy sector. The article discusses the case of wood fuel, focusing on one of the European hot spots for air pollution, namely the Po valley in Northern Italy. It proves to be an interesting case, especially because of the ambiguity between the positive and the negative aspects of wood burning, which, if not adequately integrated by information about the specific conditions that influence pollution levels, can lead to opposite political decisions about the use of wood in local energy plans. Starting from scientific findings it is possible to derive guidelines about the best practices to adopt in order to reduce environmental impacts along the whole wood fuel chain. In this, associations of producers and of consumers and other existing networks (e.g. forestry consortia) can be very useful, either as a source of information not published in the scientific literature and as intermediaries for translating the knowledge into a more usable format and to convey information to the final targets identified (e.g. policy makers, firms and final users).JRC.H.8-Sustainability Assessmen

Research findings and decision making: the case of renewable energy

Background Energy policies from local to global scale are increasingly questioned in terms of sustainability. Evidence- and science-based decision making in this field needs a robust and transparent integrated assessment of policy options. Nevertheless, scientific findings do not lead straight to political conclusions, and the relationship between science and decision making is a debated issue. The article discusses the main barriers to effective interaction and communication between scientific enquiry and decision making and proposes some effective ways to overcome these barriers, starting from experiences in the biomass energy sector