Magnus Bengtsson

Weighting in Practice:Implications for the Use of Life-Cycle Assessment in Decision Making

Summary This article investigates how environmental trade-offs are handled in life-cycle assessment (LCA) studies in some Nordic companies. Through interviews, the use and understanding of weighting methods in decision making was studied. The analysis shows that the decision makers require methods with which to aggregate and help interpret the complex information from life-cycle inventories. They agreed that it was not their own values that should be reflected in such methods, but they were found to have different opinions concerning the value basis that should be used. The analysis also investigates the difficulties arising from using such methods. The decision makers seemed to give a broader meaning to the term weighting, and were more concerned with the comparison between environmental and other aspects than the weighting of different environmental impacts. A conclusion is that decision makers need to be more involved in modeling and interpretation. The role of the analyst should be to interpret the information needs of the decision maker, and help him or her make methodological choices that are consistent with these needs and relevant from his or her point of view. To achieve this, it is important that decision makers do not view LCA as a highly standardized calculation tool, but as a flexible process of collecting, organizing, and interpreting environmental information. Such an approach to LCA increases the chances that the results will be regarded as relevant and useful.

An Approach for Handling Geographical Information in Life Cycle Assessment Using a Relational Database

A new data model has been developed to handle information relevant to site-specific life cycle assessments (LCA). The model is orientated towards GIS-representations of three generalised subsystems; the technical, the environmental and the social subsystems. The technical and environmental systems are mainly linked through flows of energy and matter, which are the causes of environmental impacts, which subsequently is perceived, evaluated and acted upon by the social subsystem. For all three systems important differences, attributable to geographical locations can be determined. With the new data model a possibility to enhance LCA and reach more relevant results emerge due to a higher site specificity. The high level data model is expressed as relations between different entities using the entity relationship (ER) modelling language. An existing LCA-database, SPINE, which is already used by several companies for decision support in product development, can be utilised since the structure of the database supports geographical information. So far, applications with GIS-data are limited, but examples of area specific LCA impact characterisation factors exist.

International Comparison and Suggestions for Capacity Development in Industrializing Countries

The global consumption of natural resources is soaring, especially in rapidly industrializing economies. This increasing demand is depleting resource stocks and is a major driver of other environmental problems, including climate change and waste. With rising prices and growing concerns about resource access, these trends are increasingly attracting policy makers’ attention. Some developed countries have devised indicator systems, based on economy‐wide material flow analysis/accounting (EW‐MFA), to monitor resource consumption. This article consists of two separate but related parts: (1) a study of how EW‐MFA indicators are used in a number of developed countries, including analysis of the commonalities between countries that are actively using these indicators in policy, and (2) a survey of the current capacity for EW‐MFA in developing countries, including data availability and policy uptake. This study found that countries in which policy makers show a great interest in EW‐MFA indicators are characterized by large resource imports and large net export of manufactured goods. Many rapidly industrializing countries demonstrate similar characteristics. The study of developing countries found that many of the data for EW‐MFA exist, but collection is fragmented and access is limited. This article recommends that capacity development of EW‐MFA in rapidly industrializing economies should first coordinate a national focal point and then raise awareness among government officials, strengthen institutions collecting EW‐MFA data, and train researchers and experts in EW‐MFA techniques and effective policy interaction.

Why achieving the Paris Agreement requires reduced overall consumption and production

Abstract Technological solutions to the challenge of dangerous climate change are urgent and necessary but to be effective they need to be accompanied by reductions in the total level of consumption and production of goods and services. This is for three reasons. First, private consumption and its associated production are among the key drivers of greenhouse-gas (GHG) emissions, especially among highly emitting industrialized economies. There is no evidence that decoupling of the economy from GHG emissions is possible at the scale and speed needed. Second, investments in more sustainable infrastructure, including renewable energy, needed in coming decades will require extensive amounts of energy, largely from fossil sources, which will use up a significant share of the two-degree carbon budget. Third, improving the standard of living of the world’s poor will consume a major portion of the available carbon allowance. The scholarly community has a responsibility to put the issue of consumption and the associated production on the research and policy agenda.

