Sustainability is a grand challenge of our time. While there is a universal recognition that sustainability includes social, economic, and environmental components, the relationship and interchangeability between these components has been debated, resulting in three distinct sustainability perspectives: weak, strong, and absurdly strong sustainability. However, despite this active debate, few h...

Information and communications technologies (ICTs) have enabled the rise of so-called “Collaborative Consumption” (CC): the peer-to-peer-based activity of obtaining, giving, or sharing the access to goods and services, coordinated through community-based online services. CC has been expected to alleviate societal problems such as hyper-consumption, pollution, and poverty by lowering the cost of...

Sustainable decision-making involves political decisions at the local, regional, or national levels, which aim at a balanced development of socio–environmental systems. A fundamental question in sustainable decision-making is that of defining and measuring sustainable development. Many methods have been proposed to assess sustainability. Recently, a model has been developed, called Sustainabili...

Basic to neoclassical economics is the sanctity of individual choice, the fungibility of economic goods and inputs, and faith in the market system to bring forth substitutes as reiative prices change. These notions are part of what Joseph Schumpeter called the "pre-analytic vision" of neociassicai economics (Daly t995) and they are central to the concept of weak sustainability, a topic of inten...

To be able to fulfil high market expectations for a number of practical applications, Environmental Product Declarations (EPDs) have to meet and comply with specific and strict methodological prerequisites. These expectations include the possibility to add up Life Cycle Assessment (LCA)-based information in the supply chain and to compare different EPDs. To achieve this goal, common and harmoni...

This review on Sustainability covers selected 2015 publications on the focus of Sustainability. It is divided into the following sections : • Sustainable water and wastewater utilities • Sustainable water resources management • Stormwater and green infrastructure • Sustainability in wastewater treatment • Life cycle assessment (LCA) applications • Sustainability and energy in wastewater industr...

The Ramsey model of economic growth is revisited from the point of view of viability compared to optimality. A viable state is a state from which there exists at least one trajectory in capital, consumption, and reproduction that remains in the set of constraints of minimal consumption and positive wealth. There exists a largest set of viable states, including all others, called the viability k...

The measure of value called emergy is used to evaluate the flows of energy and resources that sustain the biosphere including the economy of humans. A donor system of value based on solar emergy required to produce things is suggested as the only means of reversing the logic trap inherent in economic valuation, which suggests that value stems only from utilization by humans. The stocks of natur...

Data attrition compromises the ability of scientists to validate and reuse the data that underlie scientific articles. For this reason, many have called to archive data supporting published articles. However, few successful models for the sustainability of disciplinary data archives exist and many of these rely heavily on ephemeral funding sources. The Dryad project is a consortium of bioscienc...