In the European Union, the building sector accounts for more than 40% of the total energy consumption and environmental impacts, representing the area with the greatest potential for intervention. In ...addition to the existing policies that promote energy efficiency in buildings, the embodied energy and the environmental impacts contained in the building materials should be considered. In the case of the construction of insulation façade systems, the environmental implications are different depending on the type of façade system, the insulation materials used and the location of the building. This article aims to provide all of this information for Spain, including not only the production of the components of the façade system but also the installation phase and the transport to the building site. The results show that the most impactful alternative is the ventilated façade combined with the most impactful insulation materials of stone wool and expanded polystyrene. Meanwhile, the most advisable façade in all of the climate zones is the external thermal insulation system combined with any type of insulation. The environmental impacts of insulation materials are very different. Moreover, it is recommended that further studies complete these results with the economic and social implications of the use and maintenance phases for robust decision-making.
•LCA comparison of insulation materials applied in façade systems has been developed.•The Spanish climate factor is introduced in the cradle-to-site LCA.•The most sustainable option is the external thermal insulation system with glass wool.•Stone wool represents 30–50% of impacts for all of the façade systems analysed.•The choice on the type of insulation material has great environmental implications.
Eco-design is focused on incorporating environmental criteria early in the design process to reduce the environmental impacts of new products. However, while services now represent the largest share ...of the world’s economy, the incorporation of environmental sustainability in the design of new services is very limited. This research proposes the ECO-Service Design (ECO-SD) method that integrates eco-design and service design to conceptualize new environmentally sustainable services. The ECO-SD method bridges environmental criteria from eco-design with the human-centred approach of service design, to foster the environmental sustainability of new services, while offering a desirable user experience. To this end, this method encompasses four stages: service exploration, to understand the service context and how users interact with it; service visualization, to visually identify the barriers to environmental performance and user experience during service provision; service ideation, to conceptualize a new service that overcomes the identified barriers; and service assessment, to understand the changes in environmental sustainability and user experience of the newly designed service. The application of the ECO-SD method to two individual shared transport services shows how it enables integrated identification of opportunities to overcome environmental and user experience barriers in the existing services.
•ECO-SD method helps designers explore problems in early stages of service design.•ECO-SD method aims to include environmental criteria aligned with the human-centricity.•Blueprinting-based enables the identification of environmental and service barriers.•The method was applied in the redesign of two shared urban transportation services.
Within urban agriculture (UA), integrated rooftop greenhouses (i-RTG) have great growth potential as they offer multiple benefits. Currently it is intended to improve environmental benefits by taking ...advantage of the water, nutrients and gases flows. On the other hand, solid waste (SW) generated by the UA is a new type of waste within cities that has not well been classified or quantified for its use. This could become a new problem for the waste management system within cities in the future, mainly the organic fraction.
The objective of this research is to identify what type of i-RTG SW has the potential to be used from a circular economy (CE) perspective and propose a type of management for its material valorization.
The results of the case study show that, of the SW generated in i-RTG, the biomass has the greatest potential to be used locally as an eco-material, particularly the tomato stems. Its use is proposed as a substrate for two experimental lettuce crops in i-RTG. The results show that tomato stems have a better yield as a substrate after a prewash treatment, since at first the values of electrical conductivity (EC) are very high with respect to the control substrate, which is expanded perlite.
In conclusion, we can say that it is possible to increase the environmental benefits of i-RTG by taking advantage of its biomass locally, helping to foresee a possible future problem regarding the management of the residual biomass of i-RTG within cities. In this way, the paradigm about the perception of the SW of the UA could be changed to give them a by-product treatment from the beginning.
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•Solid waste (SW) from urban agriculture (UA): a new typology of waste within cities•Use of UA SW from a circular economy (CE) perspective•Biomass as a by-product of integrated rooftop greenhouse (i-RTG)•Use of tomato stems from i-RTG as a substrate for lettuce crops•Reduction of the UA SW within the cities and closure of the UA life cycle
This study proposes a combined life cycle assessment (LCA) and Geographical Information Systems (GIS) methodology to develop complex LCA inventories for multiple applications. The study focusses on ...the environmental implications of buildings retrofits, especially in the European context, where the building sector is one of the largest energy consumers. In this context, a new and holistic perspective is needed that expands from the building scale to the urban scale.
