The CSTM domain Sustainable Production and Consumption comprises five areas for special attention. In the area of “Environmental policy approaches and their effectiveness”, CSTM researchers analyse ways of changing governmental sustainability strategies towards environmental governance, industrial production and consumption.
“Networks and organizations for sustainable development” concentrates on multi-actor/network constellations joining forces and working together in the greening of industry. Furthermore, corporate collaborative strategies of companies are objects of research, especially when network approaches and capacity-building partnerships are used for increasing corporate and product legitimacy.
The firm-level mitigation of environmental impacts of products and production processes – the greening of industry – describes the theme “Environmental management and sustainability at the firm level/Greening of Industry”. This includes among others corporate environmental strategy and environmental management systems. Besides, this area includes topics such as market development/preparation for new products, technologies or services.
Opportunities for better environmental quality that come with socio-economic development and innovations are addressed in the theme of “Green Economy and Eco-innovations”. To decrease social costs and benefits while reducing natural resource use and industrial pollution is at the theme’s heart.
Finally, the theme “Sustainable development” focuses on smart ways for balancing the social, environmental and economic dimensions of sustainable development. For example, the projects “Building with Nature” and “NatureCoast” are long-term research programmes aimed at development and application of new design concepts for the layout and sustainable management of wet infrastructure.
Current projects
- Diffuse Irradiance Redirector for Efficient ConcenTration (DIRECT)
The Section of Governance and Technology for Sustainability (CSTM) is looking for the following profiles to be part of the DIRECT Project (Diffuse Irradiance Redirector for Efficient ConcenTration), the framework of Innovations for Wind and Solar Energies.
DIRECT´s aim is to optimize PV energy yields to reduce environmental impacts and costs and
provide societal benefits. Through developing novel metamaterials, yield modeling, and field testing, investigating the societal embedding for application scenarios, and assessing the sustainability along the entire lifecycle, we will determine the socio-technical feasibility of DIRECT.Life Cycle Assessment (LCA), Social Life Cycle Assessment (S-LCA), and Costing Life Cycle Assessment (C-LCA) will be the methodologies implemented to estimate environmental, social, and cost indicators in the PV energy production system. Circular economic indicators and criticality evaluation will be evaluated parallel as well.
Consortium: as co-funders of the solar project developer Next2Sun GmbH and AmperaPark and the Energiecoöperatie Haaksbergen. Collaborating partners: Saxion Uni. of Applied Sciences, Netherlands, NovelT.
Link for further information:
Key publications
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S254243512400045X
Additional online material
- Overhead vs. vertical agrivoltaics – pv magazine International (pv-magazine.com)
- Agri-PV - Next2Sun and partner build first vertical agri-PV system in the US (pveurope.eu)
Contact
- Managing telecoupled landscapes in Myanmar, Laos and Madagascar
The debate about Sustainable Development Goals following the United Nations “Rio+20” reveals the difficulty of simultaneously addressing social and economic development challenges and the degradation of Earth’s life support systems. Land systems in the humid tropics illustrate these challenges prominently. Local people’s land use strategies are facing competition from large-scale land acquisition, logging etc., but also biodiversity conservation. Remote decision-makers reshape flows of ecosystem services to their benefit, whereas the consequences hardly reach them. Land change scientists have recently conceptualized this phenomenon under the term “telecoupling”. The project within the Swiss Programme for Research on Global Issues for Development (r4d programme) pursues the overall goal of devising and testing innovative strategies and institutional arrangements for securing ecosystem service flows and human well-being in and between telecoupled landscapes at study sites in Laos, Myanmar, and Madagascar.
