Jordi Oliver-Solà

inèdit

The history of tourism in Malta goes back 60 years. While widely hailed for its economic contribution, very little reference is made to the waste externalities that riddle the industry. In islands like Malta, the impacts of waste generation are more pronounced particularly due to the size of the country and its population density. Furthermore, wast...

Ergonomics has been a very important activity in the design process. However, ergonomics rarely includes the environmental requirements into the design of products. The article proposes and presents the Eco-Ergo model through its application to a real-world product, a washing machine, to allow designers and ergonomists to establish product design r...

This study evaluates the carbon footprint (CF) of Barcelona tourist activity taking into account the above 30 million visitors who visit the city every year. This study analyzes the main sources of emissions considering direct (Scope 1) and indirect emissions (Scope 2 and 3) as a consequence of energy use. This research has been carried out in clos...

This paper performs a multi-national assessment to provide a more comprehensive vision of the potential implementation of Rooftop Greenhouses in retail parks from a theoretical perspective. A geographic information system - life cycle assessment method is used to quantify both the potential and the expected benefits of implementing rooftop greenhou...

Waste management on small islands does not hold any straightforward solutions. The numerous difficulties include limited space availability, restricted recycling and resale opportunities and impacts on the local environment that become magnified particularly when the island is small-sized, densely populated and tourist dependent. The well-documente...

Recently, urban agriculture (UA) has expanded throughout cities of the developed world as a response to social injustices and environmental gaps of the globalized food system (including food security, economic opportunities and community building). Due to the limiting factors of the urban environment (e.g., land availability), UA often occupies the...

Using a multidisciplinary approach for assessing the sustainability of urban rooftop farming " , In: Localizing urban food strategies. Farming cities and performing rurality. Abstract: Urban agriculture (UA) is blooming around cities of the developed world as a response to the increasing urban population, the growing environmental awareness of the...

Urban rooftop farming favours local food production. Although rooftop farming is perceived as a sustainable system, there is a lack of quantitative studies. There, we set up experiments in the community rooftop garden of a public housing building in Bologna, Italy, between 2012 and 2014.We grew lettuce, a leafy vegetable, using three techniques: nu...

Rooftop Faming (RF) is growing in popularity thereby increasing the potential local production in available spaces on urban buildings. RF includes multiple models (e.g. community, commercial) and systems from self-designed to high-tech greenhouses). As local production systems, RF is perceived as a sustainable way of developing local systems due to...

Due to the rapid urbanization and the large contribution of cities to the global environmental impact, urban policies integrate sustainability in the public space design. Current literature has accounted for the environmental impact of the main elements of the urban fabric, although studies have dealt with them individually. This chapter aims to op...

Rooftop Faming (RF) is growing in popularity thereby increasing the potential local production in available spaces on urban buildings. RF includes multiple models (e.g. community, commercial) and systems from self-designed to high-tech greenhouses). As local production systems, RF is seen as a sustainable way due to the avoided imported food. To da...

Ancient civilizations had agriculture production in their metropolis but modern urban planning separated agriculture from cities, such as Chandigarh by Le Corbusier. At present, FAO estimates that urban agriculture produces food for a quarter of world’s population, reducing food transport, package and waste impact among others and improving food sa...

Labeling schemes provide consumers with data to include environment as a decision-making criterion in purchasing, such as energy consumption or carbon emissions. Notwithstanding the easier communication through single indicators, the use of them can cover up other environmental impacts. In Life Cycle Assessment (LCA), impact assessment methods vary...

Purpose Rooftop greenhouses (RTGs) are increasing as a new form of urban agriculture. Several environmental, economic, and social benefits have been attributed to the implementation of RTGs. However, the environmental burdens and economic costs of adapting greenhouse structures to the current building legislation were pointed out as a limitation of...

Urban agriculture (UA) is spreading within the Global North, largely for food production, ranging from household individual gardens to community gardens that boost neighborhood regeneration. Additionally, UA is also being integrated into buildings, such as urban rooftop farming (URF). Some URF experiences succeed in North America both as private an...

