The issue of freshwater use and related impacts is central to international debate. The reason is that freshwater, even though renewable, is a scarce resource with limited availability in a growing number of regions all over the world. The consequent increasing competitiveness on freshwater resources is recognized to affect companies by exposing them to several environmental and market risks. In this contest, businesses clearly showed interest in freshwater management tool so that, in recent year, the scientific community has been working on the development of suitable models and methods. Even though several experiences can be identified in the literature, most significant researches are taking place within the framework of the Life Cycle Assessment, an internationally accepted methodology to assess potential environmental impacts of products, processes and organizations. When focusing on freshwater related issue it is also known as Water Footprint assessment.
Current methods, specifically developed to address this issue, present limits in term of transparency, completeness and comprehensiveness. These limitations prevent companies to understand their water environmental hot-spots and therefore to set effective environmental and market performance improvement strategies.
The present research focuses on the development of a new model to achieve the freshwater management as a competitive tool for industrial processes. To do so the specific objective of the research was to develop a set of indicators to overcome identified limits and to test its applicability in real case studies.
To define the set of indicators, the methodology of the research took into consideration the Life Cycle Assessment framework adopting the criteria agreed within the UNEP-SETAC (United Nation Environmental Program – Society of Environmental Toxicology and Chemistry) Water Use Life Cycle Initiative; to test and discuss its applicability and effectiveness, the methodology of the multiple case studies was adopted. The case studies were selected considering their significance in term of freshwater scarcity and their capability to represent life cycle processes in different locations and therefore to address the issue of regionalization. The four products studied in this research were: a water collection system, an organic oat beverage, an organic strawberry jam and a tomato sauce.
The development of the set of indicators is addressed in the first part of the research. To guarantee transparency and effective life cycle impact assessment analysis, the entire environmental impact chain was modelled in order to separately address consumptive and degradative freshwater use. To guarantee completeness and comprehensiveness and therefore to avoid potential environmental burden shifting, a so called water footprint profile covering accepted freshwater related impact methods, was created.
The applicability and effectiveness of the proposed set of indicators is presented in the second part of this work. The four case studies were conducted according to the Life Cycle Assessment stages. Results of the applicability of the proposed set of indicators highlighted the importance of regionalization and comprehensiveness and allowed to understand the importance of considering degradative and consumptive freshwater use separately. It was in fact possible to define environmental impact reduction strategies in each of the case studies presented.
The research activities were carried out at the Department of Industrial Engineering (Dipartimento di Ingegneria Industriale-DII) at the University of Padova (Italy) and at the Golisano Institute for Sustainability of the Rochester Institute of Technology (New York State –USA).
The results of the research activities are summarized in 5 chapters.
Chapter 1 includes an introduction of the issue of freshwater scarcity and presents the evolution of models to address freshwater use and related impacts starting from the virtual water assessment to the most recent development within the Life Cycle Assessment framework. Limits of current models and methods are presented. Objective and structure of the research are also described.
Chapter 2 reports on materials and methods used in the present research, from the description of the general framework of Life Cycle Assessment studies to the specific criteria used in the indicators definition. Set of developed indicators is therefore presented by specifying procedures for their application and describing the solutions adopted to conform to internationally accepted requirements (such as ISO 14046).
Chapter 3 presents the results of the application of the identified set of indicators in four different case studies. To identify potential strategies for companies and to test the effectiveness of the proposed set of indicators, a sensitivity analysis on results is performed.
Chapter 4 presents the discussion on results with reference to published literature, the UNEP-SETAC Water Use Life Cycle Initiative criteria, the ISO 14046 principles and objectives of the research.
Chapter 5 reports on the conclusion and perspectives for future research
