Environmental pressures from consumer products and mechanisms of predetermination were examined in this thesis using causal loop diagram (CLD) and life cycle assessment (LCA) footprinting to respectively illustrate and provide some indicators about these mechanisms. Theoretical arguments and their practical implications were subjected to qualitative and quantitative analysis, using secondary and primary data. A study integrating theories from various research fields indicated that combining product-service system offerings and environmental policy instruments can be a salient aspect of the system change required for decoupling economic growth from consumption and environmental impacts. In a related study, modes of system behaviour identified were related to some pervasive sustainability challenges to the design of electronic products. This showed that because of consumption and investment dynamics, directing consumers to buy more expensive products in order to restrict their availability of money and avoid increased consumption will not necessarily decrease the total negative burden of consumption. In a study examining product systems, those of washing machines and passenger cars were modelled to identify variables causing environmental impacts through feedback loops, but left outside the scope of LCA studies. These variables can be considered in LCAs through scenario and sensitivity analysis. The carbon, water and energy footprint of leather processing technologies was measured in a study on 12 tanneries in seven countries, for which collection of primary data (even with narrow systems boundaries) proved to be very challenging. Moreover, there were wide variations in the primary data from different tanneries, demonstrating that secondary data should be used with caution in LCA of leather products. A study examining pre-consumer waste developed a footprint metric capable of improving knowledge and awareness among producers and consumers about the total waste generated in the course of producing products. The metric was tested on 10 generic consumer goods and showed that quantities, types and sources of waste generation can differ quite radically between product groups. This revealed a need for standardised ways to convey the environmental and scale of significance of waste types and for an international standard procedure for quantification and communication of product waste footprint. Finally, a planning framework was developed to facilitate inclusion of unintended environmental consequences when devising improvement actions. The results as a whole illustrate the quality and relevance of CLD; the problems with using secondary data in LCA studies; difficulties in acquiring primary data; a need for improved waste declaration in LCA and a standardised procedure for calculation and communication of the waste footprint of products; and systems change opportunities for product engineers, designers and policy makers. / <p><strong>Jury committee</strong></p><p></p><p><strong>Henrikke Baumann, </strong>Associate Professor<strong></strong></p><p>Chalmers University of Technology</p><p>Department of Energy and Environment</p><p>Division of Environmental System Analysis</p><p></p><p><strong>Joakim Krook, </strong>Associate Professor</p><p>Linköpings Universitet</p><p>Department of Management and Engineering (IEI) / Environmental Technology and Management (MILJÖ)</p><p></p><p><strong>Karl Johan Bonnedal, </strong>Associate Professor</p><p>Umeå University</p><p>Umeå School of Business and Economics (USBE)</p><p></p><p><strong>Sofia Ritzén</strong>, Professor</p><p>KTH Royal Institute of Technology</p><p>School of Industrial Engineering and Management</p><p>Department of Machine Design</p><p>Integrated Product Development</p><p>QC 20160405</p><p></p>

As the complexity of embedded systems grows, there is an increasing use of operating systems (OSes) in embedded devices, such as mobile phones, media players and other consumer electronics. Despite their convenience and flexibility, such operating systems can be overly general and contain features and code that are not needed in every application context, which incurs unnecessary performance overheads. In most embedded systems, resources, such as processing power, available memory, and power consumption, are strictly constrained. In particular, the amount of memory on embedded devices is often very limited. This, together with the popular usage of operating systems in embedded devices, makes it important to reduce the memory footprint of operating systems. This dissertation addresses this challenge and presents automated ways to reduce the memory footprint of OS kernels for embedded systems. First, we present kernel code compaction, an automated approach that reduces the code size of an OS kernel statically by removing unused functionality. OS kernel code tends to be different from ordinary application code, including the presence of a significant amount of hand-written assembly code, multiple entry points, implicit control flow paths involving interrupt handlers, and frequent indirect control flow via function pointers. We use a novel "approximated compilation" technique to apply source-level pointer analysis to hand-written assembly code. A prototype implementation of our idea on an Intel x86 platform and a minimally configured Linux kernel obtains a code size reduction of close to 24%.Even though code compaction can remove a portion of the entire OS kernel code, when exercised with typical embedded benchmarks, such as MiBench, most kernel code is executed infrequently if at all. Our second contribution is on-demand code loading, an automated approach that keeps the rarely used code on secondary storage and loads it into main memory only when it is needed. In order to minimize the overhead of code loading, a greedy node-coalescing algorithm is proposed to group closely related code together. The experimental results show that this approach can reduce memory requirements for the Linux kernel code by about 53%with little degradation in performance. Last, we describe dynamic data structure compression, an approach that reduces the runtime memory footprint of dynamic data structures in an OS kernel. A prototype implementation for the Linux kernel reduces the memory consumption of the slab allocators in Linux by 17.5%when running the MediaBench suite while incurring only minimal increases in execution time (1.9%).

