PurposeThere are several LCA methods in existence today that solve for the multifunctionality of recycling at the product level for determining the burden profiles of individual products. These product-level methods, however, often give varying environmental burden profiles and occasionally different conclusions for determining whether recycling causes greater or lesser burdens than linear product strategies. Such ambiguous results and findings across LCA methods confuse the public and decision-makers regarding the environmental implication of recycling compared to other material strategies. In this paper system expansion with multiple functions (SEMF) is investigated as a possible solution to the multifunctionality issue of recycling within life cycle assessment (LCA) whilst also providing a product-level perspective.MethodsThe background life cycle inventory (LCI) is based on ecoinvent 3.9 and the life cycle impact assessment (LCIA) method is based on ReCiPe 2016 (H). The study investigates the use of product-level methods and SEMF, both as separate approaches and as a proposal to combine them for addressing recycling in LCA. Simplified material flow assessment (MFA) is employed for calculating the foreground life cycle inventories (LCIs).Results/discussionProduct-level LCA methods of recycling strategies lead to a wide range of global warming potential (GWP) results for the same case scenario. This ambiguity prevents a uniform conclusion as to whether recycling causes lesser or greater burdens than linear material strategies. By contrast, it is demonstrated that SEMF finds one GWP for each recycling scenario, allowing for a less methodologically uncertain comparison with linear material strategies. It is also shown that attributional LCA (ALCA) in combination with MFA, can be used to build the SEMF study, bridging the informational gap between the product level and SEMF scopes of recycling in LCA.ConclusionThe sum of each product level ALCA can be used to assemble an LCA with the SEMF perspective. In this way, one can easily transition between the product level whilst comparing material strategies within a SEMF scope. To perform a SEMF-based LCA, it is necessary to include the number of times a recycled material is utilised and to employ MFA to track resource use, mass flows, and check balances. From this research further investigation is recommended into existing methods for establishing how many times a recycled material is or can be used. The authors also recommend further testing and use of the SEMF LCA method through its application in real-life scenarios.

PurposeExtended methods and more representative datasets are needed to comprehensively evaluate the environmental life cycle performance of recycling systems compared to other material strategies. In this paper, we investigate the environmental impact profile of recycling compared to reduction, linear systems (energy recovery or landfill) and a change in the plastic polymer used in primary food packaging in a southeastern Norwegian context.MethodThe life cycle assessment scope is a system expansion with multiple functions (SEMF), which accounts for every function through a cascade of recycling loops. Closed-loop allocation is used to compare the average burden of a product within a recycling loop cascade to the reduce and linear system strategies. The regionalised scope is set to southeastern Norway, for which regionalised life cycle inventories are collected. Low and high recycling scenarios were investigated. Low recycling scenarios represent current open-loop recycling efficiencies per studied polymer type, whilst high recycling scenarios are derived from the Norwegian Deposits Pay System (DPS) PANT of beverage bottles. The energy recovery rate is based on the country mixes in which the plastics are incinerated. The investigated plastic polymers are mono-polyethylene terephthalate (mono-PET) and 95% low-density polyethylene (LDPE) with 5% ethylene vinyl alcohol (EVOH).Results and discussionThe current open-loop recycling of polyethylene terephthalate (PET) and polyethylene (PE) film in Norway is comparable to a linear product system with energy recovery and landfill across all environmental impact categories. The high-efficiency recycling system demonstrated the potential to achieve 50% less climate impact compared to the linear baseline, but with great impact variability across the investigated environmental indicators and multiple instances of problem-shifting. Comparatively, a 50% reduction in material thickness corresponded to a universal 50% lower impact compared to the linear baseline across all impact categories. The SEMF framework highlights the resource and environmental limitations of current and potential recycling efficiencies, which are otherwise missed at the product level.ConclusionMaterial recycling has no significant environmental benefit compared to a linear reference with the current recycling rates. Much higher recycling rates are needed, but material quality degradation is an obstacle. The factual numbers of recycling loops due to material degradation and losses should be included in life cycle assessments (LCAs) to provide a more realistic picture of the environmental performance of material recycling. The study also showed that the reduction of material and a change of material resulted in lower environmental impact, which underscores the need to combine different strategies.

This report is part of the Healthy and Sustainable Food Systems project initiated by the Nordic Council of Ministers. Specifically, the report is written as a deliverable from the political commitment Reducing food waste for a green Nordic Region adopted by the Nordic Council of Ministers for Fisheries, Aquaculture, Agriculture, Food and Forestry (MR-FJLS). The report comes as part of a line of activities to reduce food loss and waste in the Nordic region.

Making service provisioning significantly more sustainable is crucial if humankind wants to make a serious effort to operate withinthe boundaries of what the planet can support. The purpose of this paper is to develop a systemic understanding of sustainability inservice provision and shed light on the mechanisms that drive unsustainability and hinder service providers in their efforts to bemore sustainable. To contextualize our study, we focus on a significant sustainability problem: food waste stemming from foodretail at the retailer-consumer interface. We make two theoretical contributions to the service research on sustainability. First, weoffer a systemic conceptualization of sustainability in service as a dynamic ability of a focal system (e.g., a servicefirm) to sustain thesystem(s) that contains it. Second, we explicate the mechanisms—stocks andflows, feedback and mindsets—that contribute to(un)sustainable service provision as a systemic behavior, and which can thus be used as intervention points when designingsustainability initiatives. Our work also has significant practical implications for food retailers and policymakers working towardsreaching UN’s Sustainable Development Goal 12.3, as we specify the feedback loops that drive food waste and hinder efforts toreduce it at the retailer-consumer interface.

This article argues that citizens play a key role in sustainability transitions: Citizens have unique knowledge on why social problems occur and experiment with possible solutions to these problems. Yet transformative innovation policy - a policy frame that promotes socio-technical systems change - is guided by a producer-centric innovation paradigm, which focuses on technological breakthroughs rather than social changes driven by citizens. By drawing on multiple research fields, and by using the example of household food waste, this article challenges this paradigm and asserts that addressing sustainability challenges requires a policy frame that defines citizens as an innovation source.

Teachers are also guides and must make sure that they show the way. Good guides are indispensable in life for youngsters to move ahead and make a positive difference.

Plastic pollution of the natural environment world-wide is ubiquitous. More than 80% of marine litter is made of plastics, 70% of which originates from disposable items, so plastic disposables need to be replaced with disposables made from renewable materials. However, it is important to investigate the environmental impact of renewable alternatives through their life cycle, in order to support sustainable consumption and production. In this study, the carbon footprint of disposable plates made from two different renewable materials (paper, tree leaves) were analysed using life cycle assessment. The leaf plate was produced in India and the paper plate in Finland, but both were used and disposed of in Sweden. The results showed that the leaf plate had higher carbon footprint, due to long-distance transport and use of fossil fuel-based electricity for production. Scenario analysis indicated that the emissions associated with the leaf plate were lower when replacing air freight with sea transport and with economies of scale in expanded production. For the paper plate, the processing stage was shown to contribute most life cycle emissions. These could be lowered by applying a biodegradable coating. In comparison the leaf plate had the benefit of being biodegradable, but this benefit was not enough to compete with the paper plate which was consider the less environmentally damaging alternative. However, in order to increase sustainability in the food supply chain, it will not be enough to just improve the material use for single use plates, especially since the idea of single use materials could be seen as less sustainable, but improved materials have the potential to offset the anticipated growth of the food service sector where single use items are widely used.