The growing population, thriving economy, rapid urbanisation significantly accelerate the generation of municipal waste. Tightening conditions for waste management are a challenge for all stakeholders to comply with the law and, at the same time, motivate them to reduce waste production. The knowledge of the biosphere's assimilation capacity can quantify the environmental impact of waste in an understandable and popular form to better understand the human need to assimilate the waste produced. Utilising the waste footprint indicator and anthropogenic emissions in the form of waste are converted into soil adsorption capacity. The article compares the waste footprints of different areas of the city of Prague. It quantifies the influence of living and waste services on the waste footprints of the capital inhabitants. This article also discusses the relationship of the waste footprint with other footprints and is intended to inform future debate on trace accounting.
Sustainable development of water resources requires new tools and research in these fields of study. A systematic overview of water footprint research in countries of former Yugoslavia is presented through bibliometric analysis and publication review. The Scopus database was used as the data source. Among the countries of former Yugoslavia, only researchers from Slovenia, Serbia, Croatia, and Bosnia and Hercegovina published papers focused on water footprint research before March 2021. Research on water footprint in these countries was found to be insufficient in scope and intensity. The contribution of authors from the countries of former Yugoslavia is small compared to research in other countries all over the world but is not insignificant. Almost 2/3 of articles have already been cited by other authors. Two main centers of water footprint research are at the University of Maribor in Slovenia and at the University of Novi Sad in Serbia, respectively. The research is focused on the so-called volumetric water footprint, while the LCA water footprint stands outside the interest of the scientific community in countries of former Yugoslavia.
Water is nature resource that is essential for all life, for the functioning of ecosystems, and also for the human society. Sustainable use of water resource is important for sustainable development of human society. Water scarcity can lead to conflicts between different water users. Therefore, several sustainability assessment tools were developed in recent years. Water Footprint Sustainability Assessment, which is a part of Water Footprint Assessment methodology, is one of them. Each sustainability assessment tool has its own limitations. It is important to know these limitations because incorrect application of sustainability assessment can lead to erroneous or improper decisions. In this article, risks connected to the Water Footprint Sustainability Assessment are reviewed and discussed in several examples. Individual parts are focused on blue, green, and grey water sustainability assessment. The article contributes to the scientific debate on limits of Water Footprint Sustainability Assessment as the key element of everyday applications, identification of needs of future research and subsequent development of new or improved procedures of sustainability assessment in the framework of Water Footprint Assessment. Keywords: volumetric water footprint; sustainability assessment; sustainable development; limitation of methodology
The study evaluates the wastewater treatment plant reconstruction via the Grey Water Footprint methodology. The application was tested on a medium-size wastewater treatment plant discharging water into a small watercourse. The 6-year monitoring was assessed. The assessment included a period before and after the reconstruction when a capacity was increased and the treatment technology had been equipped with a membrane sludge separation. Ammonium nitrogen is causing the Grey Water Footprint the most often; both, before and after the reconstruction. The assessment has shown that the current setting of legal discharge limits may not cover all environmental risks even if the wastewater treatment plant meets all requirements. For environmental sustainability, it is necessary if the recipient watercourse was at least 1.4 times more watery for assimilation of total nitrogen pollution, and 3.9 times more watery for assimilation of total phosphorus pollution.
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