Adolf Acquaye

• PhD; MPhil (Cantab); BSc; PGCHE
• Lecturer at University of Kent

The development of robust mechanisms for supply chain performance measurement have been identified as an integral step needed for the transition towards sustainable supply chain systems and a greener global economy. However, measuring the environmental performance of supply chains is a challenging task, due to several factors, such as the lack of s...

In the last decades, green and sustainable supply chain management practices have been developed, trying to integrate environmental concerns into organisations by reducing unintended negative consequences on the environment of production and consumption processes. In parallel to this, the circular economy discourse has been propagated in the indust...

Environmental initiatives such as carbon labelling have been suggested as a driver for achieving sustainable production systems of product supply chains. The paper therefore presents a systematic process of developing an environmental labelling framework as an extension of carbon labelling using the fairtrade certification as a platform to facilita...

Purpose – The paper aims to develop a benchmarking framework to address issues such as supply chain complexity and visibility, geographical differences and non-standardized data, ensuring that the entire supply chain environmental impact (in terms of carbon) and resource use for all tiers, including domestic and import flows, are evaluated. Benchma...

The prohibition of lead in many electronic components and devices due to its toxicity has reinvigorated the race to develop substitutes for lead zirconate titanate (PZT) based mainly on the potassium sodium niobate (KNN) and sodium bismuth titanate (NBT). However, before successful transition from laboratory to market, critical environmental assess...

As environmental impacts continue to rise, the need to identify and quantify the underlying causes of these impacts has prompted important research questions. This is heightened by the fact that the production of goods and services is becoming increasingly global with countries relying on each other through trade. As such, it is important to have a...

Solar cells are considered as one of the prominent sources of renewable energy suitable for large-scale adoption in a carbon-constrained world and can contribute to reduced reliance on energy imports, whilst improving the security of energy supply. A new arrival in the family of solar cells technologies is the organic-inorganic halide perovskite. T...

Considered as a less hazardous piezoelectric material, potassium sodium niobate (KNN) has been in the fore of the search for replacement of lead (Pb) zirconate titanate for piezoelectrics applications. Here, we challenge the environmental credentials of KNN due to the presence of ~60 wt% Nb2O5, a substance much less toxic to humans than Pb oxide, b...

By exploiting data from the Toxic Release Inventory of the United States, we have established that the toxicological footprint (TF) surged 3.3% (88.4 Mt) between 1998 and 1999 and decreased by 39% (1088.5 Mt) between 1999 and 2013. From 1999 to 2006, the decreasing TF was driven by improvements in emissions intensity (i.e. gains in production effic...

The increasing awareness of the environmental and health threats of lead as well as environmental legislation, both in the EU and around the world targeted at decreasing the use of hazardous substances in electrical appliances and products has reinvigorated the race to develop lead-free alternatives to lead zirconate titanate (PZT), which presently...

• The ARSP is written for and by cross-sector social partnership (CSSP) academics and practitioners focusing on nonprofit, business, and public sectors who view collaboration as key to solving social problems such as climate change, economic inequality, poverty, or biodiversity loss and environmental degradation. Published by an independent group o...

The carbon footprint (CF) of biofuels and biomaterials is a barrier to their acceptance, yet the greenhouse gas emissions associated with disposing of biomaterials are frequently omitted from analyses. This article investigates whether harmonization is appropriate for calculating the importance of biomaterials' disposal. This research shows that di...

We are delighted to announce the 10th celebratory issue of the Annual Review of Social Partnerships (ARSP) that provides annually the one-stop shop of high quality curated content in cross-sector collaboration research and practice from around the world. In over 100 pages this issue covers: * State of the art review of 100+ new publications on cros...

• The ARSP is written for and by cross-sector social partnership (CSSP) academics and practitioners focusing on nonprofit, business, and public sectors who view collaboration as key to solving social problems such as climate change, economic inequality, poverty, or biodiversity loss and environmental degradation. Published by an independent group o...

The role of organisations in efforts to address negative externalities on the natural environment has become urgent. As such, an organisation-focused perspective would be a limited view point of addressing global environmental impacts on the natural environment. We argue that by drawing on resource-based view theory, development of decision support...

In order to drive optimal living and sustainable consumption in the built and natural environment, there is the need to develop more sustainable, less energy-intensive systems and approaches that offer economic advantages, better operational performance, environmental merits and social acceptability. Measures to achieve these objectives including l...

We are pleased to announce the 9th edition of the Annual Review of Social Partnerships (ARSP) 2014. ARSP is a unique international publication that is transdisciplinary and bridges the theory-practice divide by profiling multiple types of scholarship (discovery, integration, engagement, and teaching & learning). The aim of the ARSP is to bring toge...

In an effort to achieve sustainable operations, green supply chain management has become an important area for firms to concentrate on due to its inherent involvement with all the processes that provide foundations to successful business. Modelling methodologies of product supply chain environmental assessment are usually guided by the principles o...

ARSP’s new Sustainability Partnerships Section presents funded research projects, allowing practitioners to understand the process and challenges of research, but importantly provides them with privileged access to early findings, which traditionally would take years before they would be able to access emerging new evidence. The first profile featu...

• The ARSP is written for and by cross-sector social partnership (CSSP) academics and practitioners focusing on nonprofit, business, and public sectors who view collaboration as key to solving social problems such as climate change, economic inequality, poverty, or biodiversity loss and environmental degradation. Published by an independent group o...

