Combining material flow analysis with life cycle assessment to identify environmental hotspots of urban consumption
Journal article, 2019

Understanding the global environmental impacts of local consumption is an area of growing interest among policymakers and consumers. By knowing what products comprise urban consumption “hotspots,” municipalities and consumers alike could take deliberate actions to target and discourage consumption of high-impact products. In this paper, a new method for identifying environmental hotspots of consumption is presented. The main methodological advances are the following: i) material flow analysis of urban areas and life cycle assessment are combined; ii) a 16-year time-series of urban consumption data is used for selection of the most suitable representative products and for trend analysis; iii) representative products are selected systematically from consumption data of 1000 product types; iv) representative products are scaled up to represent consumption of the product groups; v) hotspots are identified by simultaneously evaluating six environmental impacts - acidification, climate change, eutrophication (marine and freshwater), photochemical ozone formation, and resource use; vi) for the case study, hotspots are connected to the city's profiles. The method was applied to the Swedish cities Stockholm, Gothenburg and Malmo and to Sweden in total. Electronics is a hotspot for all the studied areas and all the studied impacts and should be a prioritized product group for action. Fuel is a hotspot shared by all the areas while vehicles is a hotspot in Gothenburg. Meat is a nationwide hotspot, but not for the cities investigated. Gothenburg and Stockholm could collaborate to find effective measures for their common hotspot machinery. Thus, the method can be used to identify hotspots and find which product types could be part of national versus local programs.

Urban areas

Hybrid MFA-LCA

Hotspot

Consumption

urban metabolism

Environmental impact

Author

Alexandra Lavers Westin

Chalmers, Architecture and Civil Engineering, Water Environment Technology

Yuliya Kalmykova

Chalmers, Architecture and Civil Engineering, Water Environment Technology

Leonardo Rosado

Chalmers, Architecture and Civil Engineering, Water Environment Technology

Felipe Bitencourt de Oliveira

Chalmers, Technology Management and Economics, Environmental Systems Analysis

Rafael Laurenti

IVL Swedish Environmental Research Institute

Royal Institute of Technology (KTH)

Tomas Rydberg

IVL Swedish Environmental Research Institute

Journal of Cleaner Production

0959-6526 (ISSN)

Vol. 226 526-539

The MEI method - Combining material flow analysis and life cycle assessment for evaluating effectiveness and potentials of municipal measures to reach environmental targets

Formas (2014-1338), 2015-01-01 -- 2018-12-31.

Mistra Urban Futures, 2015-01-01 -- 2020-06-30.

Driving Forces

Sustainable development

Areas of Advance

Building Futures (2010-2018)

Subject Categories

Social Sciences Interdisciplinary

Energy Systems

Environmental Sciences

DOI

10.1016/j.jclepro.2019.04.036

More information

Latest update

11/15/2019