Ester van der Voet

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• Doctor of Philosophy
• Professor at Leiden University

Resources are essential for humanity's well‐being and development. At the same time, resources lay at the heart of many environmental problems. A sustainable resource use facilitates development but reduces environmental problems. This apparent contradiction can be solved by moving toward a circular economy: keeping resources, once extracted, in us...

Assessing material stocks and flows with high spatiotemporal resolution can promote circularity in the building sector. Understanding historic material stocks and flows is essential to capture material use dynamics. However, traditional modeling approaches are time and data intensive and difficult to upscale. We present a method for estimating past...

The Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) stands as the most ambitious infrastructure project in history, marked by its scale of investment, extensive geographical reach across continents and countries, and a diverse array of projects from roads to digital networks. While the BRI's environmental sustainability has raised concerns, the impacts of construct...

The anticipated increase in urban population of 2.5 billion people by 2050 poses significant environmental challenges. While the various environmental impacts of urbanisation have been studied individually, integrated approaches are rare. This study introduces a spatially explicit model to assess urbanization’s effects on ecosystem services (green...

Proton exchange membrane (PEM) water electrolyzers are a promising technology for high-purity, efficient green hydrogen production, with expanding installations. This has increased demand for materials like platinum (Pt) used in PEM manufacturing. Conversely, Pt, which currently serves primarily as catalysts for internal combustion engine vehicles...

Construction materials are associated with significant environmental and resource impacts. The circular use of materials already in use as stocks may provide an opportunity to reduce these impacts. We provide a dataset describing the potential global urban mine consisting of transportation infrastructure in an open database based on geospatial data...

The world is in the midst of a triple planetary crisis of climate change, biodiversity loss and pollution and waste. The global economy is consuming ever more natural resources, while the world is not on track to meet the Sustainable Development Goals. The scientific community has never before been more aligned or more resolute on the need for urg...

The anticipated surge in urban populations, an additional 2.5 billion people until 2050, presents environmental challenges affecting both local ecosystems and the global environment. While various studies explore these impacts individually, integrated approaches are scarce. This study introduces a spatially explicit model to assess the impact of ur...

Buildings are an important part of society's environmental impacts, both in the construction and in the use phase. As the energy performance of buildings improve, construction materials become more important as a cause of environmental impact. Less attention has been given to those materials. We explore, as an alternative for conventional buildings...

Deployment of clean energy technologies will require a considerable amount of materials. The surge in demand for metals related to emerging energy technologies may hinder the energy transition. In this study we provide a comprehensive overview and analysis of existing work in this field, a solid quantitative baseline for material requirements of di...

To achieve climate neutrality, future urban heating systems will need to use a variety of low-carbon heating technologies. The transition toward low-carbon heating technologies necessitates a complete restructuring of the heating system, with significant associated material requirements. However, little research has been done into the quantity and...

To conserve resources and enhance the environmental performance, China has launched the “Zero waste” concept, focused on reutilization of solid waste and recovery of materials, including copper. Although several studies have assessed the copper demand and recycling, there is a lack of understanding on how different waste management options would po...

Despite many studies of the metal requirements for a transition towards low-carbon electricity system, the potential of the electricity system as a source for secondary material remains underexplored. We addressed this gap, the potential circularity of the electricity system, by analyzing the stocks and flows in that system towards 2050, including...

Raw Materials are crucial in the development, production, and improvement of modern-day technology. Reliable access to critical, scarce, and valuable materials used in electronics is becoming a worldwide concern. Therefore, the quantification of material recovery from the urban mine is currently pursued worldwide. Commonly, data on (Waste) Electric...

The recycling of demolition waste is essential to lower the construction sectors primary material demand, responsible for 50% of the global primary material consumption. Almost all demolition waste is used as filler material for the construction of roads, preventing further reuse or recycling after this application. The built environment generates...

We analyse how the global material stocks and flows related to the electricity sector may develop towards 2050. We focus on three electricity sub-systems, being generation, transmission and storage and present a model covering both bulk and critical materials such as steel, aluminium and neodymium. Results are based on the second Shared Socio-Econo...

