Anyone not noticed it? Yes, of course, it is December – another annual epidemic of Christmas euphoria has spread, threatening to wipe out the last bit of tranquility and peacefulness modern cities have kept. I am...
Archive - 2011
ecoinvent – The Swiss Army Knife of LCA Background Databases
Background databases can be very convenient when you assess all of the impacts a product or a service has on the environment. Such an assessment is widely known as a life cycle assessment (LCA); it analyzes everything...
Terminating the End-of-Pipe Era by Simple Means of Process Optimization
In the course of the last three decades, more and more voices have called for cleaner industry. Today, 20 years after the legendary Rio summit, the voices in favor of the environment seem to sound rather like a choir...
Material Flow Based Process Systems Engineering
I have been waiting for this for far too long, but finally it has been written and it deserves your attention: a paper on advanced material flow based systems engineering. It was published in the December issue of...
Students Often Responsible for Changes
It’s international Students‘ day today. This day has a long history as well as impacts and scale of student movements. As some kind of intellectual nucleus these movements are often a source for fundamental changes. The...
Encouraging Ecological Forest Management
The inventor of sustainability, says the legend, was Hans Carl von Carlowitz, a mining administrator, who called for a sustainable use of forests. In order to continuously bring in a harvest, foresters had to think far...
French Environmental Labeling – Industrial Experience Feedback
EVEA Conseil is a French Umberto partner and a leading consultancy firm for Life Cycle Assessment and Ecodesign. The LCA project described in this article results in two main improvements. The labeling allows customers...
Exploring the Environmental Effects of Electric Cars
Can you imagine the weight of 1.8 billion tonnes? I can’t. I can only try to put this number in relation to others. 1.8 billion tonnes, that’s the weight of all carbon emissions caused by private transport...
3 Precise Perspectives on Corporate Carbon Footprints
As business consultant in the field of sustainability, I would like to share with you three findings that I made in Central and South America, working with companies willing to reduce their carbon emissions. Since the...
Food Footprints: Subjective Consumer Perception vs. Profound LCA Data
Today is World Vegan Day. Vegans are people ethically very consequent. Even more consequent than vegetarians. Vegans don’t eat products that derive from living beings – no cheese, no milk, no honey...