Recently, the application of rooftop greenhouses (RTGs) to integrate agriculture into cities has increased, although the area where they can be potentially implemented has not been quantified yet. Consequently, this paper aims to design a guide to evaluate the potential implementation of RTGs in industrial and logistics parks and to apply the guide...

Urban Agriculture (UA) is growing in popularity in the Global North and UA practices has also colonized buildings through Urban Rooftop Farming (URF), which aims to take advantage of unused spaces in current cities. Rooftop farms and greenhouses are spreading as local community or private (i.e., companies) projects, particularly in North America. H...

The ICTA-ICP Rooftop Greenhouse Lab (RTG-Lab) is a research-oriented RTG situated in the UAB Campus (Bellaterra, Barcelona). In contrast to current RTGs, the RTG-Lab integrates energy, water and CO2 flows into the building's metabolism. This integrated RTG (i-RTG) is an eco-innovative concept that will enhance the sustainability of both systems inv...

Eco-design is used as a tool in the manufacturing and services sectors for improving the sustainability of products by integrating environmental aspects into the design stage, where most of the product impacts are determined. Laws (e.g., EU eco-design directive) and international schemes (e.g., ISO 14006) have encouraged the use of eco-design in co...

Packaging products are common in all the industrial sectors and in the market. However, packaging design needs to be optimized while avoiding superfluous designs that don't integrate environmental in their design. The Directive 94/62/EC established a framework in order to harmonize the environmental requirements for packaging as well as to determin...

The service sector is extraordinarily important for the European economy, as it accounts for 75% of the GDP. Yet it is also a huge consumer of energy, especially in urban environments. Municipalities have the authority to develop and manage municipal services, and as a result the European Commission drew up the Covenant of Mayors in which the signa...

In developing countries, particularly in Latin America, the rapid growth of urban areas has led to complex problems, including the exploitation of natural resources, environmental pollution and greenhouse gas emissions (GHG). Massive structures are being built to meet the housing demand. Moreover, there is excessive use of energy through appliances...

Purpose Used cooking oil (UCO) is a domestic waste generated as the result of cooking and frying food with vegetable oil. The purpose of this study is to compare the sustainability of three domestic UCO collection systems: through schools (SCH), door-to-door (DTD), and through urban collection centres (UCC), to determine which systems should be pro...

Background: As urban populations increase so does the amount of food transported to cities worldwide, and innovative agro-urban systems are being developed to integrate agricultural production into buildings; for example, by using roof top greenhouses (RTGs). This paper aims to quantify and compare, through a life cycle assessment, the environment...

Today 50 percent of the world's population lives in cities. This entails an excessive exploitation of natural resources, an increase in pollution, and an increase in the demand for food. One way of reducing the ecological footprint of cities is to introduce agricultural activities to them. In the current food and agriculture model, the fragmentatio...

In recent years, the environmental impacts of urban areas have been analysed to reach sustainability. Although research was mainly focused on waste, energy and water management, the food flow has been recently identified and the production of agricultural products started to be integrated in cities through agrourban systems, such as Rooftop Greenho...

This paper examines the relevance of incorporating comprehensive life-cycle environmental data into the design and management of pedestrian pavements to minimize the impact on the built environment. The overall primary energy demand and global warming potential of concrete, asphalt and granite sidewalks are assessed. A design with a long functional...

Purpose Sidewalks are important built areas for promoting environmental sustainability in cities since they support walking as a zero emission form of transportation contributing to protect the environment and the health of individuals. However, sidewalk management is typically focused on assessing their suitability for users without applying any e...

Territorial development is one of the guidelines to follow in the process towards sustainability, in order to the European Policy for Sustainable Development. Design, as a discipline that combines creativity and innovation may contribute significantly in achieving the goals set by these guidelines. Specifically, Design for Sustainable Local Develop...

Museums are one of the most longstanding, deeply rooted cultural services in society owing to the function they perform (communication, education and conservation of our heritage). The research in this article focuses on analysing the energetic and water metabolism of 28 museums in the province of Barcelona (Catalonia, Spain) in order to quantify a...

