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Centre for Sustainable Development

Est 2000 - home of the MPhil in Engineering for Sustainable Development
 

The Sustainability Consortium
(link: http://www.sustainabilityconsortium.com/)
has recently launched its research in Europe, through the collaboration of its
Systems Science Working Group and the University of Cambridge. The
Sustainability Consortium is a group of global participants working on the
sustainability of consumer products, through the development of simplified
measuring tools for improved decision making. The Systems Working Group,
collaborating with Cambridge, takes a systems approach to product
sustainability, to improve our understanding of the environmental impacts of
the consumer goods industry as a whole. The approach is adopted in order to
consider the communalities in hotspots between different product categories,
with the objective to provide data input to the product category-specific
working groups. In line with
these objectives, the team in Cambridge focuses on the environmental impacts
arising during the use and post-use lifecycle phases of consumer products.
These phases, which for many product categories are the dominant ones, generally
suffer from a poor understanding and thereby act as a limitation in creating accurate
baseline models for the full lifecycle impacts of products.

 In order
to fulfill the aims of the project, the following streams of work are taken.
·    Literature review to consolidate existing research
within lifecycle analyses and impact assessments of products considering the
use and post-use phase impacts.
·        
Data gathering and database population of historic
data on:  Energy consumption by sector
and source, energy use in appliances, GHG emissions per source and user, water
consumption by sector and user, waste generation per sector, waste management,
household statistics, product lifetimes and specifications. The database covers
the geography territories of the UK and US.
·        
Creation of a summary matrix with legislation
related to consumer products, including monthly updates on initiatives related
to sustainability of consumer products from industry, UK and EU government
bodies, and NGOs.
·        
Analysis of the data for gap identification,
input into the creation of baseline models as well as a report and an academic
article analysing the environmental impacts on UK households (to be submitted).