Intelligent Transport Systems - The Role of a Safety Loop for Holistic Safety Management

An ITS represents a Cyber-Physical System (CPS), which will involve information exchange at operational level as well as potential explicit collaboration between separate entities (systems of systems). Specific emphasis is required to manage the complexity and safety of such future CPS. In this paper we focus on model-based approaches for these purposes for analyzing and managing safety throughout the lifecycle of ITS. We argue that: (1) run-time risk assessment will be necessary for efficient ITS; (2) an information centric approach will be instrumental for future ITS to support all aspects of safety management – a “safety loop”; (3) a formal basis is required to deal with the large amounts of information present in an ITS. We elaborate these arguments and discuss what is required to support their realization.

Information on Chemicals in Electronic Products : A study of needs, gaps, obstacles and solutions to provide and access information on chemicals in electronic products

Many chemicals used in the electronics sector have negative consequences for human and environmental health. These include chemicals such as lead, mercury, brominated flame retardants, halogenated ...

Transforming systems of consumption and production for achieving the sustainable development goals: moving beyond efficiency

The United Nations formulated the sustainable development goals (SDGs) in 2015 as a comprehensive global policy framework for addressing the most pressing social and environmental challenges currently facing humanity. In this paper, we analyse SDG 12, which aims to “ensure sustainable consumption and production patterns.” Despite long-standing political recognition of this objective, and ample scientific evidence both on its importance and on the efficacy of various ways of promoting it, the SDGs do not provide clear goals or effective guidance on how to accomplish this urgently needed transformation. Drawing from the growing body of research on sustainable consumption and production (SCP), the paper identifies two dominant vantage points—one focused on promoting more efficient production methods and products (mainly through technological improvement and informed consumer choice) and the other stressing the need to consider also overall volumes of consumption, distributional issues, and related social and institutional changes. We label these two approaches efficiency and systemic. Research shows that while the efficiency approach contains essential elements of a transition to sustainability, it is by itself highly unlikely to bring about sustainable outcomes. Concomitantly, research also finds that volumes of consumption and production are closely associated with environmental impacts, indicating a need to curtail these volumes in ways that safeguard social sustainability, which is unlikely to be possible without a restructuring of existing socioeconomic arrangements. Analysing how these two perspectives are reflected in the SDGs framework, we find that in its current conception, it mainly relies on the efficiency approach. On the basis of this assessment, we conclude that the SDGs represent a partial and inadequate conceptualisation of SCP which will hamper implementation. Based on this determination, this paper provides some suggestions on how governments and other actors involved in SDGs operationalisation could more effectively pursue SCP from a systemic standpoint and use the transformation of systems of consumption and production as a lever for achieving multiple sustainability objectives.

Contact Variation Optimization for Surface-to-Surface Contacts

Locating schemes, used to position parts during manufacturing, are usually designed in such a way that the response from the system is minimized. This implies that the position of the fasteners and/or welds are known in an assembly. Today there exist numerous of methods aiming to find an optimal set of locating points to increase the stability of an assembly, for both rigid and compliant parts. However, various industrial applications use surface-to-surface contacts to constrain certain degrees of freedom. This can lead to designs sensitive to geometric and load variations. As the complexity of the surfaces increases, difficulties of allocating geometric tolerances arise. An approach to control this is to keep the contact locations statistically stable. In this paper a methodology is presented where the First-Order reliability Method (FORM) is applied for numerical data, retrieved through Finite Element Analysis (FEA), to ensure that statistically stable contact location are achieved for two bodies with surface-to-suface contact. The FEA data represents how much of the total stress that lies within a given area, sW. The data is continuous and therefore it is assumed that the gradient can be calculated numerically with small steps. The objective function is to maximize sW for n variables. The data set is simulated through Finite Element Analysis using the commercial software Ansys and the results is illustrated on a case study from the machining industry.