The combination of LCA and GIS methods includes the development of an urban characterization model based on bottom-up methodologies. The environmental implications associated with increasing the thermal insulation of existing buildings to the current standard are determined based on LCA methods. In this step, common construction systems for building retrofits are used, and insulation materials are compared. Then, absolute and relative extrapolations are performed considering different urban morphologies.
The results confirm the importance of the energy retrofitting of residential buildings in large functional urban areas such as the Barcelona metropolitan area, which is examined as a case study. The LCA results indicate that the selection of proper construction systems and thermal insulation materials is important to the environmental performance of building retrofits, and these selections can lead to CO2 emission differences of up 16% in the region. The relative extrapolation results indicate significant environmental differences between urban morphologies. The LCA results show the potential strategic impacts of the inclusion of LCA methods in retrofit policies at the urban scale.
•A bottom-up methodology is presented to measure and map the environmental implications of retrofit scenarios.•The study compares construction systems and insulation materials, observing significant differences among retrofit scenarios.•The method is applied to the Barcelona metropolitan area, Spain, considering the urban morphology as an aggregate method.•The results show the potential strategic impacts of the inclusion of LCA approaches in retrofit policies at the urban scale.
Defining sustainable cities is not straightforward. The main issues involved in urban sustainability are buildings, energy, food, green areas and landscape, mobility, urban planning, water and waste; ...and their improvement is promoted through different strategies. However, a quantitative method, such as life cycle thinking (LCT), is essential to evaluating these strategies. This paper reviews LCT studies related to urban issues to identify the main research gaps in the evaluation of these improvement strategies. The review identifies the main sustainability strategies associated with each urban issue and compiles articles that deal with these strategies through LCT, including environmental life cycle assessment (LCA), life cycle costing (LCC), social LCA (S-LCA) and life cycle sustainability assessment (LCSA), as well as integrated analyses with combined tools. Water, waste and buildings are the urban issues that accounted for a larger amount of studies. In contrast, a limited number of papers assessed urban planning and energy (excluding energy in buildings). Strong interrelations among urban issues were identified, most of them including water. In terms of methods, 79% of the studies exclusively applied life cycle tools (i.e., LCA, LCC, S-LCA or LCSA). Within this group, the environmental dimension was the focus of 84% of the papers. Single environmental indicators (e.g., global warming) were common in 20% of the analyses, highlighting the need to integrate more impact categories to prevent trade-offs. In the field of social and sustainability assessment, there is a need for methodological advances that foster their application in urban areas. Further research should cover the thematic and methodological gaps identified in this paper, such as developing models that assess complex urban issues, generating comprehensive LCT studies and promoting multi-indicators. Life cycle tools might benefit from revising the methodology with stakeholders to optimize the understanding and communication of life cycle results for policy- and decision-making processes.
•We identified strategies promoted to achieve urban sustainability.•Based on urban issues, we reviewed the life cycle studies conducted for each strategy.•Water, waste and buildings were widely covered from a life cycle standpoint.•Urban planning and energy still need to be included in these assessments.•There is a lack of social studies and more methodological advancements are needed.
•Conventional and Passivhaus proposals for a university building’s renovation are compared.•The energy renovation achieved high energy savings for both proposals, between 60% and 80%.•The Passivhaus ...proposal is 30% better than the conventional one considering the total lifespan of the building.•The use of cork as an insulation material for envelope renovation is assessed.•Cork does not fit the requirements for competing with common non-renewable insulation materials.
The need to improve the energy efficiency of buildings has introduced the concept of nearly zero-energy buildings into European energy policies. Moreover, a percentage of the building stock will have to be renovated annually to attain high energy performance. Conventional passive interventions in buildings are focused on increasing the insulation of the building envelope to increase its energy efficiency during the operating phase. Often, however, intervention practices imply the incorporation of embodied energy into the building materials and increase the associated environmental impacts.