Copper is widely used in buildings, transportation and home appliances, resulting in steadily increasing demand in China. From 2013 on, China has implemented the “Green Fence” policy to restrict copper scrap imports, which have affected and will continue to affect its future copper supply. To explore how China's copper demand can be met in the futu...

The heating of buildings currently produces 6% of global greenhouse gas emissions. Sustainable heating technologies can reduce heating‐related CO2 emissions by up to 90%. We present a Python‐based GIS model to analyze the environmental and financial impact of strategies to reduce heating‐related CO2 emissions of residential buildings. The city‐wide...

Copper demand in China is expected to grow considerably over the coming decades, driving energy use and environmental impacts related to copper production. To explore the environmental impacts of copper production in China, we used a variant of Life Cycle Sustainability Analysis that combined the Life Cycle Assessment methodology with the Chinese c...

Huge material stocks are embedded in the residential built environment. These materials have the potential to be a source of secondary materials, an important consideration for the transition towards a circular economy. Consistent information about such stocks, especially at the global level, is missing. This article attempts to fill part of that g...

Residential buildings and service sector buildings have an important contribution to climate change, directly via energy use in these buildings and indirectly through construction activities and the production and disposal of buildings materials. In this paper, we introduce a model that looks at total global building stock for 26 regions between 19...

In this paper, we develop a dynamic stock model and scenario analysis involving a bottom‐up approach to analyze copper demand in China from 2005 to 2050 based on government and related sectoral policies. The results show that in the short‐term, China's copper industry cannot achieve a completely circular economy without additional measures. Aggrega...

The international community has set ambitious goals for global prosperity and protecting the planet, including the achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals and environmental conventions such as the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) and the United Nations Convention t...

Much is at stake as global society approaches the final decade before the Sustainable Development Goals are fixed to be realized in 2030. The international community has set high ambitions for global prosperity, the protection of our biological diversity and land resources, and limiting global warming. Progress towards these ambitions is within our...

Debate around increasing demand for natural resources is often framed in terms of a “nexus” and perhaps at risk of becoming a buzz word. A nexus between what, at what scales, and what would be the consequences? This article analyses why readers should care about the nexus concept towards the SDGs. We discuss a five-nodes definition and propose pers...

Future global copper demand is expected to keep rising due to copper’s indispensable role in modern technologies. Unfortunately, increasing copper extraction and decreasing ore grades intensify energy use and generate higher environmental impact. A potential solution would be reaching a circular economy of copper, in which secondary production prov...

Utilisation of resources is closely linked to population growth and economic and technological development. Hence, it is expected that global resource demand will increase substantially over the next decades. This resource challenge is currently partly addressed by the UNEP-IRP resource scenario activity, where metals, non-metallic minerals, and bi...

This study provides scenarios towards 2050 for the demand of five metals in electricity production, cars and electronic appliances. The metals considered are copper, tantalum, neodymium, cobalt and lithium. The study shows how highly technology-specific data on products and material flows can be used in integrated assessment models to asses global...

In this paper, we develop a method to assess the environmental impacts of metal scenarios. The method is life cycle based, but enables forward looking and upscaling. The method aims at translating metal demand scenarios into technology-specific supply scenarios, necessary to make the translation into environmental impacts. To illustrate the differe...

In recent years the concept of the resource "nexus" has been hotly debated and now widely adopted in research and policy circles as a powerful new way of understanding the relationships between multiple resources and their sustainable management. These include particularly water, food and energy. This comprehensive Handbook presents a detailed inte...

Demand for natural resources has grown rapidly for decades, and is expected to continue growing. These trends lead to repercussions, risks, and threats for humans and ecosystems at different scales. The challenges of sustainable resource management and governance are on numerous agendas, ranging from the G7 and G20 summits to UNEP’s International R...

