Inadequate coupling between interdependent and interacting water and energy systems impairs both resource efficiency and attainment of sustainable development goals. Wastewater treatment-coal power infrastructure symbiosis has proved to offer potentials for water and energy savings, and greenhouse gases (GHG) mitigations, which is crucial for integrated water-energy co-management. However, how such infrastructure symbiosis facilitates to enhance regional water and energy efficiencies and thus consolidate water-energy synergy remains unclear. Based on an integrated water-energy network, the total factor water and energy efficiencies and their historical trajectories during 2006-2023 in 30 Chinese provincial regions are examined employing superefficient Slack-Based Measure (SBM) model, with the coupling of efficiencies evaluated. The water-energyenvironmental-efficiencies co-benefits of the infrastructure symbiosis and efficiencies coupling enhancement are explored through comparing a baseline scenario and a new symbiosis scenario (incorporating enhanced coalsludge co-combustion and water reuse). Results show a progressive improvement in regional water and energy efficiencies, with their annual average coupling degree escalating from 0.19 to 0.35, although significant regional imbalance persists. In conjunction with a reduction of 5.80 million tons of coal, 1.39 billion m3 of freshwater use, and 16.77 million tons of CO2-equivalent, the infrastructure symbiosis can facilitate a maximum enhancement in energy efficiency as 0.30, and in water efficiency as 0.01 across regions. Outstanding enhancements in the coupling are observed in Beijing (+0.006), Shanghai (+0.002), and Zhejiang (+0.0004). This study clarifies the spatiotemporal variations in the coupling between water and energy systems as represented by the efficiencies, and provides critical evidence for designing differentiated water-energy co-management policies based on the infrastructure symbiosis.

Food production system (FPS) mediates intensive water, energy, and food flows, yet their total-factor efficiencies that evaluate resource management subject to technological innovation and environmental sustainability remain insufficiently understood. Incorporating waste recycling into efficiency assessment poses methodological challenges complicated by intricate resource flows and concomitant environmental tradeoffs within FPS. Targeting the entire FPS from agricultural production to food processing in 30 provincial regions, this study first quantifies environmental releases from the FPS, which are mapped to nine ReCiPe2016 midpoint impact categories. Then total-factor water, energy, and food efficiencies are computed with a super slack-based measure model and their coupling is evaluated through coupling degree model. A foreground scenario with internal waste recycling loops featuring treated wastewater reclamation, and bioenergy and bio-fertilizer production is designed to assess effects on efficiency gains and coupling enhancement. Results show that recycling contributes to reclaimed water exceeding 9 billion m3 in Jiangsu and Guangdong, energy recovery reaching 0.31 million TJ in Heilongjiang, and bio-fertilizer production exceeding 0.11 million tons in Henan and Shandong. Relative to the 2020 baseline, eight of nine impact categories (except Terrestrial Acidification) decline by 0.2% (Ozone Depletion) to 87.6% (Fine Particulate Matter Formation). Water, energy, and food efficiencies can increase by 25.4%, 92.3%, and 83.9%, respectively, and their coupling can rise by 23.0%, excelling a historical improvement of 16.2% over 2011-2020. This study demonstrates co-benefits achieved through internal recycling loops, offering a transferable framework for assessing recycling-oriented transitions in FPS.

This study investigates and compares US consumer perceptions and the impact of environmental, human health, and animal welfare information related to conventional meat on preferences for meat alternatives and labeling policies. Using the best-worst scaling method across 10 different burger alternatives, our results show that the meat burger is largely the most preferred option, while meat alternatives collectively account for nearly 40% of total consumer preferences. Information about the health effects of meat consumption and consumer characteristics influences preferences for meat alternatives. Consumers perceive the meat burger as tastier, more natural, more nutritious, and more expensive. In contrast, the plant burger is viewed as healthier and more environmentally friendly, while also being perceived as very distinct from the meat burger. Interestingly, most consumers oppose labeling meat alternatives as "meat." Our findings provide useful insights into the psychology of consumer acceptance, which can be useful in communicating the nature of meat alternatives to the public and shaping meat alternatives labeling policies.

This study used a best-worst scale experiment to reveal consumers' beliefs about the healthiness of selected cows' milk and plant-based milk products based on their nutrition panels. We find that while there is heterogeneity in health perceptions, consumers overwhelmingly select skim milk as the healthiest milk product. Additionally, the cows' milk nutrition panels are typically ranked healthier than the plant-based milk products. Finally, we also conducted an additional intent-to-purchase experiment and find that there are significant differences in the preference shares of healthiness perceptions and intent to purchase, meaning that consumers consider more than just health in their purchase decisions.