The aim of this project is to obtain quantitative data on the metabolic flows (energy consumption, not only by the establishment but also in the transportation of workers and customers, and packaging use) and their resulting environmental impacts of a standard shopping basket purchase in five city center municipal markets and a hypermarket in a sub...

The increase of tourism to the Antarctic continent may entail not only local but also global environmental impacts. These latter impacts, which are mainly caused by transport, have been generally ignored. As a result, there is a lack of data on the global impacts of Antarctic tourism in terms of energy consumption and carbon dioxide emissions. This...

Global sustainability is increasingly an issue of urban sustainability, being essential to encourage more benign trajectories of urbanisation. For this, there is need for a framework that could aid in the process of designing and redesigning (retrofitting) cities. The aim of this paper is to present and describe the methodology of urban ecodesign,...

This paper performs a comparative Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) of the collection of packaging waste (PET bottles, cans and beverage cartons) in Spain. The objective is to provide quantitative environmental data of the implementation of a Container Deposit Scheme (CDS) in Spain, adapted from the German system, and its comparison with the Green Dot Sy...

This paper aims to assess new systems to face the environmental impacts of the current supply of agrifood products to cities, which are designed to produce horticultural products in buildings, such as Roof Top Greenhouses (RTG). A Life Cycle Analysis (LCA) was applied to the distribution stage in a case study in the city of Barcelona (Catalonia, Sp...

The systematized study of urban morphology has led to the development of integrated tools based on the knowledge of the relation between physical density and urban form. These tools do help planners and decision makers; however, environmental data is rarely included in them. Official predictions of CO2 emissions by cities show that they will increa...

The systematized study of urban morphology has led to the development of integrated tools based on the knowledge of the relation between physical density and urban form. These tools do help planners and decision makers; however, environmental data is rarely included in them.This paper presents the GWP-Chart, a method that combines urban planning to...

Despite covering only 2.7% of the world’s total surface area, the world’s cities are responsible for 75% of the world’s energy consumption and 80% of greenhouse-gas emissions. For this reason, the redesign of cities is essential in the transition towards sustainability. However, planning and designing sustainable neighbourhoods is not a simple task...

This study attempts to contribute to the scarce knowledge on how eco-design, and to broad extent sustainability, is connected to innovation driven companies. In particular, this cross sectional research verifies i) perception and knowledge of eco-design of the professionals from innovation driven companies in Spain, ii) specific eco-design strategi...

Urban areas and environments are expanding worldwide and this ever-increasing urban population is likely to become larger still. Despite representing only two percent of the world's surface area, world's cities are responsible for 75 percent of the world's energy consumption, and they emit almost 80 percent of global carbon dioxide mainly related t...

Despite recent consumption decrease due to recession, European electricity sector is struggling to reach ambitious targets for reductions of greenhouse gas emissions. Our objective is to carry out a macro analysis of the energy mix in two European countries: Belgium and Spain. Life Cycle Assessments are carried for 2005 as well as for seven possibl...

This article focuses on studying the natural and artificial water flows of the service sector from an industrial ecology perspective. The purpose is to determine, in the area under study, the water consumption of the service sector and the most water demanding services in global and relative terms, total water consumption per year and liters per us...

District heating is a technology for distributing centrally produced heat for space heating and sanitary hot-water generation for residential and commercial uses. The objectives are to identify which subsystems and components of a district heating grid are the main contributors to the overall impact of the infrastructure; and provide environmentall...

This study uses the life cycle assessment methodology to analyze the type and origin of environmental impacts related to natural gas distribution networks in high and low density neighborhoods, and compares the environmental performance of two infrastructures in low density neighborhoods: a standard natural gas grid and a discontinuous system based...

Background, aim, and scopeNew neighborhoods and cities are built in both developing and developed countries worldwide. Given this urbanization context and current global environmental threats, the concept of sustainability will, in the long term, succeed or fail in cities. To succeed, we need to provide life-cycle-based data aimed at improving the...

This article evaluates, from an industrial ecology (IE) perspective, the energy performance of the services inside an urban system and determines their global environmental impact. Additionally, this study determines which are the most energy demanding services and the efficiency of their energy use per visitor and per surface area unit. The urban...