Currently, World is facing global warming, which threats especially winter tourism. Many glaciers started to melt significantly as well as winter seasons get warmer and shorter in many ski areas (Gilaberte-Búrdaloa, et al., 2014). It is a really important issue and challenge especially for ski resorts. However, in spite of ski resorts there are also millions of tourists visiting ski destinations every year. Due to that it should also be important to all those winter enthusiasts to know and reduce their own impacts on environment, if they still want to enjoy snow-based sports and natural beauty of a mountain environment. Due to that, this study chosen to focus on emissions from ski trips seeing form the perspective of the skier in one of the most famous ski region in Sweden. The carbon footprint concept was used to calculate and compare four trips to different ski destinations such as Åre, Vemdalen, Frösön and Storulvån. From each trip the following factors where considered: emissions from production of ski equipment, emissions from skier travel, from purchased electricity in the ski resort and from consumption of fuel by vehicles on the slopes. At least six transportation scenarios per destination were created to investigate possible modes of transportation and their impacts. The results showed that the total amount of carbon footprint per skier differed among the trips from 74.01 kg to 2.40 kg of CO₂-eq. per skier depends on the transportation scenario and destination. It was concluded that skier travel can be a huge source of emissions depending on the distance to chosen destination and type of the transport. However, it was found out that impact from skier travel as well as from ski equipment can be reduced by individual’s choices. Moreover, it was also concluded that the fuel consumed by vehicles on the slopes had a significant impact in all ski resorts and it should become the major issue for ski resorts to find new solutions and practices, which would reduce the amount of emissions.. / <p>2016-08-30</p>

Phosphorus is a vital element that is currently being consumed in an unsustainable manner. The element is crucial to humanity's food supply systems. In this study, the amount of phosphorus required to meet an average Swedish household's annual consumption was calculated. The method for the report was based on a literature study along with calculations. The data collection was structured into five categories and 15 subcategories, each representing an influx of phosphorus to Swedish households. The study found that, based on these subcategories, the total phosphorus footprint for Swedish households' annual consumption is 16.36 kg. Food consumption accounts for the largest proportion of this footprint and amounts to 14.23 kg. Wool is the subcategory for which the highest concentration of phosphorus is consumed for each weight unit. Wool consumes about 0.43 kg of phosphorus for every kg of product. The report also examines and discusses various scenarios for how much phosphorus that could be saved if Swedish households were to follow a certain type of diet. Furthermore, a comparison was made between the phosphorus footprint of this report and other studies. The Swedish household's phosphorus footprint in this report is considerably higher than the corresponding phosphorus footprint in other studies. It is therefore important to consider the different definitions that the different studies use for their respective phosphorus footprint.

This bachelor thesis aims to decide the ecological footprint of a smartphone and examine the ways the production of asmartphone can be improved. This is done by examining the ecological and the social aspects that are related to theproduction of smartphones. We focused on the production of metals, because metals represent a major part of asmartphones environmental impact. Ten metals were chosen based on earlier studies regarding smartphonesenvironmental impact. These metals were aluminium, lead, gold, cobalt, copper, lithium, nickel, palladium, silver andrare earth metals. To be able to evaluate the metals, a Multiple-Criteria Decision Analysis (MCDA) was done. Sevenrelevant aspects were chosen: i) problem at production ii) health risk iii) Job opportunities iv) recycling v) CO2emission vi) use of land vii) use of water. For these aspects each metal was assigned a grade representing how criticalthe metal is regarding the specific aspect. The results show that land use and health risks when spillage in environmentare the aspects where the metals have the highest negative impact. Further, several metals were critical when it comesto environmental impact. For instance, cobalt mining involves bad working conditions, gold production contributes totoxic spillage in the environment and lithium requires large quantities of water. Opportunities of improvement thathave been identified is to further focus on recycling, improve the transparency regarding the manufacturing of asmartphone, as well as implementing life cycle assessment in the design of smartphones.

Personal information available online is known as a digital footprint. While many have a digital footprint, few if any, know what it encapsulates or how to control it. Technology and personal information are becoming more intertwined as technology becomes more integrated with everyday activities. Personal information can be defined as details that apply to a person such as race or shopping habits. Shopping habits are considered personal information by many corporations who spend money to track, or even predict purchases of individuals, whereas more traditional forms of personal information are details like gender, birthdate, and home town. With a wide breadth of personal information available, not all of it is equally valuable or personally unique. This project is dedicated to determining the content and size of a digital footprint, and assessing its impact for an individual by defining the discoverability of that content.