Optimizing crop production necessitates minimizing environmental burdens while enhancing resource use efficiency. However, studies that integrate multi-dimensional environmental indicators with efficiency evaluations remain limited. This constrains a full understanding of trade-offs and synergies between resource use and environmental impacts in crop production. This study integrates life cycle assessment with a super-efficiency slack-based measure model to assess the environmental footprints and total-factor environmental efficiency (TFEE) of five staple crops across 60 counties in Jilin Province, China, during 2011-2022. Using eleven environmental indicators as undesirable outputs and a crop-county dual-scale perspective, it reveals both crop-specific and spatial heterogeneity. Results show that fertilizer consistently acts as the dominant impact source, contributing nearly 70% of the total impacts. The primary attribution pathway is identified as “Fertilizer-Maize-Central counties-Ozone depletion”. Maize exhibits the most stable and broadly distributed TFEE, with a larger share of counties remaining in the medium-to-high efficiency range. The county-level TFEE exhibits persistent advantages in the central black soil region and constraints in the western dryland region. A recovery trend after 2018 is observed, with the share of high-efficiency counties increasing from 8% to 30% by 2022. This study provides evidence for designing spatially differentiated and efficiency-oriented pathways, including improved nutrient management, low-emission paddy cultivation, and water-efficient practices in dryland regions, to support the transition toward sustainable agriculture.

While geothermal power provides stable electricity and substantial decarbonization potential, comprehensive assessments of its environmental footprints that combine technological characteristics and country-level deployment profiles under a unified scale are scarce. Beyond comparative assessments of major geothermal power technologies across 14 environmental indicators using the ReCiPe2016 methodology, this study integrates micro-level life cycle assessments with national-scale technological configurations and operational efficiency to enable country-specific evaluations of the environmental footprints of global geothermal power deployment. The system boundary has been expanded to encompass upstream material production processes to guide development of tailored optimization strategies targeting the entire stages. Results demonstrate binary cycle's superior performances on climate change (0.02 kg CO2-eq/kWh) and terrestrial acidification (7.48x10-6 kg SO2-eq/kWh), despite higher water use (0.014 m3/kWh). Countries exclusively adopting binary cycle (Chile, Croatia, Germany, and Portugal) exhibit substantially lower environmental impact intensities. Well construction and operation & maintenance stages account for greater than 80% of the footprints, primarily due to diesel consumption and noncondensable gases emissions. Extended boundary analysis highlights the environmental burden of upstream processes, emphasizing the need for greener production of steel and working fluids. Prioritized mitigation measures include incentives targeting high-efficiency operations, optimizing drilling techniques, and adopting carbon capture. This study provides a robust foundation for advancing sustainable geothermal power strategies worldwide.

Agricultural carbon emissions are a key source of nonenergy greenhouse emissions in China, yet their spatiotemporal dynamics, regional disparities and structural changes remain insufficiently explored. This study quantifies agricultural carbon emissions in 31 provinces and municipalities in China from 2001 to 2020, and examines their spatiotemporal trends, regional disparities, and structural changes using the spatial Moran index to detect spatial dependence and clustering of agricultural emissions, and Theil index to decompose regional disparities. The results show that total agricultural carbon emissions rose from about 906 million tons in 2001 to a peak of approximately 1021 million tons in 2015, before declining to around 930 million tons in 2020. Spatial analysis with the global Moran's I index reveals a consistent, and at times significant, positive spatial auto-correlation, indicating regional clustering of emissions. The Theil index showed a slight decrease over the study period, reflecting a narrowing of interregional disparities, particularly between eastern and northeastern provinces. Structural analysis identifies livestock and poultry as the largest contributors, accounting for about 44% of total emissions, followed by land-use-related emissions (about 38.5%) and methane emissions from rice cultivation. These results underscore both the spatial concentration and the changing composition of agricultural emissions, highlighting the need for spatial coordinated and sector targeted mitigation policies, especially in livestock-intensive regions, to achieve emission reduction while maintaining agricultural output productivity in China's low carbon transition.

