Towards Addressing Unintended Environmental Consequences: A Planning Framework

Abstract

Efforts to decouple environmental impacts and resource consumption have been confounded by interactions and feedback between technical–economic, environmental and social aspects not considered prior to implementing improvement actions. This paper presents a planning framework that connects material flows and the socio‐economic drivers that result in changes in these flows, in order to reduce conflicts between localized gains and global losses. The framework emphasizes the need for (i) having different settings of system boundaries (broader and narrower), (ii) explicitly accounting for causal relationships and feedback loops and (iii) identifying responsibilities between stakeholders (e.g. producers, consumers, collectors, recyclers, policy makers). Application of the framework is exemplified using the case of the global mobile phone product system. ‘Product design and development’ and ‘Retailers and users as part of a collection system’ were identified as central intervention points for implementing improvement strategies that included designing for longer life, designing for recycling and improving collection, designing for limiting phone hibernation time and internalizing external costs. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment

Environmental and Ecological Aspects in the Overall Assessment of Bioeconomy

“…Computable general equilibrium (CGE) models have been proposed to analyse the consequences of bioeconomy policies (Francois et al 2005;van Vuuren et al 2016), yet dynamic CGE models mostly remain focused only on economic effects in global production and trade, with intermediate linkages between sectors; to scale economies and imperfect competition; and to assess trade impacts on capital stocks through investment effects. All of this ignores the environmental, ecological and social factors (Laurenti et al 2016) discussed before, and is thus wholly unable to provide a realistic basis for sustainable innovation.…”

Review of Frameworks for Sustainability Implementation

“…Concerning the method used, as given in Figure , the majority of the studies, such as British Standards Institution (BSI) (), International Integrated Reporting Council (IIRC) (), Hahn et al (), Laurenti et al (), Panagiotakopoulos et al (), and Gallotta et al (), applied conceptual research methods to design the sustainability frameworks. The conceptual research method is the basis of theory building studies (Xin et al , ).…”

The Socio-Economic Embeddedness of the Circular Economy: An Integrative Framework

“…The potential effect of agents' actions on material flows and stocks can be organised in stock and flow diagrams [33] or causal loop diagrams [23]. Strategies for physical resource management achieving the depicted material flow goals are developed.…”

“…Further, expected higher consumer costs and or the unavailability of the consumer market may hamper the adoption of longer lasting products with less environmental impacts overall, as required in a circular economy (due to slow material cycles). Indeed, current norms of consumerism characterised by faster technological innovations coupled with fashion-oriented socio-cultural values [21], market competition [22], and businesses' demands for rapid turnover [23], especially in the industrialised countries, are some of the key challenges confronting the businesses aspiring towards the circular economy. These pose tremendous barriers to create value from (re-)circulating resources through repairing, remanufacturing, and component recovery, which demand a fundamental shift in consumer behaviours and expectations.…”

“…The goals/needs for material flow management are defined from MFA [28]. Life cycle assessment (LCA) investigations can accompany and complement the MFA results [23,29]. The main aspects where the material flow system could be optimised are defined using a consensus building process among the decision-making and potentially affected agents [30].…”