The way in which societies use and care for natural resources fundamentally shapes the well-being of humanity, the environment and the economy. Better and more efficient use of natural resources can be one of the most costefficient and effective ways to reduce impacts on the environment, while also achieving the socio-economic objectives of interna...

MICA develops the EU-RMICP with an innovative visualization interface that guides the user to a ‘recipe’ for how to find answers to particular mineral raw material related questions. This is different from a database providing pre-formulated answers to questions: MICA offers an expert-designed pathway towards answers by means of an exhaustive catal...

This scientific assessment report on resource efficiency has been produced by the UN Environment’s International Resource Panel in response to a commission in June 2015 by the German Government, as an outcome of the G7 Summit meeting in Schloss Elmau. The report is based on the core work of the International Resource Panel, and of other internation...

Even though tantalum has a high economic importance and is associated with armed conflict, the use of tantalum throughout the supply chain of importing economies is not well understood. This article adds to existing qualitative descriptions of the tantalum supply chain by performing a quantified substance flow analysis (SFA) of tantalum for Europe...

The Paris climate goal requires unprecedented emission reduction, while CO2 concentrations are now rising faster than ever. Internally inconsistent instrumentation has developed on the go, not fit for deep reduction. Mainly national technology-specific instruments, for example, have made the EU pure cap-and-trade system superfluous and have fragmen...

Policy makers and environmental agencies have echoed concerns brought forward by academics about the need to address the rebound effect for achieving absolute energy and environmental decoupling. However, such concerns have generally not been translated into tangible policy action. The reasons behind this inaction are not fully understood, and much...

The term eco-innovation has been coined to label those innovations expected to reduce the life cycle environmental burdens resulting from their use. Claims of environmental superiority are usually supported by technology-oriented analyses, such as product-level life cycle assessment. However, the environmental superiority of an innovation depends n...

Sustainability assessments can play an important role in decision making. This role starts with selecting appropriate methods for a given situation. We observed that scientists, consultants, and decision-makers often do not systematically perform a problem analyses that guides the choice of the method, partly related to a lack of systematic, though...

Purpose Industrial ecology academics have embraced with great interest the rebound effect principle operationalised within energy economics. By pursuing more comprehensive assessments, they applied tools such as life cycle assessment (LCA) to appraise the environmental consequences of the rebound effect. As a result, the mainstream rebound mechanis...

This work assessed the environmental impacts of the production and use of 1 MJ of hydrous ethanol (E100) in Brazil in prospective scenarios (2020-2030), considering the deployment of technologies currently under development and better agricultural practices. The life cycle assessment technique was employed using the CML method for the life cycle im...

This article presents a stepwise, refined and practical analytical framework to model the microeconomic environmental rebound effect (ERE) stemming from cost differences of electric cars in terms of changes in multiple life cycle environmental indicators. The analytical framework is based on marginal consumption analysis and hybrid life cycle asses...

In some areas of Sub-Saharan Africa appropriate organic waste management technology could address development issues such as soil degradation, unemployment and energy scarcity, while at the same time reducing emissions of greenhouse gases. This paper investigates the role that carbon markets could have in facilitating the implementation of composti...

This article presents a general framework for macroenvironmental assessment, combining life cycle assessment (LCA) with the IPAT equation, and explores its combination with decomposition analysis to assess the multidimensional contribution of technological innovation to environmental pressures. This approach is illustrated with a case study in whic...

Do we have the natural resource base to feed future populations? This study gives a quantification of global land use, water use and fertilizer use for the year 2050, for a complete diet and four different futures. Agriculture will need to develop substantially to feed future populations. It is shown that there is a negative correlation between fer...

Life cycle assessment (LCA) is a useful tool to assess impacts of cradle-to-grave chains of products/services. In the Riskcycle framework, the focus is on additives. Additives are usually minor constituents of products, but depending on their specific properties they can be important in the total scope of impacts of such products. In the LCA litera...

To illustrate the LCA method and its relevance for risk-based management of additives, an example is elaborated for a phthalate plasticizer, di (2-ethylhexyl) phthalate (DEHP), as used in the application in cushion vinyl floor covering. In LCA environmental impacts are estimated for the total of emissions, not restricted to toxic effects and/or one...

