• Energy Research
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The possibility to increase human comfort and reduce the global footprint of buildings is a powerful driving force for introduction of new building technology. Here advanced coating technologies pl ...

Abstract Environmental-impact reduction potential is great early in new product development. To exploit this potential, this study evaluates novel combinations of existent processing technologies. Process engineering is combined with an environmental product assessment along the supply chain. In the dairy sector, drying milk into milk powders is a highly energy-intensive process. This study investigates whether switching from milk powders to new products known as milk concentrates diminishes the overall environmental impact along the supply chains of dairy-containing products. A comparative life cycle assessment (LCA) is conducted, which considers individual processing steps that can be combined and operated in various ways to generate a multitude of different skim milk concentrates. For relevant environmental indicators such as cumulative energy demand, global warming potential, eutrophication potential, and acidification potential, concentrates were found to have a lower environmental impact than powders, even if the former are trucked up to 1000 km. This break-even distance is a conservative estimate. It depends upon the environmental impact of raw-milk production. The concentrate with the lowest environmental impact is produced by a combined concentration with reverse osmosis and evaporation to a dry-matter content of 35% and preservation via subsequent pasteurization. This holds for all indicators except eutrophication potential, for which this concentrate is the second-best option. This study identifies the frame within which milk concentrates are an advantageous substitution for milk powder and demonstrates the value of applying environmental assessment to product development and processing-technology selection.

Bacterial community structure and dynamics in anaerobic digesters are primarily influenced by feedstock composition. It is therefore important to unveil microbial traits that explain microbiome variations in response to substrate changes. Here, gene and genome-centric metagenomics were used to examine microbiome dynamics in four laboratory-scale reactors, in which sewage sludge was co-digested with increasing amounts of food waste. A co-occurrence network revealed microbiome shifts in response to changes in substrate composition and concentration. Food waste concentration correlated with extracellular enzymes and metagenome-assembled genomes (MAGs) involved in the degradation of complex carbohydrates commonly found in fruits and plant cell walls as well as with the abundance of hydrolytic MAGs. A key role was attributed to Proteiniphillum for being the only bacteria that encoded the complete pectin degradation pathway. These results suggest that changes of feedstock composition establish new microbial niches for bacteria with the capacity to degrade newly added substrates.

The aim of this document is to illustrate with four case studies the key steps to design and implement an innovation procurement process. These demonstration sites will exemplify the process to follow and the pitfalls to avoid. Four municipalities involved in PROMINENT-MED launched PPI for the renovation of their public building: The municipality of Alzira in Spain: the pilot project focuses on the refurbishment of an old (1891) orange storage building (“magatzem de cucó”); The municipality of Koprivnica in Croatia: the pilot project involves the energy efficient renovation of a prefabricated kindergarten building. The municipality of Mértola: the pilot project concerns the renovation of the city hall that also hosts the Roman part of Mértola’s museum. The municipality of Narni in Italy: the pilot case is applied for the refurbishment of a kindergarten hosting children from 6 to 36 months. The organisation of each municipality and the continuity of each pilot project, from needs identification to the assessment of the project performance, will be presented to show how small municipalities prepared and implemented PPI. This guidance will present the following steps in the public procurement of innovation process: Needs identification and assessment; Market engagement; The business case PPI broker / external facilitator Open market consultation Prominent MED project (Public Procurement of Innovation Boosting Green Growth in the MED area, 1MED15-1.1-M12-070) Interreg Mediterranean, Project co-financed by the European Regional Development Fund. DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.4250528

Abstract Rapidly changing hydrological conditions under climate change, upstream developments, and local water infrastructures require transformative changes in water management strategies for the agriculture sector in the Vietnamese Mekong Delta (VMD). For more than three decades, the agricultural policies in Vietnam have emphasized the intensification of rice production. In recent years, however, the Vietnamese government has started to pay more attention to longer-term sustainability considerations. Recent regional plans and high-level policies, including the Mekong Delta Plan and the Resolution 120 emphasize the development of high-value, sustainable and climate-resilient agriculture and food production. This shift has its challenges. One of them relates to changes in the government-mandated flood-control strategy. The increased awareness of the agricultural and environmental benefits of seasonal floods including soil fertility maintenance and pest management has resulted in new government regulations that require farmers to adopt a so-called 3–3–2 cropping cycle which means that every three years, farmers protected by high dikes should allow their rice fields to get flooded during the third rice season. Some of the farmers, however, have been reluctant to shift their farming cycle away from the triple-rice cropping system because of livelihood security-related concerns. Our study examines rice farmers’ livelihood sustainability in the upper delta by applying a sustainable livelihood framework to systematically identify prospects and challenges for more sustainable flood-based livelihoods. We interviewed 160 rice farmers and conducted two focus group discussions in two communes in An Giang province. Our results show that appreciation of the benefits of the 3–3–2 cycle has increased while the results of the livelihood capital index calculations show relatively good status of livelihood sustainability of farming households, indicated by the overall 5–capital scores of over 0.4. The study also identifies other constraints to sustainable farm-based livelihoods including unstable rice markets and shortage of labor. A key finding, however, is that unless more supportive policies and enhanced viability of flood-based crops are developed, farmers will not be sufficiently motivated to change their farming practices.