This study investigates the income effects of e-business adoption among Chinese business owners, with a focus on urban–rural disparities. Using data from the 2017 and 2019 China Household Finance Survey (CHFS), comprising 4,553 observations, we apply a two-stage instrumental variable (2SLS) approach to address endogeneity in e-business adoption. Digital payment penetration serves as an instrument in a first-stage probit model, with fitted values entered into a second-stage OLS regression estimating effects on total, commercial, and non-commercial income. Comprehensive diagnostic statistics — including first-stage F-statistics, weak instrument tests, and the Durbin-Wu-Hausman endogeneity test — confirm the validity of the identification strategy. Full-sample results show that e-business adoption significantly increases total and commercial income. Disaggregated analysis reveals that these gains are concentrated among rural households, which show statistically significant improvements across all income categories, while urban households experience no significant income effects. Year-specific 2SLS estimates confirm that rural business owners capture greater income gains than their urban counterparts in both survey years, though marginal returns slightly diminish by 2019, consistent with a transition from early-mover advantage to a more mature rural digital market. Three contributions emerge: first, e-business is identified as a driver of rural income diversification; second, urban–rural disparities in digital return elasticity are quantified using disaggregated household finance data; and third, temporal heterogeneity in treatment effects is documented for rural entrepreneurs. The findings support spatially targeted policy under China's Rural Revitalization Strategy, advocating for tiered digital infrastructure investment and capacity-building to promote equitable digital transformation.

Crop trade helps reconcile the spatial mismatch between arable land and population, yet it induces regional environmental-economic inequality (REEI). How to guide economic compensation from crop-importing to-producing regions for shifting environmental burdens based on quantified REEI remains insufficiently understood. Life cycle assessment is applied to quantify the multiple environmental impacts of staple-crop production in China. Building on a province-level trade network for disaggregated crops, the REEI driven by trade-induced transfers of environmental burdens and value added is measured to derive responsibility shares for the transferred environmental burdens between trading regions. Integrating responsibility shares with external costs of tthese burdens entails to establish an interprovincial economic compensation network. Crop trade-driven damage to human health and ecosystems accounts for 26.1% and 25.8% of their respective totals induced by crop production. Over 90% of provincial trading pairs have REEI values in the range of 0-0.5, whereas two pairs show markedly higher values above 1. Rice-related compensation dominates (54.8%), with smaller shares for wheat and maize, and payments flow mainly from Guangdong, Zhejiang, and Sichuan to Heilongjiang, Jiangsu, and Anhui. Compensation payments are designed to fund mitigation measures in crop production, and our findings support transition of crop production and consumption towards responsibility and sustainability.

The Green-Score label aims to complement established certifications by providing a standardized and easily interpretable assessment of products' environmental performance. This study examines (i) the relative influence of Green-Score, organic, and Protected Designation of Origin (PDO) certifications on consumers' willingness to pay (WTP); (ii) how label effectiveness varies across food categories; and (iii) the impact of a salience nudge on consumer choices. A Discrete Choice Experiment was conducted with a nationally representative sample of 1,102 Italian consumers, using a between-subjects design to evaluate the nudge. Results show that PDO labels, leveraging strong institutional credibility and symbolic value, consistently generate the highest marginal WTP (& euro;7.61), especially for culturally and traditionally significant products. Green-Score A+ labels, valued for their diagnosticity and cross-product comparability, achieve an average marginal WTP of & euro;6.25, slightly above organic certification (& euro;4.59), with variation across product categories and treatment conditions. The salience nudge enhances the perceived value of Green-Score, particularly in contexts where environmental performance is salient, and can reduce the marginal contribution of overlapping labels such as organic certification. These findings demonstrate that the effectiveness of sustainability labels depends on both the balance between credibility and diagnosticity and the product-specific context, offering actionable insights for policymakers and stakeholders seeking to design targeted and effective environmental labelling strategies in food markets.

Food processing, despite being resource-intensive and polluting, holds potential for enhancing resource efficiency and resilience through resource recovery from wastes. Yet, how symbiotic integration of food processing, waste treatment, and resource recovery within the sector influences efficiency and resilience across water and energy, and their intersecting synergies, remains inadequately understood. This study integrates super-efficiency slack-based measure model, resilience assessment metrics with coupling measurement model to evaluate efficiency and resilience across water and energy in China’s regional food processing sectors. Synergistic effects are assessed by comparing baseline scenario and symbiosis scenario where integrated water-energy-waste metabolic loops are elaborated. The results demonstrate that internal symbiosis can significantly reduce consumption by 0.89 million tons of standard coal and 1,591.91 million tons of freshwater, while cutting emissions by 34.50 million tons of CO2-equivalent, along with various air and water pollutants. Furthermore, it leads to notable improvements in water and energy efficiency (+0.33/+0.03), water and energy resilience (+0.05/+0.11), as well as four dimensional synergies between efficiency and resilience across water and energy. 87% of regions can realize “high” synergy (synergy level above 0.5) between efficiency and resilience. This study provides critical insights for advancing circular economy practices and enhancing water-energy-waste co-management in food processing sector.

