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Abstract To achieve the EU climate and energy objectives, a transition towards a future sustainable energy system is needed. The integration of the huge potential for industrial waste heat recovery into smart energy system represents a main opportunity to accomplish these goals. To successfully implement this strategy, all the several stakeholders' conflicting objectives should be considered. In this paper an evolutionary multi-objective optimization model is developed to perform a sustainability evaluation of an energy system involving an industrial facility as the waste heat source and the neighbourhood as district heating network end users. An Italian case study of heat recovery from a steel casting facility shows how the model allows to properly select the district heating network set of users to fully exploit the available waste energy. Design directions such as the thermal energy storage capacity can be also provided. Moreover, the model enables the analysis of the trade-off between the stakeholders’ different perspectives, allowing to identify possible win-win solutions for both the industrial sector and the citizenship.

Given the global energy and environmental situation, the European Union has been issuing directives with increasingly demanding requirements in term of the energy efficiency in buildings. The international competition of sustainable houses, Solar Decathlon Europe (SDE), is aligned with these European objectives. SDE houses are low energy solar buildings that must reach the near to zero energy houses’ goal. In the 2012 edition, in order to emphasize its significance, the Energy Efficiency Contest was added. SDE houses’ interior comfort, functioning and energy performance is monitored. The monitoring data can give an idea about the efficiency of the houses. However, a jury comprised by international experts is responsible for carrying out the houses energy efficiency evaluation. Passive strategies and houses services are analyzed. Additionally, the jury's assessment has been compared with the behavior of the houses during the monitoring period. Comparative studies make emphasis on the energy aspects, houses functioning and their interior comfort. Conclusions include thoughts related with the evaluation process, the results of the comparative studies and suggestions for the next competitions.

As part of the Copenhagen Accord, individual countries have submitted greenhouse gas reduction proposals for the year 2020. This paper analyses the implications for emission reductions, the carbon price, and abatement costs of these submissions. The submissions of the Annex I (industrialised) countries are estimated to lead to a total reduction target of 12-18% below 1990 levels. The submissions of the seven major emerging economies are estimated to lead to an 11-14% reduction below baseline emissions, depending on international (financial) support. Global abatement costs in 2020 are estimated at about USD 60-100 billion, assuming that at least two-thirds of Annex I emission reduction targets need to be achieved domestically. The largest share of these costs are incurred by Annex I countries, although the costs as share of GDP are similar for Annex I as a group and the seven emerging economies as a group, even when assuming substantial international transfers from Annex I countries to the emerging economies to finance their abatement costs. If the restriction of achieving two-thirds of the emission reduction target domestically is abandoned, it would more than double the international carbon price and at the same time reduce global abatement costs by almost 25%.

Improving access to safe drinking water can result in multi-dimensional impacts on people's livelihood. This has been aptly reflected in the Millennium Development Goals (MDG) as one of the major objectives. Despite the availability of diverse and complex set of technologies for water purification, pragmatic and cost-effective use of the same is impeding the use of available sources of water. Hence, in country like India simple low-energy technologies such as solar still are likely to succeed. Solar stills would suffice the basic minimum drinking water requirements of man. Solar stills use sunlight, to kill or inactivate many, if not all, of the pathogens found in water. This paper provides an integrated assessment of the suitability of domestic solar still as a viable safe water technology for India. Also an attempt has been made to critically assess the operational feasibility and costs incurred for using this technology in rural India.

Abstract Given the need to reduce the CO2 emissions coming from the manufacturing sector, it is important, for planning purposes, to know which countries and which manufacturing sub-sectors have the greatest potential for reducing energy use. Using data from the International Atomic Energy Agency and the United Nations Industrial Development Organization, the authors estimate trends in global decoupling of energy use and manufacturing value added, compare energy-use intensity in six country groups and estimate the potential for reducing energy use and CO2 emissions under two scenarios and compare selected sub-sector energy intensity and estimate the potential for reducing energy use CO2 emissions. The comparison of energy intensities across country groups and among countries suggests that there still remains significant potential to reduce energy use and associated CO2 emissions. The analysis of four sub-sectors in developing and transition economies also shows similar but varied potential for reducing energy use and associated CO2 emissions.

SummaryThe German government has adopted a law that requires sewage plants to go beyond the recovery of phosphorus from wastewater and to promote recycling. We argue that there is no physical global short‐ or mid‐term phosphorus scarcity. However, we also argue that there are legitimate reasons for policies such as those of Germany, including: precaution as a way to ensure future generations’ long‐term supply security, promotion of technologies for closed‐loop economics in a promising stage of technology development, and decrease in the current supply risk with a new resource pool.

Coal will continue to be the main energy source in China for the immediate future, although the environmental pollution and ecological impacts of each stage in the full life cycle of coal mining, transportation, and combustion generate large quantities of external costs. The Late Permian coals in southwestern (SW) China usually contain high amounts of fluorine (F), arsenic (As), and ash, which together with high-F clays cause abnormally high levels of endemic fluorosis, As poisoning, and lung cancer in areas where coal is mined and burned. In this paper, we estimate the external costs of the life cycle of coal. The results show that the externalities of coal in SW China are estimated at USD 73.5 billion or 284.3 USD/t, which would have accounted for 6.5 % of the provincial GDP in this area in 2018. The external cost of human health accounts for 87.2% of the total external costs, of which endemic skeletal fluorosis diseases and related lung cancers have the most important impact. Our study provides a more precise estimate of externalities compared with its counterparts in other provinces in China. Therefore, several policy recommendations would be proposed to internalize the external cost.

The selection of an appropriate “optimal” recycling alternative has to take into consideration both the ecological and economic effects of the entire life-cycle. The aim of this paper is to compare different waste management systems by means of a life-cycle assessment (LCA) and a cost comparison. The analysis uses data regarding the amount of household waste generated, collected and treated in a selected area in Austria. For this purpose, model-based scenarios with recycling and separate collection as well as scenarios without recycling were created. The database covers the amounts of household waste generated in the different collection schemes, the transport distances by private delivery and by regional waste management companies and data on the waste treatment processes that are widely employed throughout Austria and Germany. The resulting life-cycle inventories have been assessed according to three impact categories relevant to this topic—the global warming potential (GWP), the acidification potential (AP) and the net energy use (NEU). The results include ecological impact analyses and cost comparisons for the overall waste management systems and the waste management systems for the individual waste types—waste paper, plastic packaging, metal packaging and waste glass. Finally, a sensitivity analysis should prove the validity of the results for regions with transport distances differing from those in the area under analysis. © 2003 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.