In recent years, the horticultural sector has been confronted with questions about the carbon footprint of its products. However, the global standards used to calculate the greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions have some gaps that do not address the sector-specific issues for horticulture, such as crop rotation, land use of soil organic matter and the use of combined heat and power (CHP). The need for a sector-specific standard which addresses these interpretation gaps was identified. In response to this need, the 'Carbon footprinting of horticulture products protocol' (DNCF2009) was developed by the Dutch horticultural sector. The protocol is intended to follow the guidelines of PAS 2050 for the life cycle analysis of horticultural products; a lot of situations in greenhouse horticulture have to be described in so-called "Best Practices". In greenhouse cultures, energy consumption is the main component of the CO 2 emission. To save energy, many Dutch greenhouse companies use CHP to heat their greenhouses. These growers may sell the superfluous electricity produced by the CHP to the national grid, thereby generating two products; the horticultural product, e.g., a tomato and the electricity. The CO 2 emission of the electricity production should be deducted from the total CO 2 production of the CHP, in order to calculate the CO 2 emission that should be assigned to the production of the crop. To investigate the carbon footprint of organic crop production, an organic crop production system and a conventional crop production system are compared, and the effect on carbon emissions of a CHP system is studied for both production methods. An example for organically grown tomatoes is worked out. It shows the specific organic input factors and their impact on the CO 2 footprint. The functional unit used is kg CO 2 per 1000 kg product, and the system boundary is from seedling production until the delivery of product at the distribution center of wholesalers or supermarkets. The CO 2 footprint of the organic tomato crop grown without cogeneration is 10% higher than that of the conventional crop grown without cogeneration and more than double that of the conventional crop grown with CHP. The higher footprint compared with the footprint of conventional growing without CHP can be mainly explained by the lower yield of the organic crops. With CHP, the organic and conventional tomato crops have an equal CO 2 footprint. The use of CHP is a way to reduce the CO 2 footprint for both organic and conventional tomato growers.

This environmental impact assessment of the current situation of Dutch tomato production in a Venlo greenhouse in a temperate climate was developed as part of the EUPHOROS project. The project aims to develop a more sustainable greenhouse system with a reduction of external inputs yet with high productivity and an efficient use of resources. The environmental impact analysis was based on using the Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) methodology as defined by the ISO 14040. The crop production system was structured in several stages and processes to facilitate the study and interpretation of results. The stages considered were structure, auxiliary equipment, climate control system, fertilizers, pesticides and waste. The main results and issues to be improved are described and presented in this paper. The use of a cogeneration system (CHP) and the consequent production of electricity create a methodological question on how to handle allocation between products. This paper shows two different methods for dealing with co-production: considering electricity as an avoided product and energy allocation at CHP. Depending on the approach considered values can range between 12 to 31 MJ/kg of tomato or 0.78 to 2.0 kg CO 2 eq/kg of tomato for instance. Climate control system had a high energy demand with major contributions to all the impact categories (81.1 to 96.1% of the total) and the rockwool substrate accounted for 57.0 to 81.7% of the auxiliary equipment contribution. More effort should be made to recycle rockwool and reduce the high energy demand associated with the expansion of the mineral in the manufacturing processes. The structure was a major burden due to the high amount of steel and glass. Energy environmental impacts could be reduced, because of the avoided electricity production by the power plant, by using a combined heat and power plant to meet greenhouse electricity demands, resulting in a surplus which could be delivered to the public grid. Further research should also be oriented to developing efficient technologies to improve the intensive use of materials and energy.

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Carnival Corporation & plc identified the need for a cutting-edge revenue management system; however, existing solutions from the airline and hospitality industries were not compatible with the idiosyncrasies of the cruise domain. As such, the company partnered with revenue analytics to build a complete revenue and inventory management system to meet its requirements. Yield optimization and demand analytics (YODA) is a system that leverages a unique quadratic programming model to jointly determine cruise prices and allocate cabin inventory to multiple cruises (e.g., 14-day and 7-day lengths) offered simultaneously on a given ship. The optimization inputs come from several machine learning algorithms that predict demand. YODA combines these algorithms with an elasticity model derived from an exponential curve to represent the unique price-sensitivity behavior observed in the cruise industry. The system generates millions of price recommendations each day and has been used to price voyages on 65 Carnival ships, approximately one quarter of the ships in the entire cruise industry, since December 2017. During A/B testing, YODA generated a 1.5%–2.5% incremental uplift in net ticket revenue, which is a significant revenue increase because Carnival was a Fortune 300 company in 2019.

Though technically and economically challenging, heat exchange between glasshouses and non-horticultural counterparts (here called Energy Webs) has shown to be viable based on two operational webs and a number of feasibility studies for different locations within The Netherlands. The organizational and cultural challenges for such cross-regime co-operations however, seem more difficult to breech. So far there are two Energy Webs operational -Greenportkas Venlo (Greenport Glasshouse Venlo) and a Geothermic heat-grid in Pijnacker-Nootdorp. Wageningen UR Glasshouse Horticulture has been involved in multiple initiatives over the past two years to understand and overcome the fixations in the co-operation process.Researchers performed action-based research by partnering in the two mentioned initiative and a third unsuccessful initiative. This involvement was aimed at coaching the partners in the initiative with a focus on the participating grower, as well as gaining understanding of the issues at hand from a partners' point of view.Energy webs challenge the growers involved both in their capacity as businessman and in the adaptation of their cultivation strategies that come with the new technology.Energy webs also challenge the facilitator involved to 1) maintain a network stability given the diversity of actors, 2) manage a transitional design process and 3) manage knowledge mobility and appropriation.