Absolute environmental sustainability assessment of a Danish utility company relative to the Planetary Boundaries

Abstract

Increasing environmental pressure from production and consumption of products and services is starting to affect Earth System stability. Thus, the Planetary Boundaries framework introduced a set of absolute boundaries for keeping the Earth System stable and delimiting a safe operating space for humanity. The sum of environmental pressures associated with human activities should not exceed the safe operating space. This includes utility companies whose activities relate to supply of water and treatment of waste‐ and stormwater. This study conducted an absolute environmental sustainability assessment (AESA) of a Danish utility company to evaluate if it could be considered absolutely sustainable relative to an assigned share of the safe operating space (SoSOS). The AESA evaluated the company's impacts relative to an assigned share of the Planetary Boundaries and relative to specific local boundaries for nitrogen and phosphorous emissions. Results showed that the assigned SoSOS was exceeded for 10 of 18 impact categories, for example, climate related boundaries were exceeded by up to a factor 7.8 while local nitrogen and phosphorus boundaries were exceeded by ca. a factor 16. The AESA can indicate to which degree the company exceeds its assigned SoSOS for certain impact categories and the processes and life‐cycle stages to focus on to become absolutely sustainable. This information is crucial for deriving specific impact reduction targets as part of environmental strategies for companies to become sustainable in an absolute sense.

A new consistent framework for assignment of safe operating space to B2C and B2B industries for use in Absolute Environmental Sustainability Assessments

“…To determine the occupied SoSOS for the company, the characterized results were divided by the remaining SOS available for human activities. The remaining SOS for Climate Change -Energy Imbalance is 1 Wm -2 (Ryberg et al, 2020b). The remaining SOS was first shared equal-per-capita across all individuals on Earth.…”

“…A common approach for assigning the SoSOS to companies or industries has been to first downscale to the level of the individual human being, and subsequently upscale to the assessed company or industry based on the value that the company or industry provides to the final consumers (Hjalsted et al, 2020;Wolff et al, 2017). As an example of this final value, so far the assigned SoSOS has primarily been based on Final Consumption Expenditure (FCE) in sector and company level AESAs (Brejnrod et al, 2017;Hjalsted et al, 2020;Ryberg et al, 2018a;Ryberg et al, 2020b). The FCE describes how individuals spend their money on goods and services, used to meet their individual needs (Eurostat, 2016).…”

Determining the absolute sustainability of products with case studies on laundry and food production

“…8,9 For example, the annual environmental impact of a municipal water company has been interpreted relative to a calculated maximum permissible impact. 10 An allocation of each planetary boundary was determined based on the population being supplied with water and the household expenditure on this utility. The resulting 'share of safe operating space' reports if the allocated share of a planetary boundary for a specific purpose has been exceeded.…”

Absolute environmental sustainability assessment of renewable dimethyl ether fuelled heavy-duty trucks

“…41,42 Despite these efforts, PBs studies of industrial systems, in general, and fuels, in particular, are scarce. Ryberg et al applied the PBs to the laundry washing industry 43 and a Danish utility company, 44 while Tulus et al studied the PBs impact of chemicals. 45 Furthermore, following a similar approach, D'Angelo et al evaluated low-carbon ammonia routes, 46 while Wheeler et al investigated biomass supply chains.…”