This paper presents and evaluates a comparison of two different proposals for a real-world building renovation. The first proposal was a conventional project for energy renovation, while the second was a low-energy building proposal (following the Passivhaus standard). This study analysed the proposals using an integrated life cycle and thermal dynamic simulation assessment to identify the adequacy of each renovation alternative regarding the post-renovation energy performance of the building, including an evaluation of the introduction of a renewable insulation material into the low-energy building proposal, specifically a specific cork solution. The most significant conclusion was the convenience of the renovation, achieving energy savings of 60% and 80% for the conventional and Passivhaus renovations (ENERPHIT), respectively. The former supposed less embodied energy and environmental impacts but also generated less energy savings. The latter increased the embodied impacts in the building, mainly for the large amount of insulation material. The environmental implications of both proposals can be compensated for within a reasonable period of time, over 2 years in the majority of alternatives and impact categories. However, the ENERPHIT project was 30% better than the conventional proposal when the total lifespan of the building was considered. The introduction of cork did not fit the requirements for competing with the common non-renewable insulation materials because it did not imply better environmental performance in buildings, but cork insulation solutions currently present ample room for improvement.
Investment in the productive systems of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in the manufacturing sector is usually quite limited. For this reason, normal practice is to apply minor developments ...internally or upgrade equipment as it becomes obsolete to increase their productive capacity and competitiveness at a lower cost. However, the work team, mostly made up of engineers, does not usually have experience in the use of design methodologies but also they are often familiar with the functioning of various design and quality-management tools. This paper presents a clear and simple design methodology that facilitates the development of adaptations to items of equipment that might be considered one-off products. It includes a selection of design tools that are, according to the literature on the subject, the most common and best-known among engineers, and which are also best-suited to the environment of an SME. The design methodology was validated experimentally with the upgrading of a gear-rolling tester installed on the premises of an SME in the sector. The recommended techniques and tools were satisfactory applied opening the possibilities for further application of the methodology in similar machine's upgrades in the future.
Considering that urban agriculture (UA) is currently on the rise due to its multiple benefits in addition to environmental ones, it would also be necessary to foresee the flow of solid waste it ...generates, which if not properly managed or used, could become a new waste problem within the cities.
The main objective of this study is to take advantage of agro-urban solid waste (AUSW) from the perspective of Circular economy (CE) in order to, in addition to reducing the volume of AUSW within cities, to close the life cycle of UA allowing to continue with its multiple benefits.
Starting from a previous study on the classification and quantification of the AUSW generated in rooftop greenhouse (RTG) tomato crop, where it was determined that the waste with the greatest potential for use was tomato stems, in this study a methodology is proposed that part of the eco-design to take advantage of the tomato stems adding value (upcycling) through the approach of “do-it-yourself” (DIY) for local use.
First, the physical, chemical and mechanical characterization of the tomato stems was carried out and the materials with similar properties were identified using Ashby graphs.
Afterwards, a creative session was held where specialists in order to identify possible applications of the stems through group techniques for the generation of ideas and the evaluation of concepts.
Finally, tests were carried out with the material and a semi-quantitative evaluation of the resulting concepts was carried out using an eco-design metric. The resulting concepts were “Fences and trellises”, “Packaging” and “Boards, panels and blocks".
In addition to the results obtained on the possible applications of the stems in situ, this study provides data on the characterization of the stems of tomato plants that could also be used for the use of biomass in other contexts and scales such as conventional agriculture.
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•Methodology for the local use of residual biomass generated by urban agriculture.•Upcycling of the residual biomass through eco-ideation with a DIY approach.•Characterization of tomato stems that can be used in other application areas.•Approach to improve the environmental performance of the UA life cycle.•Reduction of the volume of potential organic solid waste within cities.
Eco-innovation initiatives include eco-ideation processes for proposing ideas that are innovative and represent an environmental improvement. The evaluation of the results of eco-ideation has been ...focused on evaluating these two aspects, but it is necessary to know how related factors, such as the thinking profile of group members, influence the generation of concepts during the creative process. This study proposes a metric that analyses the results of the creative process within conceptualization from three approaches: innovation, circularity and group activity. The group activity approach is related to the influence of the leader in the management of a creative group. The proposed metric allows us to observe the creative process, the interactions among the participants, the design decisions made, and the evaluation of the creative product which will determine which type of creative groups obtain better results. The application of the results and the proposed metric allow the creation of groups oriented to objectives, for both specific or permanent workgroups. This can be used for the initial selection of participants for eco-ideation groups, or to improve the group functionality during intermediate stages.
•Metric to concept assessment from innovative, circularity and group activity approach.•Group activity approach is focused on leader influence in the group management.•Metric application allows to configure and customize groups oriented to objectives.•Metric allows to select participants or to manage and improve group functionality.
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