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Current industrial production is driven by increasing globalization, which has led to a steady increase in production volumes and complexity of products aimed at the pursuit of meeting the needs of customers. In this context, one of the main tools in the management of customer value is Lean Manufacturing or Production, though it is considered primarily as a set of tools to reduce the total cost of the resources needed to achieve such needs. This philosophy has recently been enriched in the literature with case studies that link Lean Management (LM) with the improvement of environmental sustainability. The consequence is an expansion of the Computer Integrated Manufacturing (CIM); indeed, CIM, currently, combining and integrating the key business functions (e.g., business, engineering, manufacturing, and information management) with a view of the life cycle, does not highlight the strategic role of the environmental aspects. In order to deal with the increasingly rapid environmental degradation that is reflected in society, in terms of both economy and quality of life, Industrial Ecology (IE) introduced a new paradigm of principles and instruments of analysis and decision support (e.g., Life Cycle Assessment—LCA, Social Life Cycle Assessment -SLCA, Material Flow Account—MFA, etc.) that can be considered as the main basis for integrating the environmental aspects in each strategy, design, production, final product, and end of life management, through the re-engineering of processes and activities towards the development of an eco-industrial system. This paper presents the preliminary observations based on a analysis of both theories (LM-IE) and provides a possible assessment of the key factors relevant to their integration in a “lean environmental management”, highlighting both positives (lights) and possible barriers (shadows).

We propose an ethical analysis as a method to reflect on how companies’ decisions promote sustainable development. The method proceeds by first identifying the choice according to financial business interests, and by then scrutinizing this choice according to consequentialist and deontological ethics. The paper applies the method to the choice of an Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) that a consortium of Brazilian companies (EGASUR) delivered as part of their project proposal for the realization of the Inambari hydropower dam in the Peruvian Amazon. We show that if an EIA is chosen based on the attempt to maximize the financial bottom line, it raises ethical issues both from a consequentialist perspective by involving negative consequences for various stakeholder groups, and from a deontological perspective by not complying with relevant rules, guidelines, and principles. The two ethical perspectives hence reveal where the consortium faces impediments to a genuine commitment to sustainability. Building on stakeholder interviews, observations of the project developments, and the executive summary of the actual EIA, we provide indications that EGASUR has indeed made a choice that resembles a decision based on financial interests.

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Deciding upon optimum planning actions in terms of sustainable urban planning involves the consideration of multiple environmental and socio-economic criteria. The transformation of natural landscapes to urban areas affects energy and material fluxes. An important aspect of the urban environment is the urban metabolism, and changes in such metabolism need to be considered for sustainable planning decisions. A spatial Decision Support System (DSS) prototyped within the European FP7-funded project BRIDGE (sustainaBle uRban plannIng Decision support accountinG for urban mEtabolism), enables accounting for the urban metabolism of planning actions, by exploiting the current knowledge and technology of biophysical sciences. The main aim of the BRIDGE project was to bridge the knowledge and communication gap between urban planners and environmental scientists and to illustrate the advantages of considering detailed environmental information in urban planning processes. The developed DSS prototype integrates biophysical observations and simulation techniques with socio-economic aspects in five European cities, selected as case studies for the pilot application of the tool. This paper describes the design and implementation of the BRIDGE DSS prototype, illustrates some examples of use, and highlights the need for further research and development in the field.

The past two decades have seen an impressive expansion of municipal engagement with climate change. Yet while interest has broadened, actions remain shallow. This is in part because climate policies fit uneasily into existing bureaucratic structures and practices. Effective climate programmes require adaptive and innovative responses that span departmental divisions. This challenges siloised municipal offices that are embedded in their own organisational cultures and technical practices. Understanding those challenges is crucial to understanding urban responses to climate change, but they remain critically understudied. This paper helps to fill that gap by looking at the experiences of two cities, Durban (KZN, South Africa) and Portland (OR, USA) as they attempt to put in place integrated responses to climate change. To do so, it brings together complementary critical perspectives drawn from the study of bureaucracies and complex institutions in sociology and geography. This hybrid critical framework is used to elaborate on both the organisational barriers that inhibit effective responses to climate change, and approaches that can be used to enable change and innovation.

Hydrogen fuel cell vehicles have the potential to contribute to a sustainable transport system with zero tailpipe emissions. This requires the construction of a network of fuel stations, a long-term, expensive and highly uncertain investment. We contribute to the literature by including a knock-out barrier option in an n-fold compound real option model to take account of immediate project failure in a multi-stage sequential investment project. Our model allows to explicitly incorporate the default possibility of large-scale energy infrastructure projects. In our case study of hydrogen infrastructure development, we find that even for the least conservative valuation method no profitable business case can be made for the development of hydrogen as a sustainable transportation mode. However, we do provide some suggestive scenarios that plausible tax schedules can be designed to overcome the starting problems for hydrogen infrastructure development.

Two main topics are analyzed in this paper: a crowding model for an urban destination is tested by the use of a binary logistic model in order to identify the variables influencing crowding perception; and the inherent negativity of the crowding concept, as is often assumed, is examined through association statistics. The results confirmed that personal and behavioral variables have a larger effect on the perception of crowding than use-level. Furthermore, the relationship between crowding and experience, while significantly negative, could only be found in respondents with a preference for low, and a perception of high, use-levels, while for the majority of individuals the perception of a certain crowding level did not lead to a negative evaluation of the conditions. This proves that the concept of crowding cannot be assumed to be implicitly negative, and needs individual preferences to be fully understood.