The environmental impact of the production and consumption of food is seldom depicted to consumers. The footprint of food products provides a means for consumers to compare environmental impacts across and within product groups. In this study we apply carbon, nitrogen, and water footprints in tandem and present food labels that could help inform consumers about the environmental impacts of indi...

Humans’ demands for biological resources and energies have always been increasing, whereas evidence has shown that this demand is outpacing the regenerative and absorptive capacity of the planet. Since China is experiencing unprecedented urbanization and industrialization processes, how much impact this has imposed on the earth during economic development worldwide is conspicuous. Therefore, th...

Differences between product and corporate carbon footprint seriously hinder its wider implementation. The compound method based on financial accounts is a tiered hybrid analysis developed from advances in ecological footprint which main strength is its capability to calculate both product and corporate carbon footprint in a comprehensive assessment. This work aims to evaluate the compound metho...

In their Perspective in this issue of PLOS Biology, Blomqvist et al. [1] set out to demonstrate that ‘‘Ecological Footprint measurements, as currently constructed, are so misleading as to preclude their use in any serious science or policy context.’’ Should the reader be confident in this assessment or are Ecological Footprint methods and results adequate to guide sustainability policy? Their P...

The massive energy consumption of data centers worldwide has resulted in a large carbon footprint, raising serious concerns to sustainable IT initiatives and attracting a great amount of research attention. Nonetheless, the current efforts to date, despite encouraging, have been primarily centered around owner-operated data centers (e.g., Google data center), leaving out another major segment o...

The presented paper is a techno-economic feasibility study to use solar energy as a renewable energy to power the Passive Optical Network (PON). This discussion focuses on the requirements and sources of power for the active components of optical access networks. To ensure continuous reduction of the carbon footprint while advancing towards purely passive optical networks, we have emphasized th...

Torespondto the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions and global warming, this paper investigates the minimal-carbon-footprint time-dependent heterogeneous-fleet vehicle routing problem with alternative paths (MTHVRPP). This finds a route with the smallestcarbon footprint, instead of the shortestroute distance, which is the conventional approach, to serve a number of customers with a heterogene...

The need for more sustainable products and processes has triggered the development of a large number of environmental assessment tools. These tools measure environmental performance and identify improvement potentials from the environmental point of view. The life cycle assessment (lca) methods take into account all effects on the environment, direct and indirect resource inputs and/or emission...