Evaluating the Environmental Sustainability of Alternative Ways to Produce Benzene, Toluene, and Xylene.

The petrochemical industry can reduce its environmental impacts by moving from fossil resources to alternative carbon feedstocks. Biomass and plastic waste-based production pathways have recently been developed for benzene, toluene, and xylene (BTX). This study evaluates the environmental impacts of these novel BTX pathways at a commercial and future (2050) scale, combining traditional life cycle assessment with absolute environmental sustainability assessment using the planetary boundary concept.

Life cycle thinking for the assessment of waste and circular economy policy: status and perspectives from the EU example.

Life cycle thinking methods such as life cycle assessment (LCA) and costing (LCC) were originally developed to assess the performance of products and services (business-making decisions). However, they are increasingly deployed to support policy-making along the entire policy cycle, including via impact assessment (IA) of different policy options. These applications are associated with a number of challenges, mainly related to the dynamic and prospective nature of policy IA, typically forward-looking into 10-20 years ahead.

The potential of emerging bio-based products to reduce environmental impacts.

The current debate on the sustainability of bio-based products questions the environmental benefits of replacing fossil- by bio-resources. Here, we analyze the environmental trade-offs of 98 emerging bio-based materials compared to their fossil counterparts, reported in 130 studies. Although greenhouse gas life cycle emissions for emerging bio-based products are on average 45% lower (-52 to -37%; 95% confidence interval), we found a large variation between individual bio-based products with none of them reaching net-zero emissions.

Life Cycle Assessment support to environmental ambitions of EU policies and the Sustainable Development Goals.

The European Green Deal and the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) ask for a more holistic approach to production and consumption along value chains. The role of Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) in supporting policy design and monitoring is then pivotal to achieving policy ambitions. This paper explores the potential support of LCA to EU (European Union) policies and the SDGs, considering also the Planetary Boundaries (PBs) framework.

Grown and thrown: Exploring approaches to estimate food waste in EU countries.

National studies on food waste quantification in EU countries present highly discrepant results due to the different quantification approaches adopted. The European Commission has published a delegated act establishing a common methodology and minimum quality requirements for the uniform measurement of food waste generated in Member States. Nevertheless, as EU countries are at different levels of development and implementation of national strategies for food waste quantification, there is a need to develop a harmonized modelling system that enables the estimation of food waste generated by Member States to assess the amounts reported by each country.

Corrigendum to "Environmental sustainability of European production and consumption assessed against planetary boundaries".

• Planetary Boundaries help quantify the environmental sustainability of consumption. • We developed LCIA-based planetary boundaries for evaluating the EU consumption. • EU consumption occupies a high share of the safe operating space globally available.

No time to waste: assessing the performance of food waste prevention actions.

As a result of the growing awareness of the need to prevent food waste, several initiatives have been launched in the last few years to reduce food waste generated across the food supply chain. However, the evaluation of food waste prevention interventions is still at an early stage of development and appropriate methods to assess their effectiveness are missing, hampering the identification of best practices amongst existing initiatives and the prioritisation of those that are most promising. To address such needs and provide a common approach to consistently assess the performance of food waste prevention initiatives, the European Commission Joint Research Centre has developed an evaluation framework for food waste prevention actions.

Environmental impacts of household appliances in Europe and scenarios for their impact reduction.

Assessing the environmental impact due to consumption of goods and services is a pivotal step towards achieving the sustainable development goal related to responsible production and consumption (i.e. SDG 12).

Biodiversity Assessment of Value Chains: State of the Art and Emerging Challenges.

The consumption of materials and products is one of the drivers of biodiversity loss, which in turn affects ecosystem functioning and has socio-economic consequences worldwide. Life cycle assessment (LCA) is a reference methodology for appraising the environmental impacts of products along their value chains. Currently, a generally accepted life cycle impact assessment (LCIA) framework for assessing biodiversity impacts is lacking.

Development of a bioeconomy monitoring framework for the European Union: An integrative and collaborative approach.

The EU Bioeconomy Strategy, updated in 2018, in its Action Plan pledges an EU-wide, internationally coherent monitoring system to track economic, environmental and social progress towards a sustainable bioeconomy. This paper presents the approach taken by the European Commission's (EC) Joint Research Centre (JRC) to develop such a system. To accomplish this, we capitalise on (1) the experiences of existing indicator frameworks; (2) stakeholder knowledge and expectations; and (3) national experiences and expertise.

Unveiling the potential for an efficient use of nitrogen along the food supply and consumption chain.

Ensuring global food security is one of the challenges of our society. Nitrogen availability is key for food production, while contributing to different environmental impacts. This paper aims firstly to assess nitrogen flows and to highlight hotspots of inefficient use of nitrogen along the European food chain, excluding primary production.

Environmental sustainability of European production and consumption assessed against planetary boundaries.

The planetary boundaries (PBs) represent a well-known concept, which helps identify whether production and consumption systems are environmentally sustainable in absolute terms, namely compared to the Earth's ecological limits and carrying capacity. In this study, the impacts of production and consumption of the European Union in 2010 were assessed by means of life cycle assessment (LCA)-based indicators and compared with the PBs. Five different perspectives were adopted for assessing the impacts: a production perspective (EU Domestic Footprint) and four distinct consumption perspectives, resulting from alternative modelling approaches including both top-down (input-output LCA) and bottom-up (process-based LCA).

Sustainability of food waste biorefinery: A review on valorisation pathways, techno-economic constraints, and environmental assessment.