Resource recovery from the food processing sector (FPS) wastes holds significant potential, yet waste streams vary across subsectors, necessitating region-subsector-resolved identification of optimal waste management strategies. Strategy selection remains elusive due to unraveled cross-dimension environmental burden transfers and environment-cost trade-offs within subsectors. Herein, we develop an integrated decision-making framework targeting resource-recovery-oriented waste management strategies for China's FPS across 31 provincial-level regions and 11 food processing subsectors. A benchmark and five alternative scenarios centered on water reclamation, energy recovery, and material recycling are constructed under a unified system boundary. An algorithm combining region-subsector-specific impact potentials of six environmental dimensions, value added, and technology costs facilitates strategy prioritization to form optimal region-subsector decision matrices under best cost-effectiveness and maximum environmental benefit objectives. Results show that among 295 region-subsector units analyzed, the integrated upgrading scenario accounts for 50.2% of winner scenarios under the best cost-effectiveness objective, followed closely by the water-reclamation-oriented scenario at 46.1%. Under the maximum environmental benefit objective, winner scenarios strongly converge on the integrated upgrading scenario, accounting for 96.6% of units and delivering stronger impact potential reductions, although some region-subsector units exhibit a higher cost burden rate. Actionable evidence is provided for FPS to support waste management upgrading at the region-subsector scale.

Wastewater management is undergoing a paradigm shift from pollution control towards resource recovery. However, techno-economically feasible pathways to synergize resource recovery with net-zero emissions in the wastewater sector remain underexplored. Targeting municipal and industrial wastewater across Chinese provincial regions, we design a transformative life cycle wastewater treatment system integrating energy recovery and conversion, wastewater reclamation, biofertilizer production, and carbon capture. The system delivers net energy output and reduces net greenhouse gas emissions from 99.8 to -10.0 million tonnes carbon dioxide equivalent, but raises total cost by varying amounts across scenarios. Economically and technically feasible pathway for synergistically enhancing resource recovery while delivering lower residual greenhouse gas emissions are identified. Large scale deployment of wastewater source heat pumps for secondary effluent and lower anaerobic membrane bioreactor costs are identified as key levers to enable net-negative greenhouse gas emissions while avoiding cost increases and potentially delivering net economic gains.

Crop production imposes various environmental burdens when feeding humanity. Targeting regional critical crops for effective environmental footprints regulation remains intractable especially when indicator-extended and localized environmental efficiencies of crops are unclear. This study pinpoints regional critical crops and extract potential regulation paths for diversified environmental footprints by tracing 12 types of life cycle environmental impacts of 15 crop species inflicted by 8 groups of activities, and evaluating magnitudes and multidimensional efficiencies (measured by crop yield, sown area, and economic value) of crops' footprints at the provincial scale in China. The complete quantitative links among activities, crops, impacts, and efficiencies in each region are presented. Sugarcane, sugar beet, and vegetables always demonstrate higher efficiencies measured by crop yield. Soybean shows the greatest efficiencies measured by sown area in all impact categories. Cash crops (such as tobacco and tea) and peanut are regularly more environmentally efficient when the measure shifts to economic value. For three measurements, rice consistently shows lower efficiency in Climate change due to methane emission. Fruits, with heavy pesticide input, have lower efficiencies in the ecotoxicity-related impacts. When both low efficiency and high contribution to footprints are integrated, fruits are identified as critical crops, primarily in the northwest and southwest, for Climate change and Ozone depletion. Wheat and maize are critical crops, mainly in the north, for Climate change and Photochemical oxidant formation. Targeting efficiency improvements in critical crops may yield mitigation outcomes comparable to those from improving all inefficient crops, with differences of less than 3.5% observed between the two scenarios. The extracted regulation paths covering explicit impact-region-crop-activity correspondence yield insights into more precise and cost-effective environmental footprints control for crop production.

