Browsing by Author "Steubing, Bernhard"

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    Comparative carbon footprint analysis of residents of wooden and non-wooden houses in Finland
    (IOP Publishing, 2021-07) Ottelin, Juudit; Amiri, Ali; Steubing, Bernhard; Junnila, Seppo; Department of Built Environment; Real Estate; Leiden University
    Sustainable forest management and harvested wood products together can create a growing carbon sink by storing carbon in long-lived products. The role of wood products in climate change mitigation has been studied from several perspectives, but not yet from a consumer's view. In this study, we examine the impact of wooden housing on consumer carbon footprints in Finland. We use the 2016 Finnish Household Budget Survey and Exiobase 2015, a global multi-regional input-output model. The sample size is 3700 households, of which 45% live in a wooden house. We find that residents of wooden houses have a 12(+/- 3)% (950 kg CO2-eq/year) lower carbon footprint on average than residents of non-wooden houses, when income, household type, education of the main income provider, age of the house, owner-occupancy and urban zone are controlled in regression analysis. This is not fully explained by the impact of the construction material, which suggests that the residents of wooden houses may have some features in their lifestyles that lower their carbon footprints further. In addition, we find that an investment in a new wooden house in an urban area has a strong reducing impact on a consumer's carbon footprint, while investments in other types of housing have a weaker or no reducing impact. Our findings support wooden housing as a meaningful sustainable consumption choice.
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    Coupling material and energy flow analysis with life cycle assessment to support circular strategies at the urban level
    (Springer, 2024-07) Papageorgiou, Asterios; Björklund, Anna; Sinha, Rajib; de Almeida, Maria Livia Real; Steubing, Bernhard; Department of Bioproducts and Biosystems; Sustainable Bioproducts Innovation; KTH Royal Institute of Technology; Leiden University
    Purpose: This study aims to investigate how the coupling of Material and Energy Flow Analysis (MEFA) with Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) under an urban metabolism (UM) perspective (referred to as the UM-LCA approach) can support the design, evaluation, and monitoring of urban-level circular strategies. For this purpose, we apply the UM-LCA approach to the urban area of Umeå (Sweden) by expanding the goal and scope of a recent MEFA study conducted by the authors of the article. Methods: The modeling combines MEFA with LCA and is performed both retrospectively and prospectively. The MEFA was performed in the prior study following a bottom-up approach to map and quantify material and energy flows in the urban system at the sectoral level. The quantified flows are used in the present study to construct the life cycle inventory (LCI) model of the urban system. The LCI model is first used as a basis of the retrospective LCA (rLCA), which is conducted to assess the environmental performance of the urban system with its sectors. The LCI model is then modified according to future scenarios and is used as a basis of the prospective LCA (pLCA), which is performed to assess the environmental implications of implementing circular strategies in the future. Results and discussion: The rLCA shows that the construction and household sectors are major drivers of environmental impacts in the urban system, with households being the largest contributors to 11 out of 12 analyzed impact categories. It also reveals the most impacting flows within these sectors, including food in households and steel in the construction sector. These findings indicate that the construction and household sectors and their most impacting flows should be prioritized in a circular strategy. Furthermore, the pLCA highlights that a future circular strategy promoting reductions in the material used in these two sectors could lead to higher reductions in all impact categories, ranging from 4.3 to 8.6%, than a strategy focused only on recycling, which could lead to reductions ranging from 0.2 to 1.2%. Conclusions: This study concludes that the UM-LCA approach has great potential to comprehensively analyze, both retrospectively and prospectively, the environmental performance of an urban system providing valuable insights that could support policy makers in designing, assessing, and monitoring urban-level circular strategies. However, further research should address identified limitations of the UM-LCA approach (e.g., limited available data, inability to consider social and economic aspects) to facilitate its applicability and enhance its comprehensiveness.
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    Does car sharing reduce greenhouse gas emissions? Assessing the modal shift and lifetime shift rebound effects from a life cycle perspective
    (ELSEVIER SCI LTD, 2020-09-01) Amatuni, Levon; Ottelin, Juudit; Steubing, Bernhard; Mogollón, José M.; Department of Built Environment; Real Estate; Leiden University
    Car-sharing platforms provide access to a shared rather than a private fleet of automobiles distributed in the region. Participation in such services induces changes in mobility behaviour as well as vehicle ownership patterns that could have positive environmental impacts. This study contributes to the understanding of the total mobility-related greenhouse gas emissions reduction related to business-to-consumer car-sharing participation. A comprehensive model which takes into account distances travelled annually by the major urban transport modes as well as their life-cycle emissions factors is proposed, and the before-and-after analysis is conducted for an average car-sharing member in three geographical cases (Netherlands, San Francisco, Calgary). In addition to non-operational emissions for all the transport modes involved, this approach considers the rebound effects associated with the modal shift effect (substituting driving distances with alternative modes) and the lifetime shift effect for the shared automobiles, phenomena which have been barely analysed in the previous studies. As a result, in contrast to the previous impact assessments in the field, a significantly more modest reduction of the annual total mobility-related life-cycle greenhouse gas emissions caused by car-sharing participation has been estimated, 3–18% for three geographical case studies investigated (versus up to 67% estimated previously). This suggests the significance of the newly considered effects and provides with the practical implications for improved assessments in the future.