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The contractual relationship between the processing firm and the broiler smallholder presents incessant conflicts of interest and inequality due to technical and economic discrepancies, leading to an undervaluation of the producers' remuneration. This study aims to deepen the discussion on searching for a more balanced monetary exchange between processing firms and broiler smallholders based on scientific aspects. For this, the emergy theory and its concepts are used while considering a representative broiler production system at Concórdia, Brazil. The results indicate the importance of including cultural information in the emergy-based model calculation, which achieved the highest emergy contribution (~63%; transformity = 1.73 ×   10 8 sej/J) for the broiler smallholder. On the other hand, the cultural information was not sufficient to increase the sustainability of the broiler production system. The results show an imbalance in the monetary exchange between the processing firm and broiler smallholder from both perspectives (the economic and emergy-based ones), which indicates higher values (USD 0.32/broiler and EmUSD 1.62/broiler) than the practiced payment value of USD 0.24/broiler. Evaluating the "(eco)cost" from an emergy-based accounting perspective recognizes that production depends not only on tangible physical resources but also on knowledge, skills and information ("iceberg of value" thinking). Policy and decision makers must therefore consider the promotion of public policies that subside initiatives, including social and environmental welfare programs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Several regions have struggled to define and implement strategic priorities to ensure resource supply security and environmental, economic, and social sustainability. The circular economy is gaining more and more importance as one of the forms of transition towards a sustainable future that integrates, in a balanced way, economic performance, social inclusion, and environmental resilience, for the benefit of current and future generations. In light of the challenges of solving or avoiding future problems, the G20 bloc created proposals and action plans to support the transition towards a more circular economic model while at the same time fostering discussions on the implementation of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. Therefore, the main objective of this study is to monitor and compare the performance of 19 countries in the G20 bloc (the 20th member is the European Union) from 2000 to 2020 to assess their progress toward environmental, economic, and social sustainability supported by the CE principles. To achieve this objective, the five sectors sustainability model was used and was supported by goal programming as a multicriteria analysis tool generating a synthetic sustainability indicator to assist decision making. The results showed that the countries with the best overall sustainable performance (environmental, economic, and social) in 2020 were Canada (which also occupied the best position in 2000), Australia, Italy, the United Kingdom, and the United States, while Argentina, South Africa, India, Indonesia, and China showed lower sustainability. The results can serve as a reference for decision making by stakeholders in designing policies and incentives to encourage the adoption of the circular economy and boost economic development without compromising welfare or the environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Humans are exposed to several chemical substances during their regular daily activities that can be harmful even in low quantities. Accounting for the mass of a given released chemical may not be appropriate for the assessment of its toxicological impact. To overcome the lack of a systemic perspective of mass-based assessments, methods such as the chemical footprint (ChF) are an alternative to account for a given chemical's environmental and human toxicological impacts, a task that is considered essential in order to achieve the Agenda 2030 for sustainability. Among others, persistent organic pollutants (POP) should receive attention due to their high potential impact. Using the USEtox model to estimate indicators of human health impact, this study proposes an approach to calculate ChF for dioxins and furans and applies it to Brazil as a case study. The USEtox model quantifies human health impacts from the characterization of factors of a given chemical. Results show that ChF for dioxins and furans is approximately 620 DALY, representing a potential loss of 620 years of life in the Brazilian population. Social costs related to dioxins and furans emissions achieved USD 30 million, translating into monetary values not found in the existing literature. Besides highlighting the impacts of chemical emissions on the Brazilian population, this work contributes to the advances in methods for quantifying more appropriately such impacts beyond the exclusive use of mass units, in turn supporting sustainability-related public policies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An ecological footprint is an accounting tool that reports the balance between resource supply and demand to assess environmental sustainability. Among the many available indicators of social progress, happiness reflects how a person feels about their quality of life. We combined these two approaches to assess the ecological efficiency of social performance in the low-income community of Felicidade, in São Paulo, Brazil, in 2019. We assessed the ecological footprint and gross domestic happiness (GDH) through questionnaires. We found that the community has a lower environmental footprint than higher-income communities in Brazil. However, the per capita ecological footprint in the community is still above what is available per person globally. We found that the community has a high level of life satisfaction (GDH = 0.86) and that the main contributor to happiness is health, time use, psychological wellbeing, education, good governance, and community vitality. The results suggest that other contributors unrelated to income are more robust determinants of happiness. In Brazil, despite higher footprints characterizing higher-income communities, further efforts in low-income communities are needed to reduce environmental footprints, ensure dignified income, and nurture the underlying conditions for high levels of happiness and social capital. