Evaluation of global biotic resource consumption against absolute boundaries

In recent years, biochar has emerged as a versatile product. Producing biochar from agricultural residue is an environmentally friendly alternative to in‐situ burning, reducing the requirement for chemical fertilizers. This study presents a comprehensive assessment of the environmental impact of biochar production. Four feedstocks are compared – rice straw, palm shell, corn stover, and mixed crop residue. The cradle‐to‐gate system boundary comprises all stages of biochar production – feedstock acquisition, transport and pre‐treatment, and biochar production. Results show that the main hotspots are emissions and electricity consumption during production. The palm shell had the highest impact on human health (4.889 kg PM2.5 eq) and ecosystem quality due to high terrestrial and aquatic acidification potential (159.600 kg SO2 eq). Mixed crop residue had the greatest global warming potential (281.884 kg CO2 eq) and resource consumption. Corn stover and rice straw had moderate impacts, with corn stover contributing significantly to ecotoxicity (2.2E+04 kg TEG water) and rice straw impacting respiratory inorganics (3.545 kg PM2.5 eq), and causes severe depletion of resources, consuming 4339.672 MJ of non‐renewable energy. These findings emphasize the importance of selecting low‐impact feedstocks for biochar production. While corn stover has high impacts in midpoint categories like carcinogens, non‐carcinogens, ionizing radiation, aquatic and terrestrial toxicity, and eutrophication, it has the lowest GWP. Rice straw has the lowest impact on human health and resources. Finally, uncertainty analysis using Monte Carlo Simulation shows that the coefficient of variation for impact categories is within ±10%, indicating that the results are reliable.

This overview study investigates integrating advanced manufacturing technologies, specifically metal additive manufacturing (AM) and laser powder bed fusion (LPBF) processes, within Industry 4.0 and Industry 5.0 frameworks, to enhance sustainability and efficiency in industrial production and prototyping. The manufacturing sector, a significant contributor to global greenhouse gas emissions and resource consumption, is increasingly adopting technologies that reduce environmental impact while maintaining economic growth. Selective laser melting (SLM), as the subsection LPBF technologies, is highlighted for its capability to produce high-performance, lightweight, and complex components with minimal material waste, thus aligning with circular economy goals for metal alloys. Life cycle assessment (LCA) and life cycle costing (LCC) analyses are essential methods for evaluating the sustainability of any new technology. Sustainable technologies could support the concepts of the factory of the future (FoF), fulfilling the requirements of digital transformation and digital twins. This overview study reveals that implementing AM—specifically SLM—has the potential to reduce the environmental impact of manufacturing. It underscores the ability of these technologies to promote sustainable and efficient manufacturing practices, thereby accelerating the shift from Industry 4.0 to Industry 5.0.

The unprecedented environmental pressures confronting the global built environment have necessitated a profound shift toward integrated, scientifically grounded, and computationally enriched approaches to sustainable architectural design. As the construction and operation of buildings account for significant proportions of global carbon emissions, resource consumption, and ecological disruption, a comprehensive framework capable of synthesizing advanced mathematical modeling, construction engineering principles, and strategic design management is essential. Traditional paradigms of sustainability, anchored principally in passive design strategies and incremental efficiencies, no longer suffice to address increasingly complex climatic, social, and regulatory challenges. This article advances a rigorous theoretical foundation for sustainable architectural design that is simultaneously construction‐responsive and mathematically articulated. The argument proceeds through a multilayered examination of sustainability’s intellectual evolution, the transformation of construction methodologies, and the increasing centrality of mathematical optimization in decision‐making environments. Drawing upon interdisciplinary literature and fortified by analysis of three global case studies, the discussion elucidates the ways in which mathematical frameworks such as energy modeling, embodied carbon quantification, and multi-objective optimization can be strategically embedded within design management processes. These models are contextualized within construction engineering operations and stakeholder coordination mechanisms, yielding a holistic framework that not only addresses energy, carbon, and resource constraints but also strengthens interdisciplinary communication and the managerial coherence of complex projects. By fusing theoretical, computational, and managerial perspectives, the paper proposes a methodological advance that supports more transparent, predictable, and quantifiably sustainable outcomes across architectural and construction domains.

Cuban cinema has undergone a resurgence over the past decade, often relying on different foreign sources of funding, particularly transnational co-production agreements. As global audience appeal becomes a critical factor in national cinema, incorporating global media resources entails forms of resistance that need not be guided by a refusal to engage with hegemonic forces. Instead, audio-visual production strives to acknowledge and mobilize the elasticity of social, ideological and geopolitical borders by experimenting with national and global criteria. This article explores this media environment through Alejandro Brugués’s film Juan de los muertos/Juan of the Dead (2011). The film mediates the complex material and ideological transformations in Cuba over the past two decades and provides a fertile ground for exploring the circulation of anxieties around global consumption. This article examines how Juan of the Dead contributes towards the continued reformulation of both Cuban and genre cinemas while also reproducing pervasive discourses around race, gender and sexuality in Cuba.

