Hans-Jörg Althaus

Ecoexistence

Die Substitution von fossilen Energieträgern durch Biotreib- und Biobrennstoffe stellt eine Möglichkeit dar, um einen Teil der Verpflichtung zum Erreichen des Pariser Klimaabkommens zu erfüllen. Die vorliegende Studie schätzt ab, wie gross das Potenzial für diese Substitution in der Schweiz zwischen 2020 und 2030 sein könnte.

Data S1. Bioenergy production and sustainable development: limited science base for policy making‐Protocol. Table S1. Characterization. Table S2. Conditions. Table S3. Potential impacts. Table S4. Possible answers to potential impacts.

Data S3. Article selection and data extraction. Table S13. Basic set of articles. Table S14. Appraisal results. Table S15. Set of studies included in the data extraction. Table S16. Data extraction – Characterization. Table S17. Data extraction – Conditions. Table S18. Data extraction – Potential impacts.

Data S2. Additional results. Table S5. Number of studies per category and impact (n = 316). Table S6. Positive, negative and neutral impacts. Table S7. Methodological approaches used. Table S8. Methodological approach per impact considered. Table S9. Number of articles per method. Table S10. Cross‐analysis potential vs. bioenergy resource. T...

Data S4. Regional distribution of each impact considered in the systematic review. Figure S1. Regional distribution of impacts on energy independence. Figure S2. Regional distribution of impacts on land tenure. Figure S3. Regional distribution of impacts on cross‐sectoral coordination. Figure S4. Regional distribution of impacts on labour right...

The possibility of using bioenergy as a climate change mitigation measure has sparked a discussion of whether and how bioenergy production contributes to sustainable development. We undertook a systematic review of the scientific literature to illuminate this relationship and found a limited scientific basis for policy-making. Our results indicate...

Der schweizerische Gebäudepark besteht zu 83 % aus Wohngebäuden. Wohngebäude verursachen in der Schweiz rund 46 % des gesamten Energiebedarfs und 19 % der Gesamtumweltbelastung in der Schweiz [1], [16]. In Bezug auf politisch festgelegte Energieeffizienz- und Umweltschutz-Ziele stellt sich im Wohnbau vor allem die Frage, welcher Wärmeschutz und wel...

Die Studie zeigt auf, welche Kombinationen aus Antriebssystem und Kraftstoff – auch als Energieversorgungsoption bezeichnet – einen treibhausgasneutralen Verkehr in Deutschland im Jahr 2050 möglich machen. Auf Basis bestehender Forschungsarbeiten und Studienergebnisse wird ein systematischer Überblick über postfossile Optionen gegeben. Zu den poten...

Purpose: Due to the large environmental challenges posed by the transport sector, reliable and state-of-the art data for its life cycle assessment is essential for enabling a success-ful transition towards more sustainable systems. In this paper, the new electric passenger car transport and vehicle datasets, which have been developed for ecoinvent...

Recycling of construction material is a valuable option for minimizing construction & demolition waste streams to landfills and mitigating primary mineral resource depletion. Material flows in the construction sector are governed by a complex socio-technical system in which awarding authorities decide in interaction with other actors on the use of...

Life cycle assessment (LCA) studies include a vast amount of different products. Often, extrapolations are necessary to obtain the life cycle inventory of a specific product. This article provides quantitative scaling factors with power (heat output) for product properties and life cycle impact assessment results of heat pump and biomass furnace te...

Electric vehicles have the potential to substitute conventional vehicles and to contribute to the sustainable development of the transportation sector worldwide. There is an international consensus that the sustainability assessment of electric vehicles should be performed on a life cycle basis, including production, operation and end of life. Base...

Integrated smelter-refineries play an important role in the recovery of multiple metals from complex primary and secondary materials, and hence in closing metals cycles. Processes in these facilities are strongly interconnected, dynamic, and multifunctional, which challenges a typical representation in life cycle assessment (LCA). This is especiall...

Since Fukushima, few people still consider nuclear power as a safe technology. The explosion of Deepwater Horizon was yet another incident revealing the dangers involved in the hunt for fossil fuels. Despite the public attention and outrage at these events, neither the concept of environmental citizenship, nor the United Nations Framework Conventio...