Is the biggest tideland reclamation project in the world (the STRP) sustainable? Since 1991, the STRP which aims at converting mudflats into 401 km2 farmland and industrial complex has been carried out in the southwestern coast of South Korea. I designed a comparative study between two neighboring rural townships with nearly identical social and ecological features except that one is within the project area and no longer has mudflats, and the other is outside of the project area and has retained its mudflats (an important source of clams). This dissertation answers the question above by comparing, sustainable development indicators and quality of life indicators in the two townships. I expected to find that people living in the township within the project area would be more sustainable because they have gone through with the environment versus development controversy in their own villages and many of them participated in person in protests with the national/local environmental movement organizations. This study uses one of the best known consumption-based sustainable development indicators (SDIs) - Personal Ecological Footprint (PEF), combined with the ethnographic data from the two townships (Gyehwa-township and Simwon-township) – to demonstrate that the PEF values of the two townships appear to be the same and the status of quality of life is quite similar. As an explanation of the unexpected result, this study contends that the level of sustainable development of the people in the in-project area (Gyehwa-township) has been more affected by nation-wide economic development trajectory than by a major regional development project (the STRP). The first stage of the STRP - the construction of the dykes - has brought about a significant effect of displacement, which cannot be said to be sustainable. However, the total influence on sustainable development in South Korea by the STRP will be determined by the progress of the second stage - internal development.

Energy economy in mobile devices is becoming an increasinglyimportant factor as the devices become more advancedand rich in features. A large part of the energy footprint of amobile device comes from the wireless communication module,and even more so as the amount of trac increases.In this paper we study the energy footprint of a mobilebroadband hardware module, and how it is aected by software,by performing systematic power consumption measurements.We show that there are several cases where thesoftware does not properly take into account the eect thatdata communication has on the power consumption. Thisopens up for potential energy savings by creating better applicationsthat are aware of the energy characteristics of thecommunication layer.

I och med Sveriges åtaganden i Baltic Sea Action Plan (BSAP) och de miljökvalitetsnormer (MKN) som beskrivs i ramdirektivet för vatten kommer Käppalaverket sannolikt ställas inför strängare kväve- och fosforreningskrav. Käppala kan då bli tvungna att införa en ny processlösning t.ex. efterdenitrifikation och förfällning. Hur detta kommer att påverka det totala koldioxidavtrycket utreds i denna rapport. Tidigare har stora energiutredningar utförts på verket men aldrig har ett samlat koldioxidavtryck dokumenterats. En kartläggning över Käppalaverkets totala koldioxidavtryck 2011 gjordes för att skapa en referens för framtida modellering. Utvärderingen visade att Käppalaverkets totala koldioxidavtryck var 16 kg CO2,ek/pe, år. Ryaverket, som gjort en liknande utredning, hade ett totalt koldioxidavtryck runt noll. Det höga koldioxidavtrycket för Käppalaverket, jämfört med Ryaverket, beror framförallt på den höga lustgasemissionen från aktivslambassängen. Under hösten 2012 utfördes mätningar av lustgas för att få fram ett nyckeltal på bildad lustgas per reducerad kväve. Mätningarna visade på en relativt hög lusgasbildning 1,7 % bildad lustgas per reducerad kväve. För att ge svar på vad den nya processlösningen med strängare reningskrav skulle innebära för koldioxidavtrycket, kalibrerades och utvidgades den befintliga reningsverksmodellen Benchmark Simulation Model no.2 (BSM2). I utvidgningen av BSM2 inkluderades beskrivningar över hur Käppalas processer bidrar till koldioxidavtrycket. För att uppnå de nya reningskraven kan dagens fördenitrifikation kompletteras med en efterdenitrifikation och dagens simultanfällning ersättas med förfällning. Modellens biologi kalibrerades med två perioder, ett sommarflöde och ett höstflöde. Sedan simulerades 2011 för att ha ett referensvärde att jämföra framtida simuleringar med. Förfällning visade sig ge en ökad biogasproduktion som bidrog starkt till ett minskat avtryck. Däremot bidrog den ökade energiförbrukningen och lustgasemissionen i den biologiska reningen till ett ökat avtryck. Simuleringen med dagens rening gav ett koldioxidavtryck på cirka 14 kg CO2/pe, år och framtidens processlösning för ökad kväve- och fosforrening gav ett nästan dubbelt så stort avtryck, 26 kg CO2/pe, år. Kostnaden för den totala reningen uttryckt i koldioxidekvivalenter blir i framtiden 4,2 kg CO2/NRED mot dagens 2,5 kg CO2/NRED. En simulering av strängare reningskrav samt ökad flödesbelastning från dagens 440 000 pe till 700 000 pe visade på svårigheter att uppnå de nya reningskraven. Reningskraven kunde inte hållas under de högflödesperioder som uppkom under året på grund av slamflykt från eftersedimenteringarna. Utformningen av reningskraven är betydelsefull för branschen som helhet. Samtliga simuleringar visar svårigheter att hålla kvävekravet vid vårfloden. Det är därför av stor betydelse om kraven formuleras på årsbasis eller om de formuleras månadsvis för att reningsverken ska klara de nya kraven. / In accordance with the Baltic Sea Action Plan (BSAP) and the EU water framework directive the Käppala waste water treatment plant (WWTP) could face more stringent discharge limits for phosphorous and nitrogen. To meet these limits Käppala has to change the treatment process, for example implement pre-precipitation and post-denitrification. The effect of more stringent discharge limits on the carbon footprint has not been studied at Käppala WWTP and will be studied in this report. In 2011 a static summary of the carbon footprint was made and serves as a reference for modeling. The evaluation showed that the total carbon footprint of Käppala was approximately 16 kg CO2/pe, yr. At the Rya WWTP in Gothenburg a similar study indicated a carbon footprint of 0 kg CO2/pe, yr. The difference between Käppala WWTP and Rya WWTP is explained by the large nitrous oxide emission from the activated sludge process at Käppala WWTP. During autumn 2012 the nitrous oxide emission was measured in one treatment line at Käppala, in order to get a standard value to use in the model. The measurements showed that 1.7 % of the removed nitrogen was emitted as nitrous oxide gas. An existing model, Benchmark Simulation Model no.2 (BSM2), was extended to model the effect on the carbon footprint with a future process configuration due to more stringent discharge limits. Every process that affects the carbon footprint was described by equations to simulate the emissions from the different treatment processes regarding energy consumption, chemical consumption and transport. In order to meet the new demands, current biological and chemical water treatment with pre- denitrification and simultaneous precipitation was substituted with combined pre and post denitrification and pre precipitation. The calibration of the model was made for two periods in 2011. When the suggested process configuration, with post-denitrification and pre-precipitation, was implemented it showed that the pre- precipitation increased the production of biogas and therefore decreased the carbon footprint. However, the increased nitrous oxide emission and the increased energy consumption due to the more stringent limits resulted in an increased footprint. A simulation of existing and future process configuration showed that the total footprint would increase from approximately 14 kg CO2/pe, year to 26 kg CO2/pe, year. The cost for the extra nitrogen removal would increase from 2.5 kg CO2/NRED to 4.2 kg CO2/NRED. The simulations showed that more stringent limits and increased load from 440 000 pe to 700 000 pe could be met at “normal” flow. At wet weather flow however, the process became unstable with high concentrations of effluent organic nitrogen as a result. A big question for the industry is the design of these new limits for phosphorous and nitrogen. It is of great importance whether the new limits are based on a yearly or monthly average.

