Silvia Forin

• Doctor of Engineering
• Senior Scientist at VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland

Companies are increasingly interested in reducing their environmental footprint. Thereby, they face the challenge of identifying and mitigating their specific impacts and hotspots and simultaneously avoid burden shifting. The organizational life cycle assessment (OLCA) method was conceived and successfully tested for the assessment if companies’ po...

With water scarcity representing an increasing threat to humans, the environment and the economy, companies are interested in exploring how their operations and supply chains affect water resources globally. To allow for systematically compiling the water footprint at the company level, the organizational water footprint method based on ISO 14046 a...

Purpose This paper proposes a practical methodological approach to assess the water footprint at the organizational level, in line with the current development of life-cycle based approaches toward the organizational scale on the one hand and footprint metrics on the other hand. This methodological development allows for organizational water footpr...

Purpose The novelty of the O-LCA method and the existing differences with the established product LCA practice, as well as the unique structure each organization, pose a broad range of methodological and application challenges, in addition to the general methodological gaps in LCA. In order to provide practitioners with lessons learned for future a...

Purpose Organizational life cycle assessment (O-LCA) is an emerging method to analyze the inputs, outputs, and environmental impacts of an organization throughout its value chain. To facilitate the method’s application, the Guidance on Organizational Life Cycle Assessment was published within the UNEP/SETAC Life Cycle Initiative and applied by 12 “...

Purpose This paper presents the implementation of O-LCA by a Brazilian cosmetics manufacturer. The case study was developed within the framework of the road testing of the “Guidance on organizational LCA” of the UNEP/SETAC Life Cycle Initiative. The aim is to illustrate methodological choices and implementation challenges encountered by the company...

Water scarcity is one of the most threatening challenges of the twenty‐first century. Production processes have impacts on local water resources throughout their entire (often transboundary) value chain. This has been addressed in the last decade at the corporate level by developing and applying a broad set of approaches with different focuses and...

Due to steadily increasing resource demand and accompanying raising public awareness, a variety of assessment methodologies evaluating resource use and its consequences were published in the last years. Existing methodologies are typically developed considering the specific characteristics of one particular resource type and as consequence are not...

Sectoral production technologies differ largely across countries, so do sectoral energy intensities. Hence, shifts in production locations within global sectors, possibly caused by environmental regulations, are likely to have an impact on aggregated energy usage and emissions. Applying a Logarithmic Mean Divisia Index decomposition we decompose ch...

Purpose Organizational life cycle assessment (O-LCA) is still a rather young proposal, but moving towards becoming more broadly accepted as a scientifically mature and practical method. The UNEP/SETAC flagship project “LCA of organizations” concluded its “road-testing” phase and is glad to announce the publication of the final report “Road testing...

Economic activities play a key role in human societies by providing goods and services through production, distribution, and exchange. At the same time, economic activities through common focus on short-term profitability may cause global crisis at all levels. The inclusion of three dimensions-environment, economy, and society-when measuring progre...

We have performed X-ray absorption spectroscopy of size-selected, free, cationic, transition-metal-doped (Sc, Ti, V, Cr) gold clusters in a size range n = 1-9. The electronic configuration of the impurity atom was determined by modeling the X-ray absorption spectrum in a charge-transfer multiplet framework which makes it possible to quantify the am...