Better, but good enough? Indicators for absolute environmental sustainability in a life cycle ...

367 Pages·2017·7.19 MB·English

Downloaded from orbit.dtu.dk on: Jan 02, 2023

Better, but good enough? Indicators for absolute environmental sustainability in a life
cycle perspective
Bjørn, Anders
Publication date:
2015
Document Version
Publisher's PDF, also known as Version of record
Link back to DTU Orbit
Citation (APA):
Bjørn, A. (2015). Better, but good enough? Indicators for absolute environmental sustainability in a life cycle
perspective. DTU Management Engineering. DTU Management Engineering. PhD thesis No. 8.2015

General rights
Copyright and moral rights for the publications made accessible in the public portal are retained by the authors and/or other copyright
owners and it is a condition of accessing publications that users recognise and abide by the legal requirements associated with these rights.

 Users may download and print one copy of any publication from the public portal for the purpose of private study or research.
 You may not further distribute the material or use it for any profit-making activity or commercial gain
 You may freely distribute the URL identifying the publication in the public portal

If you believe that this document breaches copyright please contact us providing details, and we will remove access to the work immediately
and investigate your claim.
Better, but good enough?
Indicators for absolute environmental sustainability in a life cycle perspective
PhD thesis 8.2015
DTU Management Engineering
Anders Bjørn
November 2015

I have amazing news for you. Man is
not alone on this planet. He is part of
a community, upon which he depends
absolutely.
Daniel Quinn, Ishmael (1992)

I understand now that boundaries be-
tween noise and sound are conven-
tions. All boundaries are conventions,
waiting to be transcended.
David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas (2004)

i
ii
P
REFACE
This PhD thesis presents the outcome of the PhD project “Better, but good
enough? Indicators for absolute environmental sustainability in a life cycle per-
spective.” The project was carried out at the Division for Quantitative Sustaina-
bility Assessment of the Department of Management Engineering at the Tech-
nical University of Denmark. The project was supervised by Professor Michael
Zwicky Hauschild (main supervisor) and Professor Inge Røpke, Aalborg Univer-
sity, and Professor Katherine Richardson, Copenhagen University.
The PhD project was carried out from December 2011 to April 2015 and
included an exchange stay at CIRAIG (Centre international de référence sur le
cycle de vie des produits, procédés et services) in Montreal, Canada, under su-
pervision of Professor Manuele Margni and Professor Cécile Bulle.
The backbone of this thesis is six scientific articles. These articles are in-
cluded as appendices and will be referred to by the numbers given below:
I. Bjørn, A., Diamond, M., Birkved, M., & Hauschild, M. Z. (2014). Chemi-
cal footprint method for improved communication of freshwater ecotoxicity
impacts in the context of ecological limits. Environmental Science and
Technology, 48(22), 13253-13262.
II. Bjørn, A., & Hauschild, M. Z (2015). Introducing Carrying Capacity Based
Normalisation in LCA: Framework and Development of References at
Midpoint Level. International Journal of Life cycle assessment, 20(7),
1005–1018.
III. Bjørn, A., Bey, N., Georg, S., Røpke, I., & Hauschild, M. Z. (2015). Is
Earth recognized as a finite system in corporate responsibility reporting?
Journal of Cleaner Production. Accepted with minor revisions.
IV. Bjørn, A., Margni, M., Roy, P. O., Bulle, C., & Hauschild, M. Z. (2015).
Modifying life cycle assessment to measure absolute environmental sus-
tainability. Ecological indicators. Accepted with minor revisions.
V. Bjørn, A., Richardson, K., & Hauschild, M. Z. (2015). Environmentally
sustainable or not? Managing and reducing indicator uncertainties. Ecologi-
cal indicators. To be resubmitted.
VI. Bjørn, A., Diamond, D., Owsianiak, M., Verzat, B., & Hauschild, M. Z
(2015) Strengthening the link between life cycle assessment and indicators
for absolute sustainability to support development within planetary bounda-
ries. Environmental Science and Technology, 49(11), 6370-6371.

iii
iv
A
CKNOWLEDGEMENTS
These three years have passed incredibly fast and, yet, I feel that I have learned a
lot and hopefully produced a bit of knowledge for others to learn from. This
could not have happened without, in particular, my main supervisor Michael
Zwicky Hauschild or co-supervisors Katherine Richardson and Inge Røpke. Be-
ing immersed in the supportive, energetic and pleasantly geeky environment of
the QSA Division at DTU has also been invaluable for my journey. The inspir-
ing research stay at CIRAIG, over a long wonderful summer, in addition, gave
me a unique opportunity to test and develop my ideas with people having new
and refreshing perspectives. I would also like to thank the co-authors of the arti-
cles that was written during the PhD project for countless times gently pushing
me in the right direction and helping me to express my thought better than I
could do so myself. My friends and family also deserve my gratitude for coping
with my frequent physical and mental absence during, especially, the last months
of the project. Finally, this project would never have happened had it not been for
the Danish tax payers funding it. I will try to make it worthwhile.

v
vi
S
UMMARY
An increasing focus on sustainability has led to proliferation of the use of envi-
ronmental indicators to guide various types of decisions, from individual con-
sumer choices to policy making at the national, regional and global scale. Most
environmental indicators are relative, meaning that quantified environmental in-
terferences of a studied anthropogenic system (a product, a company, a city, etc.)
are compared to those of chosen anthropogenic systems of reference. The use of
relative indicators can give the impression that societies are moving towards en-
vironmental sustainability when decisions are being made which favour solutions
with lower environmental interferences than alternative solutions. This impres-
sion is very problematic considering that monitoring repeatedly shows that many
environments are highly degraded and that degradation often increases over time.
This shows that society-nature interactions in many cases are environmentally
unsustainable and that the level of unsustainability may be increasing over time.
A clear rationale therefore exists for developing and using absolute environmen-
tal sustainability indicators (AESI) that not only can identify the anthropogenic
system with the lowest environmental interferences in a comparison of systems,
but also can evaluate whether any of the compared systems can be considered
environmentally sustainable, and if not, can quantify the decrease in environmen-
tal interferences required for environmental sustainability. The purpose of this
PhD thesis is to improve AESI using life cycle assessment (LCA) and to deepen
the understanding of drivers and obstacles for increasing the use of AESI in deci-
sion-support. The thesis summarizes in three core chapters the work of five peer
reviewed scientific articles and one scientific viewpoint article.
The first chapter is concerned with operationalizing the concept of carry-
ing capacity as reference value of environmental sustainability in environmental
indicators in general and in LCA indicators specifically. LCA is a tool that quan-
tifies environmental stressors (resource use and emissions) occurring over the life
cycles (“cradle to grave”) of anthropogenic systems and translates these stressors
into metrics of environmental interferences for a number of mutually exclusive
and collectively exhaustive “impact categories”, such as climate change, eutroph-
ication and ecotoxicity. Carrying capacity is in this thesis defined as “the maxi-
mum sustained environmental interference a natural system can withstand with-
out experiencing negative changes in structure or functioning that are difficult or
impossible to revert.” In the design of AESI a choice needs to be made for each
of 12 identified concerns. Existing AESI are found to be based on different
choices for concerns, such as “threshold value”, “quantifying environmental in-
vii