Extended producer responsibility Strategy designed to promote the integration of environmental costs associated with goods Extended producer responsibility (EPR) is a strategy to add all of the estimated environmental costs associated with a product throughout the product life cycle to the market price of that product, contemporarily mainly applied in the field of waste management.[1] Such societal costs are typically externalities to market mechanisms, with a common example being the impact of cars. Extended producer responsibility legislation is a driving force behind the adoption of remanufacturing initiatives because it "focuses on the end-of-use treatment of consumer products and has the primary aim to increase the amount and degree of product recovery and to minimize the environmental impact of waste materials".[2] Passing responsibility to producers as polluters is not only a matter of environmental policy but also the most effective means of achieving higher environmental standards in product design.[3]
Green finance and the Belt and Road Initiative Green finance is officially promoted as an important feature of the Belt and Road Initiative, China's signature global economic development initiative. The official vision for the BRI calls for an environmentally friendly "Green Belt and Road".[1] Policy[edit] Chinese policy documents for the BRI coordinate and encourage green finance and investment. The Ministry of Ecology and Environment with four other ministries released the "Guidance on Promoting a Green Belt and Road" in 2017. The Development Research Center of the State Council and Export-Import Bank of China released a report in 2019 on green finance for the Belt and Road. Forms[edit] The various forms of green finance includes investments, lending, and insurance by Chinese state-owned financial entities and companies for renewable energy projects in host countries of the Belt and Road.[4] Bonds[edit] Loans[edit] Coal projects[edit] References[edit]
Helix of sustainability The helix of sustainability - the Carbon cycle ideal for manufacture and use The helix of sustainability is a concept coined to help manufacturing industry move to more sustainable practices by mapping its models of raw material use and reuse onto those of nature. The environmental benefits of the use crop origin sustainable materials have been assumed to be self-evident, but as the debate on food vs fuel shows, the whole product life cycle must be examined in the light of social and environmental effects in addition to technical suitability and profitability. The advantages of working with crop origin raw materials are readily observed if the social and environmental impacts are considered as well as monetary cost (the Triple bottom line), and the helix of sustainability helps to demonstrate this. Conventional cycles of use and reuse are circular. For sustainable material articles there is not such a great requirement for a dedicated recovery infrastructure. See also[edit]
Environmental full-cost accounting Environmental full-cost accounting (EFCA) is a method of cost accounting that traces direct costs and allocates indirect costs[1] by collecting and presenting information about the possible environmental costs and benefits or advantages – in short, about the "triple bottom line" – for each proposed alternative. It is one aspect of true cost accounting (TCA), along with Human capital and Social capital. As definitions for "true" and "full" are inherently subjective, experts consider both terms problematic.[n 1] Since costs and advantages are usually considered in terms of environmental, economic and social impacts, full or true cost efforts are collectively called the "triple bottom line". Many standards now exist in this area including Ecological Footprint, eco-labels, and the International Council for Local Environmental Initiatives' approach to triple bottom line using the ecoBudget metric. These have the advantage of avoiding the more contentious questions of social cost. Notes[edit]
Environmental economics Sub-field of economics Environmental economics is a sub-field of economics concerned with environmental issues.[1] It has become a widely studied subject due to growing environmental concerns in the twenty-first century. Environmental economics "undertakes theoretical or empirical studies of the economic effects of national or local environmental policies around the world. ... Particular issues include the costs and benefits of alternative environmental policies to deal with air pollution, water quality, toxic substances, solid waste, and global warming."[2] History[edit] Topics and concepts[edit] Market failure[edit] Air pollution is an example of market failure, as the factory is imposing a negative external cost on the community. Externality[edit] An externality exists when a person makes a choice that affects other people in a way that is not accounted for in the market price. Common goods and public goods[edit] These challenges have long been recognized. Global biochemical cycles David A.
History of industrial ecology The establishment of industrial ecology as field of scientific research is commonly attributed[by whom?] to an article devoted to industrial ecosystems, written by Frosch and Gallopoulos, which appeared in a 1989 special issue of Scientific American.[1] Industrial ecology emerged from several earlier ideas and concepts, some of which date back to the 19th century. Before the 1960s[edit] The term "industrial ecology" has been used alongside "industrial symbiosis" at least since the 1940s. Economic geography was perhaps one of the first fields to use these terms. Any industry tends to locate at a point which provides optimum access to its ingredients or component elements. In the same article the author defines and describes industrial symbiosis: Often the location of an industry cannot be fully understood solely in terms of its locative ingredient elements. The central ecological variable in the present research is ecological mobility, or the movement of men in space. 1960s[edit]
Energy quality Examples: Industrialization, Biology[edit] The consideration of energy quality was a fundamental driver of industrialization from the 18th through 20th centuries. Consider for example the industrialization of New England in the 18th century. This refers to the construction of textile mills containing power looms for weaving cloth. The simplest, most economical and straightforward source of energy was provided by water wheels, extracting energy from a millpond behind a dam on a local creek. If another nearby landowner also decided to build a mill on the same creek, the construction of their dam would lower the overall hydraulic head to power the existing waterwheel, thus hurting power generation and efficiency. Water wheels are also driven by rainwater, via the solar evaporation-condensation water cycle; thus ultimately, industrial cloth-making was driven by the day-night cycle of solar irradiation. History[edit] Energy quality evaluation methods[edit] T. Ranking energy quality[edit] M.T.