Emerging technologies such as information and communication-, photovoltaic- or battery technologies are expected to increase significantly the demand for scarce metals in the near future. The recently developed methods to evaluate the criticality of mineral raw materials typically provide a 'snapshot' of the criticality of a certain material at one...

Purpose Construction and demolition (C&D) waste recycling has been considered to be a valuable option not only for minimising C&D waste streams to landfills but also for mitigating primary mineral resource depletion. However, the potentially higher cement demand due to the larger surface of the coarse recycled aggregates challenges the environmenta...

Wind energy is a fast-growing and promising renewable energy source. The investment costs of wind turbines have decreased over the years, making wind energy economically competitive to conventionally produced electricity. Size scaling in the form of a power law, experience curves and progress rates are used to estimate the cost development of ever-...

Construction and demolition (C&D) waste, being already the largest waste fraction in industrialized countries, is expected to increase in the future. C&D waste recycling has been considered to be a valuable option not only for minimizing C&D waste streams to landfills but also for mitigating primary mineral resource depletion. Even though the use o...

Umicore Precious Metal Refining (UPMR) runs a high-tech industrial metal refinery which recovers 17 different metals from end-of-life consumer products and from by-products of the non-ferrous industry. We present an approach for an attributive gate-to-gate LCA study of this system, which is characterised by multi-input/multi-output processes, chang...

The potential of agent-based modeling (ABM) has been demonstrated in various research fields. However, three major concerns limit the full exploitation of ABM; (i) agents are too simple and behave unrealistically without any empirical basis, (ii) \'proof of concept\' applications are too theoretical and (iii) too much value placed on operational va...

To perform life-cycle assessment studies, data on the production and use of the products is required. However, often only few data or measurements are available. Estimation of properties can be performed by applying scaling relationships. In many disciplines, they are used to either predict data or to search for underlying patterns, but they have n...

Umicore Precious Metal Refining (UPMR) runs a high-tech industrial metal refinery which recovers 17 different metals from end-of-life consumer products and from by-products of the non-ferrous industry. We present an approach for an attributive gate-to-gate LCA study of this system, which is characterised by multi-input/multi-output processes, chang...

Battery-powered electric cars (BEVs) play a key role in future mobility scenarios. However, little is known about the environmental impacts of the production, use and disposal of the lithium ion (Li-ion) battery. This makes it difficult to compare the environmental impacts of BEVs with those of internal combustion engine cars (ICEVs). Consequently,...

An inclusion of traffic noise effects could change considerably the overall results of many life cycle assessment (LCA) studies. However, at present, noise effects are usually not considered in LCA studies, mainly because the existing methods for their inclusion do not fulfill the requirement profile. Two methods proposed so far seem suitable for i...

Background, aim, and scope: According to some recent studies, noise from road transport is estimated to cause human health effects of the same order of magnitude as the sum of all other emissions from the transport life cycle. Thus, ISO 14′040 implies that traffic noise effects should be considered in life cycle assessment (LCA) studies where trans...

This paper provides a detailed analysis of life cycle assessment (LCA) results of different building components (e.g. wooden wall, concrete roof) on different levels of simplification (from a comprehensive LCA including all materials and processes to the fully reduced component including only the main materials remaining in the component). The main...

Many different types of noise barriers have been installed over the last decades using a wide variety of construction materials including wood, steel, aluminium, concrete and acryl glass. Among these materials, only wood is renewable but it has to meet the requirements of EN 460, which states that either a suitable wood species has to be selected o...

As a consequence of the introduction of limits on exhaust gas emissions and a target agreement between the Swiss association of car importers (auto-schweiz) and the Swiss government calling for a reduction in the specific fuel consumption, a considerable reduction of exhaust emissions of newly registered Swiss passenger cars occurred in the last 10...

Results. The analysis confirms the fact that capital goods can-not be excluded per se. On one hand, toxicity related environ-mental impacts such as freshwater ecotoxicity or human toxic-ity are more sensitive towards an inclusion or exclusion of capital goods. On the other, certain products like photovoltaic and wind electricity are very much or ev...