This paper investigates the energy system of the Basilicata region (southern Italy) to highlight, through a scenario analysis, its possible future development in compliance with the European Commission's long-term vision. The IEA-ETSAP methodology was utilized to model and analyse the Basilicata energy system in a business-as-usual scenario, based on the assumptions of the 2010 Regional Energy and Environmental Policy Plan, and in two low-carbon scenarios, decarbonisation and high energy efficiency, which, in line with the long-term European strategy, foresee an 85% carbon dioxide emission reduction and a 20% energy efficiency increase in 2050. The results highlight that electricity production from renewable energy sources (in particular wind energy), strongly supported by the regional policy, goes beyond the Basilicata Regional Energy-Environmental Plan forecast, with a further increase in the decarbonisation scenarios. In addition, solar thermal and highly efficient technologies are adopted in commercial and residential end-use sectors. An additional 9% reduction in energy consumption is achieved in the high energy efficiency scenario by passive houses. The proposed approach shows the usefulness of a modelling framework typically used for national and supranational analyses to support regional authorities in their decision-making process to obtain results in line with the European and national strategies. Application to the Basilicata region shows the usefulness of a consolidated framework for policy assessment at a local scale to assess regional contribution to the achievement of national climate mitigation targets that tend towards climate neutrality.

This chapter describes the objectives, strategy, and practical initiatives of the Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) Alliance Portugal to contribute to the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. It also describes the collaborative network and multi-stakeholder approach implemented to achieve the SDGs and targets. The SDGs aim to be universal – that is, applicable to all countries and not only to developing countries – and to serve as guideposts for a global transition to the sustainable development world. Countries with a more stakeholder-oriented culture are more prepared to embrace all stakeholders, from business to civil society, in the developing of change strategies to promote the SDGs. The SDG Alliance Portugal is a multi-stakeholder platform that aims to “raise awareness, inform, implement, monitor, and evaluate the contribution of the private sector and other civil society partners to the SDGs at [the] national level”.

Revealing the trends and main drivers of rural energy transition has important implications for building up a clean, efficient and sustainable energy system. Based on physical energy consumption, we measure the effective energy consumption and constructed a provincial panel dataset of rural China from 1990 to 2017. The results show that the energy transition is not only reflected in the growth of fuel consumption and the change of fuel structure, especially the growth of high-quality energy, the diversification of service functions and the convenience of use. The term of effective energy can more accurately measure the level of energy consumption per capita than physical energy. The income per capita, urbanization level and annual average temperature are three main factors impacting energy consumption. Every 1,000 yuan growth in per capita income can increase the consumption of 6 kgce physical energy and 4 kgce effective energy, respectively. Every 1% rise in the urbanization rate of the population can bring a growth of 4.86 kgce physical energy and 1.83 kgce effective energy. 1℃ of rise in average temperature may decrease by 22.3 kgce physical energy and 2.8 kgce effective energy. There are roughly-three levels of transition, the slow transition in the northeast, the forefront transition in the eastern coastal areas and the intermediate level transition in vast central and western regions. According to regional differences, focus should be on increasing the share of renewable energy, improving energy infrastructure and energy efficiency in the future.

In food-processing industries, agricultural raw materials are processed into consumer products or food ingredients. Within this context, efficiency and sustainability are mainly impacted by losses of valuable food products that already caused significant monetary and environmental impacts, as well as by the inefficient use of utilities such as energy, water, and cleaning agents. In turn, these factors are mostly driven by product changeovers and cleaning of production and storage equipment. Efforts to improve the efficiency and sustainability of food processing, therefore, emphasize managerial and technological solutions to decrease the number and impact of changeovers. This chapter first distinguishes technological and managerial perspectives on product losses and utility consumption. Elaborating on the managerial perspective, we subsequently provide an overview of cyclic production planning and scheduling approaches that can be used to improve efficiency and sustainability. The intuitive nature of cyclic planning frameworks also provides a lean perspective on planning that facilitates implementation processes.