The increasing focus on environmental sustainability and the pressing need to mitigate climate change have driven innovative approaches in waste management and energy production. Managing growing waste tires requires strategies that address disposal while contributing to energy generation and climate mitigation. This study employs auto regressive integrated moving average modeling to forecast end-of-life tires generation based on vehicle ownership trends in Hong Kong. A life cycle assessment using the ReCiPe2016 method and a genetic algorithm optimization is applied to assess and optimize the environmental and energy impacts of combined heat and power, gasification, and pyrolysis technologies under two scenarios: the baseline scenario, where 50 % of end-of-life tires are utilized for energy production reflecting current practices, and the enhanced scenario, which increases this to 65 % by including end-of-life tires that would otherwise be improperly disposed of. Although the baseline scenario produced slightly more energy, the optimized use of end-of-life tires in the enhanced scenario prioritized substantial climate benefits through strengthened greenhouse gas mitigation. In the enhanced scenario, greenhouse gas emissions were reduced by approximately 357,825 tons of CO2-eq annually by 2025, leading to a cumulative reduction exceeding 3 million tons by 2030. Additionally, the enhanced scenario demonstrated improvements in reducing air pollutants such as SO2 and NOx, further contributing to better air quality. The findings highlight the potential of integrating end-of-life tires-to-energy technologies for sustainable end-of-life tires management, providing a framework for policymakers and stakeholders to develop effective strategies that contribute to environmental sustainability and public health. The study's methodologies and insights can be adapted to other regions, facilitating the creation of tailored waste tire management policies globally.

PurposeLiquid milk has a higher nutritional value than powdered milk; however, Sri Lankans consume more powdered milk than fresh liquid milk. To increase domestic liquid milk consumption in Sri Lanka, it is vital to understand the demand for different milk products and the existing relationship between them. Therefore, this study estimates the households' demand for different milk products.Design/methodology/approachWe used the most recent Household Income and Expenditure Survey - 2019 data to study the demand for disaggregated milk products in Sri Lanka. A censored QUAIDS model was applied to estimate the price and expenditure elasticities.FindingsThe results showed that households are price-sensitive to all milk products, whereas households are more responsive to price changes in fresh liquid milk than in milk powder and flavoured liquid milk. The findings revealed that all milk products considered are substitutes for each other, and a strong substitution relationship exists between milk powder and fresh liquid milk.Research limitations/implicationsThis study focuses on three milk products to estimate their demand and analyse the relationships between them. The findings will help policymakers and marketers to understand how households react to changes in economic parameters, thereby allowing them to formulate effective policies and marketing strategies to increase fresh liquid milk consumption in Sri Lanka.Originality/valueDisaggregated demand studies on milk products are limited globally, and this study is the first to analyse the demand for various milk products in Sri Lanka.

Resource recovery from wastes presents opportunities for resource conservation and greenhouse gas (GHG) mitigation within food processing sector (FPS). However, complicated by intricate interconnections among water-energy-waste elements, potentials and strategies of their integrated management for achieving co-benefits across the food processing subsectors remain unexplored. This study develops a transformative framework for water-energy-waste metabolic integration within FPS, which transforms linear resource flows into closed-loop cycles. Both baseline scenario (characterizing the prevailing conditions) and foreground scenario (applying the new framework) are formulated to facilitate comparative analyses across 11 subsectors and 31 Chinese provincial regions. The findings demonstrate substantial water-energy-GHGs co-benefits: 40 % reduction in freshwater consumption, 7 % in fossil energy use, and 29 % in GHG emissions nationally. Regions like Shandong and Sichuan, and subsectors such as Meat and Liquor, emerge as major beneficiaries. Wastewater management in most subsectors predominantly drives energy recovery, while subsectors like Oil, Meat, Aquatic Products, and Instant Food benefit primarily from food waste management. Enhanced water reclamation through advanced treatment technologies compromises the energy benefit, especially in regions where subsectors (Sugar, Tabacco) with low organic content wastes prevail. This study provides scalable solutions for optimizing water-energywaste-GHGs synergies in FPS while highlighting the importance of implementing localized strategies.

Biodegradable plastics are slowly being introduced in the food industry to protect the environment, but consumer willingness to pay a premium remains uncertain. This study uses a choice experiment and latent class logit model to assess consumers' valuation for biodegradable plastic packaging and examines the impact of different information types on the willingness to pay estimates. Findings suggest that consumers are willing to pay a premium ($1.32) for biodegradable packaging over conventional options, with additional information increasing the willingness to pay by over $0.50. These results imply that higher prices may not deter consumers from choosing biodegradable plastic packaging.