Increased water scarcity is driving water utilities to consider alternative water supply options (WSOs). Identifying the most sustainable WSOs that meet environmental, economic, and social objectives is challenging due to the overwhelming number of both assessment criteria and treatment configurations, including a growing number of potable reuse options. Conventional approaches using process-based life cycle assessments are data-intensive and site-specific, and therefore not suitable for the early stages of assessing WSOs. To address this gap, we have combined hybrid multi-regional input-output-based life cycle assessment (MRIO-LCA), social impact analysis, and multi-criteria decision analysis (MCDA) to develop a novel, flexible framework with unit process level resolution for the comprehensive evaluation of WSOs. Here we describe the formulation of the framework along with an application to two US utilities considering alternative WSOs. In both cases, given sufficient levels of community acceptance and optimum system design, the results favoured potable reuse WSOs due to their climatic resilience, cost effectiveness and lower environmental impacts (compared to other non-conventional options such as desalination). The generalised and globally applicable framework developed for this study can be used to assess sustainability trade-offs between diverse WSO configurations, providing valuable insights for decision-making processes at the early planning stage, as a complement to existing urban water supply scenario and optimisation models.

Progressive cities worldwide have demonstrated political leadership by initiating meaningful strategies and actions to tackle climate change. However, the lack of knowledge concerning embodied greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions of cities has hampered effective mitigation. We analyse trans-boundary GHG emission transfers between five Australian cities and their trading partners, with embodied emission flows broken down into major economic sectors. We examine intercity carbon footprint (CF) networks and disclose a hierarchy of responsibility for emissions between cities and regions. Allocations of emissions to households, businesses and government and the carbon efficiency of expenditure have been analysed to inform mitigation policies. Our findings indicate that final demand in the five largest cities in Australia accounts for more than half of the nation’s CF. City households are responsible for about two thirds of the cities’ CFs; the rest can be attributed to government and business consumption and investment. The city network flows highlight that over half of emissions embodied in imports (EEI) to the five cities occur overseas. However, a hierarchy of GHG emissions reveals that overseas regions also outsource emissions to Australian cities such as Perth. We finally discuss the implications of our findings on carbon neutrality, low-carbon city concepts and strategies and allocation of subnational GHG responsibility.

In order to ensure that the Integrated Carbon Metrics (ICM) project meets industry and user needs, a scoping study was conducted within Australia with construction industry professionals.The aim of the study included the following:Gain an understanding of the construction industry’s current approach to embodied carbon assessment;Identify perceived strengths and weaknesses of current embodied carbon assessment tools; andIdentify potential areas for improvement to existing tools and recommendations for development for new embodied carbon toolsThe results of the study were presented at an Industry Utilisation Workshop, which was held at UNSW Australia on 22 May 2015. This workshop provided a platform where the tools and research related to the ICM project could be demonstrated to a wide range of industry professionals so as to gain feedback and generate discussion. The scoping study, together with the workshop, provided a means to determine where the ICM project’s future goals should be directed, so as to ensure research and tools are developed to best suit industry requirements. This report provides a summary of the scoping study’s findings and brief discussion of the workshop outcomes.

One third of global greenhouse gas emissions are emitted from the building sector contributing significantly to the problem of climate change. While more work has been done on decreasing direct emissions from the operation of buildings, embodied emissions of construction materials receive little consideration even though they constitute a significant additional proportion of emissions. The main objective of this study is to harmonise different data and methods such as Life Cycle Assessment (LCA), Input Output Analysis (IOA) and Material Flow Analysis (MFA) to accurately calculate the embodied carbon emissions of construction materials in Australia. This study will develop and streamline efficient hybrid methodologies in analysing embodied emissions of the built environment at multiple scales and develop a comprehensive database of embodied carbon LCI data for building and construction materials that will be derived from an economy-wide modelling framework. This work is part of the Cooperative Research Centre for Low Carbon Living under the Integrated Carbon Metrics project.