Chemicals and additives in products being produced and marketed globally, this makes an international harmonised assessment and management essential. Chemical testing, research on risks, impacts and management options are carried out throughout the globe but quite fractionated to certain areas and sectors and much too often with little linkages bet...

This paper develops, tests, and discusses a metric for livelihood assessment that integrates cash flow and time use households. It expresses how much time the household adults have left after satisfying the household’s basic needs (e.g., for food, sleep, care, consumables, and leisure). This “freely disposable time†(FDT) may be put to any use...

To obtain a picture of environmental and health impacts related to plastics additives, data are required with respect to the production and use of plastics and of their additives, to emissions of additives in all life cycle stages, and to the impacts resulting from those emissions. Statistics on plastics production, trade, and sales are available....

The issue of municipal solid waste (MSW) management has been highlighted in China due to the continually increasing MSW volumes being generated and the limited capacity of waste treatment facilities. This article presents a quantitative eco-efficiency (E/E) analysis on MSW management in terms of greenhouse gas (GHG) mitigation. A methodology for E/...

This Workshop on “Safety assessment of consumer goods coming from recovered materials in a global scale perspective” is the first of the Thematic Workshops organized within the framework of the European Union (EU)-funded Coordination Action “Risk-based management of chemicals and products in a circular economy at a global scale” (RISKCYCLE). It was...

In order to tackle climate change, a transition to a renewable based energy system is crucial. A renewable based hydrogen economy is one of the possible implementations of such a system. The world receives ample energy from the sun that can be harvested by PV solar cells and, indirectly, by wind turbines. In order to use the most optimal locations...

The rise of China to become world largest iron and steel producer and consumer since the late 1990s can be largely attributed to urbanization, with about 20% of China's steel output used by residential buildings, and about 50% for the construction sector as a whole. Previously, a dynamic material flow analysis (MFA) model was developed to analyze t...

Biorefinery, an example of a multiple products system, integrates biomass conversion processes and equipment to produce fuels, power and chemicals from biomass. This study focuses on technical design, economic and environmental analysis of a lignocellulosic feedstock (LCF) biorefinery producing ethanol, succinic acid, acetic acid and electricity. A...

Of all materials extracted from the earth's crust, the construction sector uses 50%, producing huge amounts of construction and demolition waste (CDW). In Beijing, presently 35 million metric tons per year (megatonnes/year [Mt/yr]) of CDW are generated. This amount is expected to grow significantly when the first round of mass buildings erected in...

Background, aim, and scopeThe increasing gasoline price, the depletion of fossil resources, and the negative environmental consequences of driving with petroleum fuels have driven the development of alternative transport fuels. Bioethanol, which is converted from cellulosic feedstocks, has attracted increasing attention as one such alternative. Thi...

The massive migration flows from rural to urban areas in China, combined with an expected decline in the total population over the next decades, leads to two important challenges for China's housing: the growth of its urban housing stock and the shrinkage of rural housing. The rural and urban housing systems in China were analyzed using a dynamic m...

Recently, there has been an explosion of life-cycle assessment (LCA) studies of biofuels to support biofuel policy making. It is difficult to draw general conclusions from the set of studies due to the variation in outcomes. Causes of this variation include real-world differences, data uncertainties and methodological choices. In this review we exp...

Climate change and the wish to reduce the dependence on oil are the incentives for the development of alternative energy sources. The use of lignocellulosic biomass together with cellulosic processing technology provides opportunities to produce fuel ethanol with less competition with food and nature. Many studies on energy analysis and life cycle...

This chapter focuses on metals as they provide the clearest example of the challenges and opportunities that mineral resources present to society, in terms of both primary production and recycling. Basic concepts, information requirements and sources of consumer and industrial resource demand are described as well as the destabilizing effects of vo...