The need to increase circularity of industrial systems to address limited resources availability and climate change has triggered the development of the food waste biorefinery concept. However, for the development of future sustainable industrial processes focused on the valorisation of food waste, critical aspects such as (i) the technical feasibility of the processes at industrial scale, (ii) the analysis of their techno-economic potential, including available quantities of waste, and (iii) a life cycle-based environmental assessment of benefits and burdens need to be considered. The goal of this review is to provide an overview of food waste valorisation pathways and to analyse to which extent these aspects have been considered in the literature.

Accounting for the dissipation of abiotic resources in LCA: Status, key challenges and potential way forward.

The concept of resources or materials dissipation after their use in the technosphere has been increasingly considered in life-cycle based studies, applying Substance and Material Flow Analysis (SFA and MFA), Input-Output Analysis, and Life Cycle Assessment (LCA). However, there is currently no common understanding of what a dissipative flow is. This article first reviews 45 publications to describe the status of resource dissipation in life-cycle based studies, discussing how resource dissipation is usually defined, which temporal perspective is considered, which compartments of dissipation are distinguished, and which approaches (including the implementation of parameters) are considered to assess resource dissipation in a system.

Characterizing honey bee exposure and effects from pesticides for chemical prioritization and life cycle assessment.

Agricultural pesticides are key contributors to pollinator decline worldwide. However, methods for quantifying impacts associated with pollinator exposure to pesticides are currently missing in comparative risk screening, chemical substitution and prioritization, and life cycle impact assessment methods. To address this gap, we developed a method for quantifying pesticide field exposure and ecotoxicity effects of honey bees as most economically important pollinator species worldwide.

Out of sight out of mind? A life cycle-based environmental assessment of goods traded by the European Union.

Ensuring responsible production and consumption is one of the United Nations' Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) to which the European Union (EU) has committed. An increasing body of literature has demonstrated that global trade flows are key contributors to the environmental impacts of consumption. Indeed, very often developed countries import fuels and other resources from developing ones, displacing a large share of environmental burdens related to consumption of goods outside their boundaries.

Methodological review and detailed guidance for the life cycle interpretation phase.

Life cycle interpretation is the fourth and last phase of life cycle assessment (LCA). Being a "pivot" phase linking all other phases and the conclusions and recommendations from an LCA study, it represents a challenging task for practitioners, who miss harmonized guidelines that are sufficiently complete, detailed, and practical to conduct its different steps effectively. Here, we aim to bridge this gap.

The consumer footprint: Monitoring sustainable development goal 12 with process-based life cycle assessment.

Sustainable and responsible production and consumption are at the heart of sustainable development, explicitly mentioned as one of the sustainable development goals (SDG12). Life cycle assessment, with its integrated holistic approach, is considered a reference method for the assessment of the environmental impact of production and consumption. This paper presents a study on the environmental impacts of final consumption in Europe in five areas of consumption: food, mobility, housing, household goods, and appliances.

Environmental impacts of household consumption in Europe: Comparing process-based LCA and environmentally extended input-output analysis.

The environmental impacts generated by household consumption are generally calculated through footprints, allocating the supply-chain impacts to the final consumers. This study compares the result of the Consumer Footprint indicator, aimed at assessing the impacts of household consumption in Europe, calculated with the two standard approaches usually implemented for footprint calculations: (i) a bottom-up approach, based on process-Life cycle assessment of a set of products and services representing household consumption, and (ii) a top-down approach, based on environmentally extended input-output tables (EXIOBASE 3). Environmental impacts are calculated considering 14 environmental impact categories out of the 16 included in the EF2017 impact assessment method.

Environmental footprint family to address local to planetary sustainability and deliver on the SDGs.

The number of publications on environmental footprint indicators has been growing rapidly, but with limited efforts to integrate different footprints into a coherent framework. Such integration is important for comprehensive understanding of environmental issues, policy formulation and assessment of trade-offs between different environmental concerns. Here, we systematize published footprint studies and define a family of footprints that can be used for the assessment of environmental sustainability.

Quantification of food waste per product group along the food supply chain in the European Union: a mass flow analysis.

In 2015, the United Nations defined the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG), which include a target (12.3) on food waste. The target requires "by 2030, to halve per capita global food waste at the retail and consumer levels and to reduce food losses along production and supply chains, including post-harvest losses".

Building national emission inventories of toxic pollutants in Europe.

The reduction of chemical pollution is a priority in many regional, national, and international policies, including in EU countries. To effectively do so, quantified overviews of pollutant emissions at national levels and with some granularity in their sources, are required. However, current monitoring efforts are often scattered and a quantitative and comprehensive inventory of toxic emissions in Europe is lacking.

Using REACH for the EU Environmental Footprint: Building a Usable Ecotoxicity Database, Part I.

The European Union Environmental Footprint (EU-EF) is a harmonized method to measure and communicate the life cycle environmental performance of products and organizations. Among 16 different impact categories included in the EU-EF, 1 focuses on the impact of substances on freshwater ecosystems and requires the use of toxicity data. This paper evaluates the use of the aquatic toxicity data submitted to the EU Registration, Evaluation, Authorisation and Restriction of Chemicals (REACH) regulation.

Food waste accounting methodologies: Challenges, opportunities, and further advancements.

About one third of the food produced globally is wasted along the food chain, representing a burden for the environment and an inefficiency of the food system. Tackling food waste is a priority on the global political agenda to guarantee food security. Defining a methodology for food waste quantification is key to monitoring progress towards the achievement of reduction targets.