Industrial ecology programme The Industrial Ecology Programme, or IndEcol, in the Department of Energy and Process Engineering at NTNU (Trondheim, Norway) is an interdisciplinary research programme specialising in sustainable development, circular economy research and environmental issues.[1] IndEcol's research areas are framed around the recently adopted United Nations Sustainable Development Goals[2] and include: Research groups focus on Life Cycle Assessment, Material Flow Analysis, and global environmental input-output analysis.[1][3][4][5] The Digital Laboratory of the Programme bundles the Research software engineering efforts of the group. [6] The programme was initiated in 1994 and covers several research disciplines and a comprehensive educational curriculum.[7] IndEcol established the world's first PhD programme in Industrial Ecology in 2003[7][8] and set up the international Master of Science in Industrial Ecology the following year.[3][4][5][9] Specialist programmes[edit] Partnerships[edit] References[edit]
EIO-LCA Method of analyzing environmental impacts An economic input-output life-cycle assessment, or EIO-LCA involves the use of aggregate sector-level data to quantify the amount of environmental impact that can be directly attributed to each sector of the economy and how much each sector purchases from other sectors in producing its output. Combining such data sets can enable accounting for long chains (for example, building an automobile requires energy, but producing energy requires vehicles, and building those vehicles requires energy, etc.), which somewhat alleviates the scoping problem of traditional life-cycle assessments. EIO-LCA analysis traces out the various economic transactions, resource requirements and environmental emissions (including all the various manufacturing, transportation, mining and related requirements) required for producing a particular product or service. Background[edit] Theory[edit] represents the amount that sector purchased from sector in a given year and , then
Industrial symbiosis Example of Industrial symbiosis: waste steam from a waste incinerator (right) is piped to an ethanol plant (left) where it is used as an input to their production process Industrial symbiosis[1] a subset of industrial ecology. It describes how a network of diverse organizations can foster eco-innovation and long-term culture change, create and share mutually profitable transactions—and improve business and technical processes. Although geographic proximity is often associated with industrial symbiosis, it is neither necessary nor sufficient—nor is a singular focus on physical resource exchange. Industrial symbiosis is a subset of industrial ecology, with a particular focus on material and energy exchange. Introduction[edit] Eco-industrial development is one of the ways in which industrial ecology contributes to the integration of economic growth and environmental protection. Example[edit] See also[edit] References[edit] External links[edit]
Efficient energy use Energy efficiency Energy intensity of economies (1990 to 2015): Energy intensity is an indication of how much energy is used to produce one unit of economic output. Lower ratio indicates that less energy is used to produce one unit of output.[1] Efficient energy use, sometimes simply called energy efficiency, is the process of reducing the amount of energy required to provide products and services. There are many motivations to improve energy efficiency. Energy efficiency and renewable energy are said to be the twin pillars of sustainable energy policy[5] and are high priorities in the sustainable energy hierarchy. Overview[edit] Simplified electrical grid with energy storage Lovin's Rocky Mountain Institute points out that in industrial settings, "there are abundant opportunities to save 70% to 90% of the energy and cost for lighting, fan, and pump systems; 50% for electric motors; and 60% in areas such as heating, cooling, office equipment, and appliances." Benefits[edit] Appliances[edit]
Integrated chain management Integrated Chain Management (ICM), also known as Integral Chain Management, is an approach for the reduction of environmental impact of product chains. Such a product chain exists out of an extraction phase, a production phase, a use phase and a waste phase. The ultimate goal of ICM is a reduction of environmental load over the whole chain. Integrated Chain Management is one of the approaches that can be used to come to sustainable development. Within the ICM approach all phases within the chain must be considered. Integrated chain management should not be mixed up with Supply Chain Management or Integrated Supply Chain Management. An important aspect of ICM is that shifting to other phases in the product chain is avoided. The chain can be managed by developing new policies and economical or political incentives. Analyse the processes into a preferred level of detailDetermine the boundaries of the chain. Example[edit] External links[edit]
International Society for Industrial Ecology The International Society for Industrial Ecology (ISIE) is an international professional association with the aim of promoting the development and application of industrial ecology.[1][2] History[edit] The decision to found ISIE was made in January 2000 at the New York Academy of Sciences in a meeting devoted to industrial ecology attended by experts from diverse fields. The society formally opened its doors to membership in February 2001.[1] Membership[edit] ISIE offers different types of membership that can be purchased from the Wiley-Blackwell website. Recent conferences of ISIE have been held at locations such as the University of Ulsan in South Korea,[5] Melbourne, Australia,[6] University of California, Berkeley,[7] and Stockholm Environmental Institute.[8] References[edit] External links[edit] Official website
ISASMELT Smelting process The installed feed capacity of Isasmelt furnaces has grown as the technology has been accepted in smelters around the world. Graph courtesy of Xstrata Technology. The ISASMELT process is an energy-efficient smelting process that was jointly developed from the 1970s to the 1990s by Mount Isa Mines (a subsidiary of MIM Holdings and now part of Glencore) and the Government of Australia’s CSIRO. ISASMELT technology has been applied to lead, copper, and nickel smelting. Smelters based on the copper ISASMELT process are among the lowest-cost copper smelters in the world.[2] The ISASMELT furnace[edit] An ISASMELT furnace is an upright-cylindrical shaped steel vessel that is lined with refractory bricks.[3] There is a molten bath of slag, matte or metal (depending on the application) at the bottom of the furnace. Cut-away view of an Isasmelt furnace. The products are removed from the furnace through one or more "tap holes" in a process called "tapping". AGIP Australia[edit]