While many countries have set ambitious targets for reducing energy use and GHG (greenhouse gas) emissions, it remains highly uncertain whether the policies introduced will be suitable to reach these targets at the specified times. Models used to inform building policies often do not account for the different boundary conditions related to socioeco...

Experts discuss the multiple components of sustainability, the constraints imposed by their linkages, and the necessity of taking a comprehensive view. Humanity faces immense hurdles as it struggles to define the path toward a sustainable future. The multiple components of sustainability, all of which demand attention, make understanding the very c...

Experts discuss the multiple components of sustainability, the constraints imposed by their linkages, and the necessity of taking a comprehensive view. Humanity faces immense hurdles as it struggles to define the path toward a sustainable future. The multiple components of sustainability, all of which demand attention, make understanding the very c...

Experts discuss the multiple components of sustainability, the constraints imposed by their linkages, and the necessity of taking a comprehensive view. Humanity faces immense hurdles as it struggles to define the path toward a sustainable future. The multiple components of sustainability, all of which demand attention, make understanding the very c...

The shift from fossil resources to renewables for energy and materials production has been the driving force for research on energy analysis and environmental impact assessment of bio-based production. This study presents a detailed energy analysis of corn stover based ethanol production using advanced cellulosic technologies. The method used diffe...

Background, aim, and scopeFacing the threat of oil depletion and climate change, a shift from fossil resources to renewables is ongoing to secure long-term low carbon energy supplies. In view of the carbon dioxide reduction targets agreed upon in the Kyoto protocol, bioethanol has become an attractive option for one energy application, as transport...

Brazil has always been the pioneer in the application of bioethanol as a main fuel for automobiles, hence environmental and economic analyses of the Brazilian ethanol industries are of crucial importance. This study presents a comparative life cycle assessment (LCA) on gasoline and ethanol as fuels, and with two types of blends of gasoline with bio...

CALCAS is the EU 6th Framework Co-ordination Action with the objective of defining research lines and proposals of networking for innovation in Life-Cycle Analysis for Sustainability. This Blue Paper consists of two parts: I) a description of a framework and a road map for a Life Cycle Sustainability Analysis (LCSA) including the ISO standard LCA a...

Background, aim, and scopeThe expectations with respect to biomass as a resource for sustainable energy are sky-high. Many industrialized countries have adopted ambitious policy targets and have introduced financial measures to stimulate the production or use of bioenergy. Meanwhile, the side-effects and associated risks have been pointed out as we...

Substances may enter the economy and the environment through both intentional and non-intentional flows. These non-intentional flows, including the occurrence of substances as pollutants in mixed primary resources (metal ores, phosphate ores and fossil fuels) and their presence in re-used waste streams from intentional use may have environmental an...

The environmental impacts of municipal solid waste (MSW) management have been highlighted in China, due to the continually increasing amount of MSW being generated and the limited capacity of waste treatment facilities. Of particular interest is greenhouse gas (GHG) mitigation, aided by the Kyoto Mechanisms. China is an important case study for thi...

Background, aim, and scopeManagement of the medical waste produced in hospitals or health care facilities has raised concerns relating to public health, occupational safety, and the environment. Life cycle assessment (LCA) is a decision-supporting tool in waste management practice; but relatively little research has been done on the evaluation of m...

IntroductionMaterial Flow AccountingLife Cycle AssessmentProcedural AspectsConclusions References

Over the last decades the concepts of Integrated Environmental Assessment (IEA) and Industrial Ecology (IE), both claiming to provide analyses and solutions for sustainability issues, have been developed separately as they emerged in response to questions from different policy-fields. In both fields, specific tools are used to support national and...

In den 1960er Jahren erlebte die Welt eine lange, nachhaltige Periode des Wirtschaftswachstums, die vielen Ländern Wohlstand und Reichtum brachte. Bereits Mitte/Ende der 1960er Jahre kam jedoch bei Boulding (1966) und Mishan (1967) die Frage auf, ob aufgrund der wachsenden Umweltbelastungen kontinuierliches Einkommenswachstum möglich bzw. wünschens...