Aggregating multi-criteria data is an important problem with many applications. Commonly-used additive aggregation methods, such as the weighted arithmetic mean, cannot account for the criteria interactions encountered in many practical multi-criteria decision problems. The Choquet integral is a suitable aggregation operator in the presence of interacting criteria. It replaces the weight vector with a fuzzy measure that models the importance of each subset or coalition of criteria, rather than just the importance of individual criteria. However, estimating the fuzzy measures in practice has been problematic. Conventional approaches are cognitively challenging for decision makers, while more recent approaches suffer from prohibitive data requirements. In this paper, we present a formulation for the weights of the Choquet integral that uses principal component analysis to account for criteria interaction. This novel unsupervised approach to estimating the required fuzzy measures overcomes the limitations of other methods. The approach is applied to two case studies in environmental and sustainability analysis, and the results are compared with those of the weighted arithmetic mean. The first case is a triple bottom line analysis of 135 Australian industry sectors evaluated against 11 criteria, while the second case is an environmental life cycle assessment of 8 alternative biosolids management options evaluated against 5 criteria. These examples demonstrate the ability of the proposed approach to account for criteria interaction in these and other decision contexts.

In order to ensure that the Integrated Carbon Metrics (ICM) project meets industry and user needs, a scoping study was conducted within Australia with construction industry professionals.The aim of the study included the following:Gain an understanding of the construction industry’s current approach to embodied carbon assessment;Identify perceived strengths and weaknesses of current embodied carbon assessment tools; andIdentify potential areas for improvement to existing tools and recommendations for development for new embodied carbon toolsThe results of the study were presented at an Industry Utilisation Workshop, which was held at UNSW Australia on 22 May 2015. This workshop provided a platform where the tools and research related to the ICM project could be demonstrated to a wide range of industry professionals so as to gain feedback and generate discussion. The scoping study, together with the workshop, provided a means to determine where the ICM project’s future goals should be directed, so as to ensure research and tools are developed to best suit industry requirements. This report provides a summary of the scoping study’s findings and brief discussion of the workshop outcomes.

Compiling, deploying and utilising large-scale databases that integrate environmental and economic data have traditionally been labour-and cost-intensive processes, hindered by the large amount of disparate and misaligned data that must be collected and harmonised. The Australian Industrial Ecology Virtual Laboratory (IELab) is a novel, collaborative approach to compiling large-scale environmentally extended multi-region input-output (MRIO) models.The utility of the IELab product is greatly enhanced by avoiding the need to lock in an MRIO structure at the time the MRIO system is developed. The IELab advances the idea of the "mother-daughter" construction principle, whereby a regionally and sectorally very detailed "mother" table is set up, from which "daughter" tables are derived to suit specific research questions. By introducing a third tier - the "root classification"-IELab users are able to define their own mother-MRIO configuration, at no additional cost in terms of data handling. Customised mother-MRIOs can then be built, which maximise disaggregation in aspects that are useful to a family of research questions.The second innovation in the IELab system is to provide a highly automated collaborative research platform in a cloud-computing environment greatly expediting workflows and making these computational benefits accessible to all users.Combining these two aspects realises many benefits. The collaborative nature of the IELab development project allows significant savings in resources. Timely deployment is possible by coupling automation procedures with the comprehensive input from multiple teams. User-defined MRIO tables, coupled with high performance computing, mean that MRIO analysis will be useful and accessible for a great many more research applications than would otherwise be possible. By ensuring that a common set of analytical tools such as for hybrid life-cycle assessment is adopted, the IELab will facilitate the harmonisation of fragmented, dispersed and misaligned raw data for the benefit of all interested parties. (C) 2014 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Life cycle assessment (LCA) of chemicals is usually developed using a process-based approach. In this paper, we develop a tiered hybrid LCA of water treatment chemicals combining the specificity of process data with the holistic nature of input–output analysis (IOA). We compare these results with process and input–output models for the most commonly used chemicals in the Australian water industry to identify the direct and indirect environmental impacts associated with the manufacturing of these materials.

Sustainability analysts and environmental decision makers often overcome the difficulty of interpreting comprehensive environmental profiles by aggregating the results using multi-criteria decision analysis (MCDA) methods. However, the wide variety of methodological approaches to weighting and aggregation introduces subjectivity and often uncertainty. It is important to select an approach that is consistent with the decision maker's information needs, but scant practical guidance is available to environmental managers on how to do this. In this paper, we aim to clarify the theoretical implications of an analyst's choice of MCDA method. By systematically examining the methodological decisions that must be made by the analyst at each stage of the assessment process, we aim to improve analysts' understanding of the relationship between MCDA theory and practice, and enable them to apply methods that are consistent with a decision maker's needs in any given problem context.

This paper describes part of the first detailed environmental life cycle assessment (LCA) of Australian red meat (beef and sheep meat) production. The study was intended to assist the methodological development of life cycle impact assessment by examining the feasibility of new indicators for natural resource management (NRM) issues relevant to soil management in agricultural LCA. This paper is intended to describe the NRM indicators directly related to agricultural soil chemistry.

