Environmental impacts of household appliances in Europe and scenarios for their impact reduction

Assessing the environmental impact due to consumption of goods and services is a pivotal step towards achieving the sustainable development goal related to responsible production and consumption (i.e. SDG 12). Household appliances plays a crucial role and should be assessed in a systemic manner, namely considering all life cycle stages, technological efficiency, and affluence aspects. The present study assess the impact of such household appliances used in Europe, and tests scenarios of potential impact reduction at various scales. Life cycle assessment is applied to 14 different household appliances (ranging from dishwashers to television devices) selected to build a set of representative products, based on their economic value and diffusion in households in Europe. Related impacts are calculated with the Environmental Footprint method for calculating a Consumer Footprint “appliances” for the baseline year 2010. A number of scenarios encompassing eco-solutions on a technical level, changes in consumption pattern, behavioral changes, as well as the combination of all these aspects are run to estimate the Consumer Footprint related to household appliances for the year 2030, compared against this baseline scenario. The baseline Consumer Footprint is confirming the importance of the use phase in leading the impacts in almost all impact categories. Testing different scenarios concludes that there is a reduction of the impact for most of the categories (with up to 67% for the ozone depletion potential, and still around 35% for the global warming potential), while two of the here examined impact categories (i.e. land-use and mineral resource depletion) show an overall potential that is even negative – i.e. the results of all scenarios are higher than the ones of the 2010 baseline scenario. The increase in purchase and use of such appliances may offset energy efficiency benefits in some of the examined categories. Hence, the assessment of sustainability of appliances consumption should always include several scales, from the efficiency of the products (micro scale), to the improvement of the energy mix (meso scale), up to accounting for socio-economic drivers and patterns of consumption affecting the overall appliances stock (macro scale).     

昆明近郊"农家乐"旅游发展的优势与策略研究

目前,中国假日结构的调整导致人们集中出游,形成高峰性需求,造成交通运输压力的加大和资源配置的浪费。“农家乐”旅游的开发,不仅开发了新的旅游产品,拓展了旅游项目,还可缓解旅游热点地区假日旅游的压力。昆明近郊“农家乐”旅游发展有其特有的优势,但也存在不少问题,对其持续健康发展造成一定影响。促进昆明近郊“农家乐”旅游发展,提出相应的发展对策措施,有利于提高昆明乃至云南旅游业的整体文化品位,是适应全球旅游大发展形势的紧要举措。     

Responsible adults-in-the-making: Intergenerational impact of parental migration on Indonesian young women’s aspirational capacity

In the developing economies in Southeast Asia, labour migration is increasingly seen not simply to generate income to meet short-term livelihood needs but to secure the family’s future, often by investing in children’s education. While much work has been done studying the impact of parents’ remittances on children’s wellbeing including education access, the impact of parental migration on children’s (educational) aspirations has received less attention. Viewing youth as social actors, this paper interrogates how they make meaning of their parents’ migration, and how this consequently influences their decisions to activate, delay or reshape their hopes and plans for their own educational and work trajectories. With the increasing feminisation of labour migration in Southeast Asia where gendered regimes in care and domestic work make it easier for women to work overseas, this paper focuses attention on the aspirations of young women at the cusp of adulthood from a migrant-sending area in rural East Java, Indonesia. These young women’s ‘navigational capacity’ (Appadurai, 2004) is not only shaped by tangible obstacles such as the lack of sufficient resources, but is also more subtly moulded by an emerging discourse of self-responsibilisation in the making of ‘dutiful daughters’. Drawing on conceptualisations of multiple ‘logics of aspiring’ operating within spatial contexts (Zipin et al., 2015), we show how young women unsettle, inflect and challenge the normative linear education-work transitions by expressing their desire to replace their parents in accessing labour migration as a livelihood option, and reflect on the dialectical relationship between agency and aspirations.