Once considered a 'green' industry, tourism and its associated ecological impacts are now widely acknowledged. Focus within tourism planning has aimed to reduce the ecological burden placed on a destination area, and move towards a more sustainable tourism industry. This research proposes the use of the Ecological Footprint (EF) as a tool to compare the ecological costs of different types of tourism. The EF shows the relative amount of productive land appropriated by the activities and choices of an individual tourist. The main goal of this study was to analyse and compare the ecological resource use of tourism in Ontario. Surveys were conducted with tourists staying at 9 different types of accommodations throughout Ontario. Additional data were collected from personal interviews with accommodation managers at each location and incorporated into the EF calculation. Four areas of tourism ecological impact were identified; tourists' personal consumption, transportation, activity, and accommodation costs. These four components contributed in varying degrees to each tourist Ecological Footprint, and this variation became the main area of analysis. The findings of this research demonstrated that air travel contributes significantly to the total ecological cost of a particular tourism experience. Comparably, travel by personal car made a much smaller contribution to the tourist EF. Thus, local area tourists who could drive to a destination had a smaller EF than those long-distance domestic and international tourists who flew. Accommodation ecological costs were primarily a factor of the amount of built space available, and total energy usage per guest. Accommodations that had a large number of occupants for a given area and level of energy consumption achieved a scale of efficiency. In this manner, larger, more efficiently constructed accommodations often made smaller contributions to the tourist EF than small-scale, but inefficient accommodations. The main conclusion was that the ecological impacts of tourism can be quantitatively recorded, and that a complete trip view of tourism ecological resource use is necessary. When considering practical applications in the tourism industry, an Ecological Footprint analysis could be used by tourism managers as an evaluative tool to compare the ecological outcome of various construction, programming, and operational changes. For the tourist, the EF can serve as an 'eco-label', to distinguish one type of 'green' tourism from another, creating a more informed consumer. Ultimately, the Ecological Footprint serves one purpose- to demonstrate that less ecologically consumptive tourism choices are possible for both tourists and tourism managers.