Lipids: Global Resources and Consumption

The demand for resource circulation of heat exchangers in air conditioners is expected to grow rapidly; however, the market stocking time is relatively long. Therefore, this scenario was used as a case study for sustainable products design. A material flow analysis was conducted to estimate the balance between global relative resource consumption for shipment, waste, and installed stock from publicly available information up to 2050. Based on the projected demand through 2050, the shipment volume for each year was calculated on a cooling capacity basis. From this analysis, the waste volume was calculated. Using the shipment volume on the basis of yearly cooling capacity, the shipment volume on a resource basis was calculated considering the heat transfer coefficient. The balance between the waste volume and the installed stock was estimated. The resource circulation was simulated by defining variables such as the ratio of units that can be converted from waste to shipment and the ratio of heat exchangers using circulated resources in the total number of shipments. The results indicate that the shipment, waste, and installed stock of resources projected for 2050 were greater than those at the 2021 levels by factors of 2.2, 2.8, and 2.9, respectively. In addition, they were greater than those of the 2021 levels in the scenarios by factors of 1.8, 2.2, and 2.8 accounting for the increase of heat transfer coefficient into account, indicating the importance of improvement of heat transfer. The simulation of circulation showed that a fully closed loop in 2050 would be difficult to achieve owing to the shortage of heat exchangers for waste-to-shipment. Sensitivity analysis also indicated that even under conditions where there is no predicted shortage of circulated resources for 2050, achieving the target in a short period of time may cause a rapid increase in demand for circulating resources. This would subsequently, lead to a shortage of supply compared to demand. Thus, it is important to account for these dynamics relating resource circulation and strategy planning during analysis.

The construction sector contributes to approximately 50% of global carbon dioxide emissions and natural resource consumption, along with generating a significant amount of landfill waste. Thus, there is an urgent need to actively involve our professional community in fostering real environmental change. Embracing circularity in construction presents significant opportunities for decarbonization, particularly in the context of prestressed precast concrete structures. This paper explores the potential for reusing prestressed hollow core slabs already built-in, as well as the principles of designing for future dismantling and reassembly. A second life for hollow core slabs is possible, as has already been confirmed by practical realisations in the Netherlands, Sweden and Finland.

Environmental change Global change refers to planetary-scale biophysical and societal changes in the Earth system (Hall 2013). The global environment is always changing, although change is never uniform across time and space. Yet ‘all changes are ultimately connected with one another through physical and social processes alike’ (Meyer and Turner 1995: 304). However, what is most signifi cant with respect to contemporary global environmental change is that it is not primarily due to natural processes. Instead, the scale and rates of change have increased dramatically as a direct result of human action related to the consumption of natural resources, the creation of new habitat for human activities (including tourism) which have in turned altered the habitats of other species, and the waste products of human consumption and production. Human impacts on the environment may have a global character in two ways. First, ‘global refers to the spatial scale or functioning of a system’ (Turner et al . 1990:15); the climate and the oceans have the characteristic of a global system. Second, global environmental change occurs if a change ‘occurs on a worldwide scale, or represents a signifi cant fraction of the total environmental phenomenon or global resource’ (Turner et al. 1990:15-16); an example is coral bleaching. Tourism is signifi cant for both types of change (Gossling 2002; Gossling et al. 2002; Gossling and Hall 2006a; Hall and Lew 2009).

Resource Depletion Risk for Medical Equipment: Embracing the Circular Economy.

Growing population and rising incomes are leading to an ever-increasing demand for animal-based foods. Pigmeat is currently the most consumed meat globally, even exceeding the consumption of poultry meat. Despite the disproportionate environmental burden of animal production—mostly attributable to associated feed demand, up-to-date country-scale quantifications of the land and water impacts of the concentrate feed (mainly cereals and soybean) and co-products required to support pig production are still missing. In addition, the specific role that international feed trade plays in separating resource use from consumption and in altering resource use efficiencies remains unclear. This paper analyses at a country-scale the internal and external consumption of natural resources (i.e. land and water) to support pig feed production in 2018. Combining data on the country- and production system-specific diets and crop-specific yields with an agro-hydrological model, we find that 64.1 Mha of agricultural land (5% of all croplands) and 332.6 km3 of water (both green and blue) (6% of all agricultural water use) were utilized by China, EU-27 and the United States (accounting for 70% of pigmeat production) to produce pig feed alone. Comparing domestic feed production scenarios with those that also consider the feed trade, we show that global resource consumption tends to be more efficient when considering international feed trade, especially in China and EU-27, while sometimes causing significant environmental impacts. This demonstrates the need to investigate the environmental effects of pig feed associated both with the domestic use of natural resources, but also to the ones displaced by international trade.

