Fossil energy depletion and fight against climate change force humanity to decarbonize the economy. By year 2050 CO2 emissions will have to reduce globally at least 85%, and probably over 95% in developed countries.

Although Macao is one of the individual members of the Kyoto Protocol, a holistic picture to draw its energy consumption and GHG emissions has been lacking. A comprehensive review of energy consumption as well as GHG emissions is presented in this study for Macao since the handover of...

The aim of this article is to report a comprehensive review of life cycle assessment (LCA) and life cycle cost (LCC) implication on residential buildings. It discusses the contemporary issues, and its relationship and significance of system boundary, assumptions, and reports how it effects on...

This paper provides an extensive review of anaerobic digestion (AD) systems, with a specific focus on community scale digesters for urban applications, processing either municipal organic waste exclusively or as mix feed. Emphasis is placed on reducing the systems scale environmental impact of...

A recent study suggested that buildings globally consume up to 40% of energy and responsible for half of world greenhouse gas emission. Introducing life cycle assessment (LCA) to the building industry is important because it can measure every environmental impact involved in every process from...

The last decades, lowering the ecological impact of buildings is receiving increased attention by researchers, policy-makers and companies. Mostly the focus is on reducing energy consumption and the use of eco-friendly materials, but the concept of life-cycle thinking is growing in importance....

The aim of the current paper is to discuss the sustainability aspect of biorefinery systems with focus on biomass supply chains, processing of biomass feedstocks in biorefinery platforms and sustainability assessment methodologies. From the stand point of sustainability, it is important to...

The main objective of this study is to develop a methodology adapted to the prospective environmental evaluation of actions in the energy sector. It describes how a bottom-up long-term energy model can be used in a life cycle assessment (LCA) framework. The proposed methodology is applied in a...

Mathematical models have been widely used to simulate all aspects of bioenergy production systems including the growth kinetics of energy crops, conversion processes, production economics, supply logistics and environmental impacts. There is limited commercial experience to produce and process...

This paper examines the uncertainty of a new method – the macro life cycle assessment – to analyze the environmental impacts of public policies. The environmental impacts of two 2005–2025 European energy policies (a business as usual policy and a bioenergy policy) were comparatively...