More information
Project website: https://www.telecoupling.unibe.ch
Videos: Cash crops: Opportunity or Challenge? Voices from Maroantsetra region, MadagascarKey publications
Andriamihaja, O. R., Metz, F., Zaehringer, J. G., Fischer, M., & Messerli, P. (2021). Identifying agents of change for sustainable land governance. Land use policy, 100 [104882]. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.landusepol.2020.104882
Pham-Truffert, M., Metz, F. A., Fischer, M., Rueff, H., & Messerli, P. (2020). Interactions among Sustainable Development Goals: Knowledge for identifying multipliers and virtuous cycles. Sustainable development, 28(5), 1236-1250. https://doi.org/10.1002/sd.2073
Andriamihaja, O. R., Metz, F., Zaehringer, J. G., Fischer, M., & Messerli, P. (2019). Land Competition under Telecoupling: Distant Actors’ Environmental versus Economic Claims on Land in North-Eastern Madagascar. Sustainability, 11(3). https://doi.org/10.3390/su11030851
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- SATIN (Sustainable Assessment of Textile Industry) (2018-2024)
SATIN is a theoretical framework translated into a web application. The tool serves to guide textile companies, particularly SMEs, in their transition towards sustainable production patterns. Generates a diagnosis in the dimensions of environmental, social, economic and business management and guidelines for the establishment of continuous improvement strategies. It was developed as part of a PhD project at CSTM with the collaboration of Laura Franco and Michiel Heldeweg.
Link for further information
Key publications
Luján-Ornelas, C., Franco-Garcia, M. L., Heldeweg, M., & Bressers, H. (2024). Developing SATIN, a Sustainability Assessment Tool for Textile Industry. In 3rd Sustainable Textile and Fashion Congress, STFC 2024.
Additional online information
https://watch.wave.video/Np85WaUVTmi7fe9d
Contact
- The role of informal practices in convivial post-growth rural lifestyles (2019 - 2024)
Socio-economic precarity in Japan’s shrinking society has given rise to a range of alternative lifestyles that reject contemporary ideas of work and market dependency. One common feature of these “convivial” lifestyles are informal food practices (IFPs) and ways of food self-provisioning, such as gardening, wild food procurement, and food processing and sharing. Despite many modern-day pressures for them to disappear, IFPs continue to exist for a reason, but explanations as to why this is the case are lacking. This research will catalogue the range and diversity of IFPs performed as part of convivial lifestyles in rural communities popular with in-migrants as sites of experimentation with rural living. This will clarify how IFPs 1) contribute to peoples’ well-being and livelihoods as well as 2) inform and improve policy and planning related to IFPs to strengthen local food economies. Results will create a new research space on social practices, well-being, and food policy.
More information
Project information in KAKEN database: https://kaken.nii.ac.jp/en/grant/KAKENHI-PROJECT-19K15931/
Contact
- Socio-technical pathways and material choices for a responsible electrification of the production of chemicals and fuels (2022-2025)
New types of electrochemical processes and electrolysers are expected to contribute to a transition towards more sustainable ‘green’ chemicals based on electricity from renewables. This project studies possible socio-technical configurations and pathways for selected applications (such as bio-oil upgrading, synthesis of common chemical compounds, wastewater recycling), and assesses the environmental and societal implications related to the choice of materials involved, such as electrocatalysts, electrolyser materials and produced compounds, that will be developed in a closely linked ECCM project. It takes a long-term perspective by not only scrutinizing present application scenarios and anticipating potential future socio-technical pathways, but also extending our perspective into the recent past, learning from challenges and failures in preceding innovation trajectories. In particular, the project considers the challenges and opportunities related to the embedding of the envisaged applications in current and changing structures of the related sectors, such as the chemical industry, energy, or wastewater, with a focus on multi-sector settings and directions for more decentralized processes. Methodologically, the project connects approaches from constructive technology assessment and lifecycle thinking as means to integrate sustainability criteria and the perspectives of a broad set of stakeholders in the anticipation and assessment of possible application pathways, and it proceeds in a highly integrated manner with ongoing electrochemical research, mutually adjusting research agendas and reflecting on implications for design. In this way, the project will help to develop societally viable and responsible electrochemical processes and applications which can contribute to ‘greening’ the chemical industry in the Netherlands and beyond.
Further information
NWO ECCM MVI Top-up call Granted to Dr. Marco Altomare (utwente.nl)
Key publications
Contact
- The role of sustainable business networks in mainstreaming a circular economy Africa (2022-2026)
Despite participation of many firms and institutions in sustainable business networks, there is little evidence to suggest the causal effects of improved sustainability performance are exclusively due to network participation. It is not clear as to whether participation in networks has significant impacts on the uptake of CE practices. This research aims to assess the role of sustainable business networks in promoting a circular Economy in Africa. It assesses, roles of networks, activities, information dissemination, network governance, power dynamics, business models, barriers, success factors, challenges, opportunities and recommends approaches to scaling up the effectiveness of networks. The key questions which arise in this discourse are related to how networks impact on Circular Economy uptake in SMEs; whether formulating networks will be the panacea to sustainability challenges affecting industries in the developing world and if this is the case how the networks be constituted and oriented.
