An international team of the UNESCO Chair in Life Cycle and Climate Change ESCI-UPF has developed the first study to evaluate the circularity of food distribution systems in Spain. Its results have been published in the prestigious scientific journal Heliyon. The linear economy follows the take-make-waste model, based on the presumption that resource availability and ecosystem regeneration are unlimited, neglecting…
Ensuring enough food for the world’s growing population, while reducing impacts on the environment, is one of the main challenges of the 21st century (UN, 2015). Food systems are responsible for 23-42% of global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions (IPCC, 2022). Overall, GHGs before and after agricultural production reached 5.5 billion tons of carbon dioxide equivalent (Gt CO2eq) globally in 2020,…
Analysis of COP28 by Sahar Azarkamand, ARECO Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the UNESCO Chair in Life Cycle and Climate Change at ESCI-UPF Sahar Azarkamand, postdoctoral researcher at the UNESCO Chair in Life Cycle and Climate Change at ESCI-UPF and ARECO Postdoctoral Research Fellow, has attended the 2023 United Nations Climate Change Conference or UNFCCC Conference of the Parties, better known…
By Sahar Azarkamand, researcher of the ARECO Fellowship of the UNESCO Chair on Life Cycle If the world’s population were to reach between 9.4 and 10.2 billion by 2050, it would require resources equivalent to almost three planets to sustain our current way of life. This underscores the need for improvements in all our resource management systems (UN, 2017). Packaging…
Climate change is increasingly recognized as a major challenge. There is broad consensus that greenhouse gas emissions are having a negative impact on the environment. The term carbon footprint is commonly used to describe the total amount of CO2 and other greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions for which an individual or organization is responsible. Footprints can also be calculated for services…
Reverse logistics is “the sequence of activities required to collect the used product from the customers for the purpose of either reuse or repair or re-manufacture or recycle or dispose of it (Fig.1; Agrawal et al., 2015)”. Hence, reverse logistics is, in essence, a circular strategy (since it integrates R-strategies) and it is recently considered as a key step towards…
Last November took place in Glasgow the 26th UN Climate Change Conference of Parties, known as COP 26. This conference was the first one after the 2015 Paris Agreement where parties had to submit their enhanced Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) to rise up the ambition to mitigate climate change. NDCs are those national ambitions or goals to limit greenhouse gases…
The concept of Circular Economy (CE) is relatively new, being in 1990 the first time it was defined and described as such by Pearce and Turner (1990). However, the concept remained dormant for about 20 years (Elkins, 2019). It was not until the creation of the Ellen MacArthur Foundation (FEM) in 2010 and its publication “Towards the Circular Economy” in…
The transition to a circular economy aims at closing material loops in order to reduce waste, use resources more efficiently and minimize the environmental impacts. But what are the strategies that the companies can establish to achieve this? In this respect, Potting et al. (2017) apply a useful framework (Fig.1) that defines 9 R-strategies, group them in three main circularity…
Reuse and recycling are the two key strategies to move towards circularity, as reported last month. But several issues arise when assessing the environmental impacts or benefits of applying these strategies. How do these burdens or benefits can be shared between the product being recycled and the next product that will use the recycled material for its manufacturing? What is…
