• Energy Research

This chapter aims to reveal the geographies of ewaste flows at global and national levels based on waste statistics data and thematic cartography. WEEE management practices are examined for each major geographical area respectively: Europe, North America, Latin America and Caribbean, South America, Africa, Asia, and Oceania. Pollution and public health threats associated with improper ewaste management practices is a crucial environmental issue, particularly in emerging economies. Generation, collection, treatment, recycling and recovery activities of WEEE fraction are analyzed within each geographical area. The role formal and informal sector is further investigated pointing out the gaps and different prospects in development of sustainable ewaste management systems across developing and developed countries.

The scientific debate about sustainability in the agricultural sector is growing worldwide, especially thanks to the increasing awareness of customers towards the impact of their consumption behaviors. While a great deal of attention is given to the economic and environmental dimensions of sustainability, social sustainability assessment often focuses on the quality of life of farmers and the local community; the dimension regarding occupational health and safety (OHS) is not so analyzed even if the agricultural sector could be evaluated as one of the most hazardous ones all over the world. From this point of view, workers are considered high-risk groups mainly due to the presence of hazardous equipment and chemicals. The aim of this work is to propose a cross-analysis developed on public databases reporting data about injuries in the Italian agricultural sector—provided by the Italian National Institute for the Insurance of Work-Related Injuries (INAIL)—in order to point out the main sources and causes that led to these injuries. The injury analysis will allow companies as well as institutions to define more effective prevention strategies to increase the social sustainability levels of this sector. Even if results are limited to the Italian sector, they could outline some directions for improving social sustainability levels as well as research gaps and possible future research directions in order to prevent injuries in the agricultural sector.

The adoption of Product–Service Systems (PSS) in a business strategy is often mainly associated with the servitization process, where a service component is added to the product component in order to improve the value proposition of the company and better satisfy the customer’s needs. The productization phenomenon is far less studied in literature, but growingly prominent in today’s market. In particular, companies in the utilities sector have been exploring the potentialities of productization and proposing new business models for improving their offer to the customers, in order to be more and more competitive on the market. In this paper, we provide a first analysis and classification of productization strategies in the utilities sector, starting from experiences in the Italian market, with the aim of understanding which can be the main benefits of a PSS approach in this field, considering the effects on the three dimensions of sustainability (economic, environmental, and social).

Intermodal transportation is the use of multiple modes of transportation, which can lead to greater sustainability by reducing environmental impact and traffic congestion and increasing the efficiency of supply chains. One of the preconditions for efficient intermodal transport is the efficient intermodal terminal (IT). ITs allow for the smooth and efficient handling of cargo, thus reducing the time, cost, and environmental impact of transportation. Adequate selection of subsystem technologies can significantly improve the efficiency and productivity of an IT, ultimately leading to cost savings for businesses and a more efficient and sustainable transportation system. Accordingly, this paper aims to establish a framework for the evaluation and selection of appropriate technologies for IT subsystems. To solve the defined problem, an innovative hybrid multi-criteria decision making (MCDM) model, which combines the fuzzy factor relationship (FFARE) and the fuzzy combinative distance-based assessment (FCODAS) methods, is developed in this paper. The FFARE method is used for obtaining criteria weights, while the FCODAS method is used for evaluation and a final ranking of the alternatives. The established framework and the model are tested on a real-life case study, evaluating and selecting the handling technology for a planned IT. The study defines 12 potential variants of handling equipment based on their techno-operational characteristics and evaluates them using 16 criteria. The results indicate that the best handling technology variant is the one that uses a rail-mounted gantry crane for trans-shipment and a reach stacker for horizontal transport and storage. The results also point to the conclusion that instead of choosing equipment for each process separately, it is important to think about the combination of different handling technologies that can work together to complete a series of handling cycle processes. The main contributions of this paper are the development of a new hybrid model and the establishment of a framework for the selection of appropriate IT subsystem technologies along with a set of unique criteria for their evaluation and selection.

Electronic and electric devices are now applied in most human activities: their diffusion is increasing worldwide; furthermore, most of them are characterized by a high replacement rate due to technological obsolescence. Consequently, environmental problems due to their diffusion are increasing; several aspects are involved from the energy consumption derived from their manufacturing processes and their use phases to their end-of-life (EOL) management. Such legislative (e.g. the European Energy Efficiency directive for household appliances) or voluntary interventions (e.g. based on the ISO standards) have been introduced for such devices: the aim is to incorporate environmental considerations in product design and manufacturing in order to benefit the environment. Some attempts are focusing on defining standardized models for the overall lifecycle including waste management. The aim of this paper is to introduce a reference model for comparing environmental product footprint of electrical and electronic e...

Safety-II is a recently theorized approach, considering safety as the ability of a system to reach a positive outcome under variable conditions: analyzing “what goes right” can help to understand the dynamics of the analyzed system and improve its inherent safety level. On the contrary, a more traditional perspective, defined as Safety-I, aims at analyzing “what goes wrong”, thereby relating the safety level of a system to the number of adverse events that occurred. This study explores the potentialities of integrating these two approaches in near-miss management. Through a Safety-I approach, near-miss events are analyzed to identify the root causes generating the event chain, in order to delete them and prevent future accidents. Applying a Safety-II approach, the analysis can include elements that contributed to limiting the consequences and blocking the event chain, revealing the resilience level of the systems. This study presents a critical analysis of the two approaches and proposes a practical framework to integrate them into near-miss management systems. A test case shows the potential benefits of this integration. This work provides a tool to support the implementation of Safety-II on the operative level while suggesting a new perspective for near-miss management.

In the last years, the circular economy (CE) paradigm is being widely explored by researchers and institutions as a possible path to increase the sustainability of our economic system. Reuse, repair and recycling are becoming crucial activities in many sectors. At the same time, companies are showing an increasing interest for this new economic model. However, the state of the art shows that a deep research on CE assessment and indicators is still lacking, in particular on the micro level. This work tries to fill this gap, first analyzing the current literature on CE assessment, then proposing a reference framework for the monitoring phase of a CE strategy. Finally, the main existing environmental assessment methodologies based on indexes are analyzed according to their suitability to evaluate the circularity of a system. A systematic approach for the choice of the adequate methodology is also provided, highlighting the main critical steps in the assessment of a CE strategy. Further research could be focused either on the extension of this approach to include other assessment methods, and on the validation of this proposal in a case study.