Despite multiple research projects on the nature, function and effects of networks there are still knowledge gaps regarding the success factors for network management and collaborations in multiple contexts. The focus of this research is to assess the role of networks and develop a networking model for sustainable business networks in Africa. Furthermore, it will identify the success factors for network activities and recommend effective strategies for sustainable business networking in African countries. Key researcher of the University of Twente involved in the project include Tawanda Collins Muzamwese.
Promoters: Michiel Heldeweg, Laura Franco-Garcia and Kris Lulofs.
Key publications
A total of 3 publications have been produced so far based on this research in reputable international journals.
https://wires.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdfdirect/10.1002/wene.506
https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007/s43615-023-00315-9.pdf
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.clcb.2023.100071
Picture: Tawanda Collins Muzamwese (University of Twente, PhD Candidate standing right) standing in front of a truck with waste bales alongside Mr Tawanda Masuka (Chief Operating Officer of PETRECOZIM after completing Case Study Interviews at a waste recycling networks.
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- Social system and policy towards regeneration of agri-food system from local perspectives in post-Corona era (2021 - 2026)
Food and agriculture in Japan are caught between global issues such as global environmental problems and internal issues such as the consistent regression of domestic agricultural production. The recent coronavirus pandemic has made the future image even more uncertain. This comparative study regards the coronavirus pandemic as a turning point in the revitalization of the food and agriculture systems, and aims at embedding new policy ideas and frameworks in local policies as social institutions, while comprehensively mobilizing local socio-historical, comparative sociocultural, and socio-practical research methods to explore future social forms of linking food production and consumption.
More information
Project information in KAKEN database: https://kaken.nii.ac.jp/en/grant/KAKENHI-PROJECT-21H04745/
Contact
- Renewable Building Blocks from Complex and wet waste Streams (ReBBloCS) (2023-2027)
This project aims at providing industry with circular and biobased bulk and platform chemicals new value chains. These latter need to be developed where waste sources (agro/food residues, mixed biomass/plastic, sludges etc) are converted by innovative technologies (based on hydrolysis, pyrolysis & gasification) into new chemicals. These chemicals can be used to replace current fossil based chemicals. ReBBloCS will develop these value chains in collaboration with relevant stakeholders (private sector, technology providers & knowledge institutes). A decision tool considering the full value chains in terms of social, economic & environmental impacts will help to determine which route towards a specific chemical can be a better option. Dr. Laura Franco-Garcia supervises a PhD candidate who is assessing the social and environmental effects of the treatment routes.
Link for further information
Breaking down waste and building it up like lego - Stories (utwente.nl)
Contact
Selection of past projects
- ELSE aspects of human-robot interaction in the classroom (ELSE-HRIC) (2023)
A key question in human-robot interaction concerns the implications that the cognitive pairing with the robot’s AI and mechanical components has for core human dimensions, such as emotions, identity, trust, anthropomorphism, and dependability. Moreover, as autonomous systems are deployed to perform real-world functions, the issue is not just about human-robot interaction from a consumer perspective; it is also about the interaction between robot and decision maker, as well as about the indirect interaction with a potentially large amount of people without their direct involvement. As a consequence, several ethical aspects merit attention, as well as how they can be translated to legal, regulatory, social terms. At the same time, the degree of cognitive pairing between humans and robots has led to hybrid epistemology, with open questions on what knowledge about the world do machines produce, how it relates to human knowledge, and what the resulting epistemological flow is.
In order to help the new generations of students and future professionals understand and address these crucial issues, the applicants have developed the new course “Ethics and Epistemology of AI” (OSIRIS code 202200010) as part of the Master’s in Philosophy of Science, Technology and Society. The course gives a systematic introduction to the ethics and epistemology of AI and robotics in the context of a larger debate in the humanities. Given the rapidly growing use of AI and robotics in various social spheres as well as its largely experimental nature, there is a pressing need for a responsible stance towards the design and implementation of this technology.