Background In product life cycle assessment (LCA), the attribution of environmental interventions to a product under study is an ambiguous task. This is due to a) the simplistic modeling characteristics in the life cycle inventory step (LCI) of LCA in view of the complexity of our techno-economic system, and b) to the nontangible theoretical nature...

Goal, Scope and Background Telephony as well as remote data transfer is increasingly performed via mobile phone networks. However, the environmental consequences, in particular of the End-of-Life (EOL) treatment, of such network infrastructures have been investigated insufficiently to date. In the present report the environmental implications of th...

IntroductionMetrics and Criteria to Assess the Sustainability of ForestryMetrics and Criteria for Assessing the Sustainability of the Wood IndustryScope for ActionSummaryReferences

Résumé De nos jours, les bâtiments représentent une pression sérieuse sur ’environnement; de leur construction à leur démolition. Il est donc essentiel de savoir quelle phase e leur vie affecte plus fortement l’environnement et quelle est la cause de cet impact afin d’améliorer leur performance écologique. Le but de ce travail est de réaliser une A...

Sustainability has been enshrined as a goal of society to ensure that the satisfaction of present needs does not compromise the ability of future generations to meet their own needs. It is thus a social objective, achievable only where all areas of society co-operate in fulfilling the associated demands. Ecological sustainability is, in turn, a bas...

A life cycle assessment was carried out based on a detailed life cycle inventory for a typical GSM 900 mobile phone network and related End of Life (EOL) treatment infrastructure. The environmental relevance of the three life cycle phases: production, use and EOL treatment was analysed using IMPACT2002+. The environmentally preferable EOL treatment...

Goal, Scope and Background This paper gives an overview on how the wood and packaging material production is inventoried in ecoinvent. Packaging materials have been a very important topic in the area of Life Cycle Assessment for more than twenty years. Wood is the most important renewable material and regenerative fuel used worldwide, and an import...

Goal, Scope and Background The present paper describes the goal and scope of building material inventories in the ecoinvent database and gives an overview of its content. The ecoinvent database provides generic life cycle inventories for building material production and related processing. They can be used as background data for different LCA appli...

Introduction This paper provides an overview on the content of the ecoinvent database and of selected metholodogical issues applied on the life cycle inventories implemented in the ecoinvent database. Goal, Scope and Background In the year 2000, several Swiss Federal Offices and research institutes of the ETH domain agreed to a joint effort to harm...

The ecoinvent database provides harmonised generic life cycle inventories for metal production and processing. They can be used as background data for different LCA applications. The goal of this paper is to provide an overview of the metals inventoried in ecoinvent. Beside, some methodological background information is given. The focus lies on a n...

This paper provides an overview on the content of the ecoinvent database and of selected metholodogical issues applied on the life cycle inventories implemented in the ecoinvent database. In the year 2000, several Swiss Federal Offices and research institutes of the ETH domain agreed on a joint effort to harmonise and update life cycle inventory (L...

Environmental decision-support tools, such as life cycle assessment or material flow analysis, only support the decision-making process if, in addition to the causalities of the systems under study, their role within sustainable development is adequately depicted. This article outlines the basis of the two requirements for post-consumer wood in Swi...

In the global context of Sustainable Development (SD) and the Swiss governmental approach of an Integrated Product Policy (IPP), inventories of ecological data of materials and processes gain more and more importance. The project ecoinvent will provide Swiss and European Life Cycle Inventory (LCI) data allowing administration, industry and consulta...

High refractive index composites of iron sulfides and poly(ethylene oxide) (PEO) have been prepared by co-precipitation from aqueous solution. Several reaction parameters were varied: inorganic reactants, reactant ratios, reaction temperatures, and reaction times. Selected samples were characterized with organic microelemental analysis, x-ray fluor...

Summary ZEN is presenting a new method which allows to measure the sustainability of buildings. The aim is to create a standard for sustainable building construction and use. Thereby, the meaning of "sustainable" shall be expressed in concrete terms. This paper is a "work in progress" report. Future work is dedicated to refine and improve the metho...

Emerging technologies such as information and communication-, photovoltaic-or battery technologies are expected to significantly increase the demand for scarce metals in the near future. The recently developed methods to evaluate the criticality of mineral raw ma-terials typically provide a 'snapshot' of the criticality of a certain material at one...