Environmental design guidelines for circular building components based on LCA and MFA: Lessons from the circular kitchen and renovation façade

The transition towards a Circular Economy (CE) in the built environment is vital to reduce environmental impacts, resource consumption and waste generation. The built environment can be made circular by replacing building components with more circular ones. There are many circular design options for building components and knowledge about...

Environmental design guidelines for circular building components: The case of the circular building structure

Transitioning to a circular built environment can reduce the environmental impacts, resource consumption and waste generation emanating from buildings. However, there are many options to design circular building components, and limited knowledge on which options lead to the best environmental performance. Few guidelines exist and they build...

Urban Material Flow Analysis of Plastics: A Case Study for Leiden

Global plastic production increased from 200 million metric tons in 2002, to 359 million metric tons in 2019. It is estimated that plastics in the marine environment weigh more than 150 million metric tons and by 2050 could even outweigh the mass of fish in the ocean. Over half of the world population (55%) nowadays lives in urban areas and...

Material Recovery from Dutch Wind Energy: A dynamic material flow analysis on Dutch wind turbines towards 2050 including recycling approaches for recovery of key materials

The transition to a renewable electricity system requires more intensive material use, causing problem shifting in environmental impacts. To conserve resources for the future and mitigate environmental impact, circular economy principles are needed. This study analyses material flows in Dutch wind energy towards 2050 to identify the potential...

Power-City Amsterdam Nieuw-West

“Our” world is changing rapidly, man-made global warming, as a result of greenhouse emissions is causing more frequently extreme weather patterns such as droughts or cloudbursts. In order to change the current fossil fuel based economy, producing and emitting harmful greenhouse gasses, a transition is required from this fossil fuel based economy...

Sustainable Urban Water Management System in Palomino, Colombia: An Urban Water Metabolism Approach

This master thesis is an attempt to contribute to the understanding of urban water systems through the use of the urban metabolism (UM) framework. By developing steady-state models with STAN, a software used for material flow analysis (MFA), the urban water flows are quantified and analyzed as they enter the system boundary and are transformed...