Life cycle assessment (LCA) is a means of determining the environmental impact of a product, process or activity. It abstracts that “thing” from its surrounds and assesses its material interaction with the ecosystem in...
Category - Norms and Standards
A Truly Green Building Sector? Sustainable Housing Challenges in Northern Europe
Throughout its lifespan, a building affects the environment in a multitude of ways. How our house is built, how we live in it, and what climate it stands in, has an unbelievably big impact on our personal carbon...
ISO 14051-Based Material Flow Cost Accounting in a Nutshell
The ISO 14000 series has proved to be handy for quite a while now. Companies and public institutions have valued the universal guidelines for all sorts of environmental management procedures – energy management, carbon...
From Green to Blue to Gray to Black: The Chromatics of Water Footprints
Because water is the most vital element for life, many contemporary intellectuals expect it to be the most conflict-generating resource of the 21st century. Not water in general, which is present in most places in one...
Kyoto’s CO2-Baseline Wrong by 7% – But Today’s GHG Inventories Aren’t All That Bad
Regardless of how China is perceived in the west, in the medium term, the world’s most ambitious energy efficiency goals can be found in that country. In only five years, from 2010 to 2015, it’s seven...
How Sustainable are Europe’s 5 Million E-Cars in 2020? New LCA Guidelines Help the Assessing
When it comes to sustainable private transport, the 21st-century-bearer-of-hope number one is called electric car. Unprecedentedly efficient, locally pollution-free and silent, this technology will totally save the...
9 Months of Certified Energy Management: ISO 50001 Starts Out
In July 2011, the promising ISO 50001 energy management standard was launched. This certificate rewards companies and public organizations willing to continuously reduce their energy consumption by providing a guideline...
Effectively Managing Greenhouse Gases – Worldwide
Do companies have a conscience to fight global warming and manage their greenhouse gas emissions? They should have, if we all want to limit the global mean temperature increase to 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial...