Join the research community

This is a working environment to develop a unweighted evaluation tool for impacts by human activities, based on the ‘ effort’ to keep resource cycles closed. Its open source, and material is available for students and researchers that want to contribute to the development or want to use it as study material in students assignments.

The site is run independent by Ronald Rovers, and supported by lecturers and students from several universities. But more is welcome!
.
See the open call for contributions, and the “to solve” page for interesting research questions.

RESEARCH QUESTIONS

The methodology is clear now, however practicing is still ongoing work. Basic data are available, but many data can still be more specified and processing improved.

Here is a list of what can be seen as ‘tasks’. The tasks can provide a subject for a thesis of doctoral work, or as research contribution. Please notify me if someone starts working on a task, to be able to connect people or to avoid double work.  More tasks and material can be added over time.

1 Energy routes

Energy is needed to produce things, to harvest and process materials, and can be needed to operate some device.

How to collect, store, and distribute energy is the question, without depleting the system? In the first place this always has to start from solar energy. And from there have different and effective routes to bring that to end use: heat , power, electricity.

Labor, from food energy, is of course the first option. Via biomass, is a second option. For instance growing rape seed, that can ultimately deliver 1400 liters of bio-oil per ha-year. [x] Or to grow trees that can store energy and burned directly for heat/power.

Or use biomass/trees to built a wooden wind mill, (to harvest ‘indirect solar energy’). The windmill requires land to produce the wood to construct it, but could be profitable over its lifetime compared to the land required tot directly ‘burning’ the wood.

The questions is: what routes are there and which are the most effective, and require the least ha-year?

2 Resources data

we have indicators for some of the most important resources, but are still lacking many on the input side. These have to be calculated or estimated. For now we can use iron as the general indicator for all metals, (recently I added copper as well, see data) but better would be to have them for each metal separately. The same for minerals and other sources. See what is already available under tool and data.

3 process energy-land /Embodied Energy

Raw materials need processing to become useful. Which again require energy and materials/machines etc. Its embodied energy and embodied material, both to be transferred again in to space-time, or the land relation in ha-year.

Mind that its required to also involve secondary and tertiary impacts ( building factories etc) .

For many elements data are available, but mostly calculated as primary energy. But 1) what we however need is end use data, not transferred to primary energy, since we want to be able to calculate how much embodied land is involved to generate the energy or materials. Its not primary fossil fuels we deal with.

And 2) Secondly we need data preferably without including transport. For two reasons: to be able to choose transport means, and secondly , since we start from the assumption that as much as possible should be locally generated: This implies different transport distances as generally calculated in the main databases. see also the article here

a general example: see the ‘potato study report’ here.

4 embodied land demand for activities

In the end products are made from different materials and processes, sometime requiring operational energy. Or land is directly used for an activity. We can express the impact in ha-yer, using the input data from materials and energy. For some activities and products it is already calculated how much ha-year is involved. But still many activities lack, and others can use more detail. See the ‘demand’ table under tools and data.

5 Water Embodied Land

Producing materials not only involves energy but also water. (think of the rucksack calculations by the Wuppertal institute: link in download/topics). For which its needed to develop a overview database of “Embodied water” and transferred to Embodied Land per material/product, for a house for instance. The Embodied land -tool can then be extended with a calculation referring to the precipitation in a region. ( additional Embodied Land in m2-year to harvest water)

Besides: there are more routes for water, similar as for solar energy conversion: precipitation is a likely route with an easy land conversion. And can be seen as a free resource, harvesting is not increasing entropy, since its a flow mainly driven by solar radiation. A river can be a resource as well: But then how to relate this to embodied land: how much can be extracted from a river without disturbing the flow upstream or downstream: this is the capacity per m2 of river-surface.(?) See some exploring papers (on ” Watergy” ) in the publications section.

6 Recycling

Recycling is a tricky thing. Basically its good of course, but how to value ? There is initial embodied land, at its first time use. But when recycled after x years, how much of the initial impact remains? And how does it relate to the years of previous use (which might not be known?) In a closed cycle approach recycling is seen as prolonged use, (linear delaying) with some additional energy input. However, the original impact is never 0. See the documents here for further explanation and discussion. XX

7 allocation/land

Some parts of the harvest might be used for something else. this implies that we have to decide which part to allocate to what activity.

Initially its assumed that for instance with classic (bio-) agriculture the land regenerates by itself ( by incoming nutrients from rain and wind for instance, and natural fertilizing) And yields remain the same for long periods. However, literature study could show different, or other yields depending agricultural style. (even increased yields are possible with organic farming, as described in the book the Omnivores dilemma by Michael Pollan, ). However, It requires a different specialization to work on this and to detail the figures, how much in that case exactly can be harvested ( taken out) of a hectare.

(For bamboo we have done some research ourselves, and found that a natural regenerating bamboo forest of a specific species could generate continuously 17 tonnes of raw material per hectare per year. (although we have found other sources with higher data, which we will study and publish if relevant)

8 What else ….