The construction industry is accountable for about 50 percent of the global resource consumption. Within this, traditional concrete is one of the products with a manufacturing process that has a relatively large impact on the environment. As a result of the rising awareness regarding sustainability, concrete suppliers, product manufacturers, and building contractors are concerned about which environmental impact their product has. Based on a life cycle assessment (LCA) it is possible to analyze the different stages in the life cycle of structures and to evaluate the respective impacts. Such a study is presented here for a producer of high-strength concrete building materials, applying a cradle-to-gate approach with options. Specific company data were combined with general input from databases, and a functional unit of 1m³ was adopted to be able to compare the different results. Based on this, it was determined that whereas the reinforcing and prestressing steel and the cement dominate the impact contributions, other factors such as transport by road, maintenance, aggregates, fabrication and concrete waste production during fabrication are non-negligible. A further impact study shows that several adaptions can potentially reduce the impact on the environment with 20 to 30 percent, depending on the assessment method used.

<p>More than half of the world’s population are urban dwellers, and this percentage is on the rise. Therefore, understanding the links between water, energy, and food requirements of cities plays a critical role in determining global resource consumption. Adelaide is a mid-size, coastal Australian city in Australia with a population of almost 1.3 million inhabitants. With its plentiful access to wind and solar energy, the Adelaide region has one of the highest rates of renewable energy production in the world, and access to additional, conventional energies supplies from other parts of the Australian network. However, the water supplies in this region are theoretically limited, as groundwater depletion is already occurring in the food production areas surrounding the city, and municipal water supplies rely heavily on the fully allocated Murray River system. Therefore, optimization of the food, energy and water requirements of the city provides an opportunity for optimal use of valuable resources. Quantification of these industries was not trivial and provided data availability and comparison challenges.  Lessons learned on a quantitative example of the water-energy-food nexus at city scale are presented.</p>

One of the critical challenges in achieving sustainability is finding a way to meet the energy consumption needs of a growing population in the face of increasing economic prosperity and finite resources. According to ecological footprint computations, the global resource consumption began exceeding planetary supply in 1977 and by 2030, global energy demand, population, and gross domestic product are projected to greatly increase over 1977 levels. With the aim of finding sustainable energy solutions, we present a simple yet rigorous procedure for assessing and counterbalancing the relationship between energy demand, environmental impact, population, GDP, and energy efficiency. Our analyses indicated that infeasible increases in energy efficiency (over 100 %) would be required by 2030 to return to 1977 environmental impact levels and annual reductions (2 and 3 %) in energy demand resulted in physical, yet impractical requirements; hence, a combination of policy and technology approaches is needed to tackle this critical challenge. This work emphasizes the difficulty in moving toward energy sustainability and helps to frame possible solutions useful for policy and management.

Low carbon concrete for prefabricated modular construction in circular economy: An integrated approach towards sustainability, durability, cost, and mechanical performances

Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) is a critical criterion for evaluating corporate non-financial performance. For the textile sector, which is highly concentrated in global resource consumption and pollution emissions, the transition toward sustainable development presents particularly severe challenges. Traditional research primarily focuses on the linear effects of single factors, often failing to capture the non-linear interplay and complex causality among multiple influencing conditions. Based on corporate governance and market-driven perspectives, this study innovatively integrates Actor-Network Theory (ANT) to construct a multi-actor governance network. It then employs fuzzy-set Qualitative Comparative Analysis (fsQCA) to systematically explore the influence mechanism of multiple antecedent conditions (including external regulation, internal incentives, and market drive) on the ESG performance of China’s A-share listed firms in the textile supply chain. The results indicate that no single factor (such as government regulation, social supervision, consumers, investors, the board of directors, or digital technology) is a necessary condition for achieving high ESG performance, thereby confirming the configurational complexity underlying high ESG outcomes. We identify two core sufficient paths leading to high performance: the ‘internal-driven configuration,’ centered on internal governance and digital technology, and the ‘external supervision-market-driven configuration,’ characterized by external governance and market drive. Furthermore, our findings reveal a significant asymmetry in the ESG performance of these textile firms. A group of firms, due to the absence of critical governance elements, follow an ‘element-missing path,’ resulting in persistently low ESG performance. This study not only enriches the configurational theory of ESG performance formation, particularly for the complex governance systems of highly polluting industries like textiles, but also addresses the limitations of traditional linear methods in revealing diverse driving pathways. Ultimately, it provides differentiated policy tools and practical references for promoting the green transition of the textile industry and its related value chain enterprises.