In the UK, 87% of dwellings and 60% of non-domestic buildings that will be standing in 2050 have already been built. Therefore, the greatest energy savings and emissions reductions will be achieved through retrofit of existing buildings. This usually involves decision-making processes targeted at reducing operational energy consumption and maintena...

Global awareness of environmental impacts such as climate change and depletion of ozone layer has increased significantly in the last few years and the implication for emissions reductions in buildings are widely acknowledged. The goal, therefore, is to design and construct buildings with minimum environmental impacts. Lifecycle emissions resulting...

• The ARSP is written for and by cross-sector social partnership (CSSP) academics and practitioners focusing on nonprofit, business, and public sectors who view collaboration as key to solving social problems such as climate change, economic inequality, poverty, or biodiversity loss and environmental degradation. Published by an independent group o...

Embodied energy analysis is used to evaluate the total energy consumed by any product during all the stages leading up to its manufacture and delivery and can also be used to determine the energy-related environmental impacts such as CO2 emissions of buildings and other built infrastructure. In the wake of increase global awareness on climate chang...

Interest in energy efficiency has risen rapidly in the last few years. In particular, Government institutions have launched several initiatives for improving housing energy efficiency through the implementation of retrofitting measures. As a result, the UK Energy Efficiency Retrofitting Services (EERS) market (estimated at around £2bn in 2010) has...

Currently, the building sector has an oversized carbon footprint as it represent the single largest contributor to global greenhouse gas emissions (GHG), with approximately one third of global energy end use taking place within buildings. The challenge to successfully reduce the energy consumption in the building sector is to find effective strateg...

The potential of biofuels contributing to the UK emission reduction targets in the formulated UK Low Carbon Transition Plan (LCTP) and the UK’s obligation in the wider EU emissions reduction targets are assessed using four scenarios. The scenarios were evaluated using hybrid lifecycle assessment developed in a multi-regional input–output (MRIO) fra...

In this research natural fibre (biomaterial) pocket spring mattresses are shown to emit marginally less greenhouse gasses (GHG) than foam (petrochemical) pocket spring mattresses. However, when end of life scenarios are considered, the results suggest much larger GHG emission reductions for natural fibre than foam mattresses. Refurbishing natural f...

This report, produced by the Centre for Low Carbon Futures' Low Carbon Supply Chain Project, raises key points in relation to the transition to low carbon supply chains in Yorkshire and the Humber. These key points are identified to facilitate an understanding of the transition towards low carbon supply chains from a business perspective.

Based upon an increasing academic and business interest in greening the industrial supply chains, this paper establishes the need for a state-of-the-art decision support system (DSS) for carbon emissions accounting and management, mainly across the product supply chains by identifying methodological shortcomings in existing tools, and proposing a s...

In recent times, environmental thinking has become a prominent feature in the design of supply chain networks leading to the concepts of low carbon supply chains and green supply chain management. Understanding the sources and levels of emissions within the supply chain is the first step needed to fully design a low carbon supply chain. This paper...

Future energy technologies will be key for a successful reduction of man-made greenhouse gas emissions. With demand for electricity projected to increase significantly in the future, climate policy goals of limiting the effects of global atmospheric warming can only be achieved if power generation processes are profoundly decarbonized. Energy model...

Although embodied CO2-eq analysis has seen recent developments as evident in the establishment of the ISO 14040 and 14044 LCA standards, it is recognized that due to weaknesses in gathering data on product-related emissions, embodied CO2-eq values are probabilistic. This paper presents a stochastic analysis of hybrid embodied CO2-eq in buildings to...

It is expected that biodiesel production in the EU will remain the dominant contributor as part of a 10% minimum binding target for biofuel in transportation fuel by 2020 within the 20% renewable energy target in the overall EU energy mix. Life cycle assessments (LCA) of biodiesel to evaluate its environmental impacts have, however, remained questi...

Policymakers traditionally focus on regulating operational energy use in buildings, ignoring other life cycle components such as embodied energy even though this may account for a significant portion of life cycle emissions. Data relating to embodied energy and emissions in buildings is limited. However, stochastic techniques can be used to estimat...

Ireland is committed to limiting its greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions to 113% of 1990 levels over the period 2008–12 and to 84% of 2005 levels by 2020 under the Kyoto Agreement and the EU's 2020 target by 2020 respectively. National policies have targeted many industry sectors but have failed to directly tackle GHG emissions associated with construct...

Embodied energy analysis can be used as a construction design assessment tool in a sustainable matrix for a building. Its implementation however remains challenging mainly because of data measurement errors. A comparison between the deterministic embodied energy (EE) of a building and the stochastic EE of the same building undertaken using Monte Ca...

Engineering building design focuses on optimising operational energy use and ignores the energy required to procure and construct a building. This energy, termed ‘embodied energy’, can be very significant when compared to operational energy. Therefore, it is important to minimise the embodied in buildings; this must be done at the design stage. Thi...

Given a general lack of research on Irish construction greenhouse gas emissions, a subsectoral embodied carbon dioxide equivalent (CO2-eq) analysis of this sector has been undertaken with the aim of overcoming some methodological challenges such as system boundary constraints, input-output aggregation, double counting of energy inputs and a general...