Analyzing the relationship between product waste footprints and environmental damage - A life cycle analysis of 1,400+ products.

A major problem for the circular economy is monitoring improvements in environmental sustainability. Measuring how much waste reduction efforts contribute to the decrease of environmental impact is difficult, because knowledge on whether life cycle waste amounts correlate with environmental damage is limited. In this article, product waste footprints are used to explore structural similarities and differences in associations with environmental damage.

Calculating the pre-consumer waste footprint: A screening study of 10 selected products.

Knowledge about the total waste generated by the production of consumer goods can help raise awareness among policy-makers, producers and consumers of the benefits of closing loops in a future circular economy, avoiding unnecessary production and production steps and associated generation of large amounts of waste. In strict life cycle assessment practice, information on waste outputs from intermediate industrial processes of material and energy transformation is translated into and declared as potential environmental impacts, which are often not reported in the final results. In this study, a procedure to extract available intermediate data and perform a systematic pre-consumer waste footprint analysis was developed.

Progress and challenges to the global waste management system.

Rapid economic growth, urbanization and increasing population have caused (materially intensive) resource consumption to increase, and consequently the release of large amounts of waste to the environment. From a global perspective, current waste and resource management lacks a holistic approach covering the whole chain of product design, raw material extraction, production, consumption, recycling and waste management. In this article, progress and different sustainability challenges facing the global waste management system are presented and discussed.