We aim to apply DesignLab’s responsible futuring approach to our course from a citizen science perspective, in a way that humanities and social science topics are treated hands-on with technology. We will acquire and use in the classroom two robotic systems as learning material, for demonstration and prototyping activities. We use a humanoid robot as an accessible entry point to classic embodied artificial intelligence and a means for the teachers to introduce essential ethical and epistemological entry points. Distributed intelligence follows via use of swarm robots as an entry point to the radically alternative paradigm of swarm intelligence, with a set of largely unexplored implications. In parallel, we use swarms to demonstrate embodied machine learning in real-time.
Additional online material
Key publications
- Our new approach has been operational since 2023 in two master programmes: Robotics, and Philosophy of Science, Technology, and Society.
- A peer-reviewed article is under preparation that documents the new approach.
Contact
- FEAST - Lifeworlds of Sustainable Food Consumption and Production: Agrifood Systems in Transition (2016-2021)
The FEAST Project takes a transdisciplinary approach to explore the realities and potential for sustainable agrifood transition at sites in Japan, Thailand, Bhutan, and China with significance for the entire region. We analyze patterns of food consumption, food-related social practices and their socio- cultural meanings, and consumer-based agency to change deeply-held cultural dimensions. We map and evaluate food systems specific to national, regional, and local production, distribution, and consumption contexts. Building upon that work, we engage in action research to partner with stakeholders to vision desirable and plausible futures and to initiate food citizenship-oriented experiments and actions. FEAST co-designs and co-produces socially-robust knowledge and mechanisms that challenge mainstream economic thinking on consumption and growth, work to redefine the notion of long- term food security at the regional level, and engage society in a public debate on our relationship with food and nature that questions shared beliefs and values to reacclimatize consumers as citizens and co-producers in the foodscapes around them.
The FEAST Project was developed, funded, and conducted at the Research Institute for Humanity and Nature (RIHN), Kyoto, Japan, one of the National Institutes for Humanities (NIHU). At its conclusion, FEAST was inaugurated as a non-profit organization in 2021 and continues to conduct research to solve environmental and social problems and support transdisciplinary efforts in local sustainable food policy and education.
More information
Project website: www.feastproject.org
Project information via the Research Institute for Humanity and Nature: https://www.chikyu.ac.jp/rihn_e/project/2016-01.html
Video: RIHN 15th International Symposium "Transitioning Cultures of Everyday Food Consumption and Production- Stories from a Post-Growth Future"Key publications
McGreevy, S. R., Rupprecht, C. D. D., Niles, D., Wiek, A., Carolan, M., Kallis, G., Kantamaturapoj, K., Mangnus, A., Jehlička, P., Taherzadeh, O., Sahakian, M., Chabay, I., Colby, A., Vivero-Pol, J-L., Chaudhuri, R., Spiegelberg, M., Kobayashi, M., Balázs, B., Tsuchiya, K., ... Tachikawa, M. (2022). Sustainable agrifood systems for a post-growth world. Nature Sustainability. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41893-022-00933-5
Kantamaturapoj, K. , McGreevy, S., Thongplew, N., Akitsu, M., Vervoort, J., Mangnus, A., Ota, K., Rupprecht, C., Tamura, N., Spiegelberg, M., Kobayashi, M., Pongkijvorasin, S., & Wibulpolprasert, S. (2022). Constructing practice-oriented futures for sustainable urban food policy in Bangkok. Futures, 139, [102949]. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.futures.2022.102949
Vervoort, J. M., Milkoreit, M., van Beek, L., Mangnus, A. C., Farrell, D. , McGreevy, S., Ota, K., Rupprecht, C. D. D., Reed, J. B., & Huber, M. (2022). Not just playing: The politics of designing games for impact on anticipatory climate governance. Geoforum. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2022.03.009
Calo, A., McKee, A., Perrin, C., Gasselin, P. , McGreevy, S., Sippel, S. R., Desmarais, A. A., Shields, K., Baysse-Laine, A., Magnan, A., Beingessner, N., & Kobayashi, M. (2021). Achieving Food System Resilience Requires Challenging Dominant Land Property Regimes. Frontiers in Sustainable Food Systems, 5, [683544]. https://doi.org/10.3389/fsufs.2021.683544
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