The first detailed life cycle assessment (LCA) of Australian red meat production increased the resolution of the carbon and water footprints of Australian red meat products. The authors dealt with varied farming enterprises that presented different life cycle inventory data acquisition challenges. We also dealt with truncation errors through the application of a hybrid input-output technique. The results indicated greenhouse gas emissions that were broadly in line with expectations, but the calculated water consumption was much lower than some related studies have suggested. The increasing proportion of lot-fed beef in Australia had a favourable impact on the carbon footprint of beef products, since the conversion of feed to meat products is more efficient in feedlot production systems than in grass-fed meat production, offsetting the effect of producing and transporting feedstuffs. In addition to describing these carbon and water footprints, in this paper we also quantify solid waste generation and a soil erosion indicator on a common basis and reflect on the rapidly evolving challenge of agricultural LCA.

Life cycle assessment (LCA) and life cycle inventory (LCI) practice needs to engage with the debate on water use in agriculture and industry. In the case of the red meat sector, some of the methodologies proposed or in use cannot easily inform the debate because either the results are not denominated in units that are meaningful to the public or the results do not reflect environmental outcomes. This study aims to solve these problems by classifying water use LCI data in the Australian red meat sector in a manner consistent with contemporary definitions of sustainability. We intend to quantify water that is removed from the course it would take in the absence of production or degraded in quality by the production system.

Greenhouse gas emissions from beef production are a significant part of Australia's total contribution to climate change. For the first time an environmental life cycle assessment (LCA) hybridizing detailed on-site process modeling and input-output analysis is used to describe Australian red meat production. In this paper we report the carbon footprint and total energy consumption of three supply chains in three different regions in Australia over two years. The greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and energy use data are compared to those from international studies on red meat production, and the Australian results are either average or below average. The increasing proportion of lot-fed beef in Australia is favorable, since this production system generates lower total GHG emissions than grass-fed production; the additional effort in producing and transporting feeds is effectively offset by the increased efficiency of meat production in feedlots. In addition to these two common LCA indicators, in this paper we also quantify solid waste generation and a soil erosion indicator on a common basis.

One barrier to the further implementation of LCA as a quantitative decision-support tool is the uncertainty created by the diversity of available analytical approaches. This paper compares conventional (‘process analysis’) and alternative (‘input–output analysis’) approaches to LCA, and presents a hybrid LCA model for Australia that overcomes the methodological limitations of process and input–output analysis and enables a comparison between the results achieved using each method. A case study from the water industry illustrates this comparison.

To fill a gap in the information available to nonmetropolitan policy makers, eight scenarios combining processing technologies and end-uses for biosolids products associated with a 40 000 equivalent-person town were modeled using environmental life cycle assessment (LCA). An uncertainty analysis examined several key assumptions. The results showed that the reuse of biosolids products can be environmentally beneficial but transportation distances can change the preferences between technologies, and drying biosolids using petrochemical methane rather than biogas (produced endogenously in the wastewater facility) significantly worsens environmental performance. System scale can also invert option preferences. This work demonstrates an application of LCA to a strategic engineering question. We also examine the methodological feasibility of considering carbon sequestration and water offsets beyond those typical of previous studies. As the development of scientific data regarding the benefits of biosolids recycling develops, there may be potential to reward agricultural businesses that choose to reduce their environmental burdens using biosolids. A life cycle management approach to this will be necessary.

A life, cycle assessment (LCA) was used to evaluate the influence of choosing refrigerants R22, R407C or R410A for domestic air conditioners. Other than the chemical characteristics of R22, the other key factor was the operating pressure. Due to high pressure operation, the R410A system experienced the highest leakage rate, energy consumption and global warming potential (GWP). Sensitivity analysis was used to examine the influence of leakage and to show that, compared with the unit's lifespan, set point and efficiency, the climate in different Australian locations and the load profile have significant effects on the energy use and GWP.

In this article, Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) and Life Cycle Costing (LCC) quantify the performance of variable and fixed speed centrifugal chillers using two refrigerants (HCFC 123 or HFC 134A) in commercial air-conditioning systems. Electricity demand during operation causes the highest environmental and economic burdens for all options. Detailed energy simulation shows that chillers operate most of the time in partial load, therefore energy-optimised variable-speed systems are preferable. We demonstrate the significance of understanding each phase of the life cycle to optimise overall performance. A systems approach, if broadly applied, could reduce the barriers between stakeholders along supply chains.