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Petrochemicals, which convert oil and gas into products such as plastics, are fundamental to modern societies. Chemists recognize their role in designing materials and the adverse effects that these may have on the environment, preventing sustainable development. Several methodological frameworks and sustainability assessment approaches have been developed to evaluate the resources used in the petrochemical sector in terms of environmental costs. Still, there is a need to evaluate these systems in terms of environmental costs deeply. A combination of life cycle assessment and emergy accounting—to assess the environmental support for resource use—is applied in this study of the PET production chain in Europe. The unit emergy values of several intermediates are calculated or updated to facilitate the discernment of the quality of energy used and the processes' efficiency. Several routes for synthesizing renewable para-xylene and ethylene glycol from biomass are discussed and confronted with the efforts focused on recycling and recovering the final product, providing concurrently a procedure and a valuable data set for future CP actions. The results show that understanding the efficiencies changing across the production chain may help stakeholders decide where and when interventions to promote a circular economy are most effective along a petrochemical production chain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Water and wastewater treatment plants are essential for the supply of drinking water for consumption and the treatment of effluents produced by human/industrial activities. However, few studies deal with the investments and sustainability of these services, which consider both the contribution of nature and society. This study uses the emergy approach to evaluate a wastewater treatment plant located in the northeastern part of Romania, in Iași city. An assessment of the environmental costs of natural fluxes required for the treatment processes was performed, considering that the treated effluent is, still, loaded with contaminants that have to be absorbed by the receiving water natural system. The work done by nature to assimilate this load, generally considered free, is esteemed as a further cost in the total emergy budget of the wastewater treatment processes. The sustainability perspective was approached by calculating and analyzing the emergy yield ratio (EYR), environmental load rate (ELR), and emergy sustainability development index (ESI). The use of local renewable natural resources in Iași municipal wastewater treatment plants is negligible (1.71% of the total plant emergy budget), as compared to that of the purchased resources (98.29% of the total plant emergy budget) mainly processed with the support of fossil fuels' generated energy. The unit emegy value was, also, calculated and compared to other studies relevant for wastewater treatment plants. The analysis suggests that the large amount of emergy that wastewater contains is proportional to the number of resources employed for wastewater treatment and the extensive effects on surrounding ecosystems, where wastewater is discharged. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Family farming is a lifestyle and agricultural base that has ensured food for the world's growing population in addition to the family's own subsistence. However, the intensification of production processes to primarily generate exportable surpluses is based on the constant input of industrial inputs of low local socioeconomic viability. This study aims to evaluate the sustainability of family farms and their impact on the adoption of homeopathy instead of traditional/conventional intensification techniques. The study was conducted at six family farms located in the Serrana Mesoregion, Santa Catarina, Brazil, and include farms were classified according to the management and representativeness of their agricultural activity, i.e., conventional grains-cattle, milk-grains, grains and diversified, and according to their ecological basis, i.e., agroecological and organic. To discuss the sustainability of the family farms that were evaluated, the of metrics emergy synthesis, ecotoxicity potential and socioeconomic indicators are used. The results indicate that conventional diversified property has the best overall performance with regard to sustainability, including emergy yield ratio (EYR 1.88), emergy investment ratio (EIR 1.13), return on assets (1.22), hourly income of work (36.6 BRL/h) and income sufficiency (3.3). Agroecological and organic properties have better performance in renewability (76% and 75%), environmental load (ELR = 0.32 and 0.34), sustainability (ESI = 4.78 and 3.5) and potential ecotoxicity (1.736 and 1.579 kg 1.4 DCB-eq/ha). The contribution of homeopathy in an alternative scenario results in a 19% reduction in nonrenewable flows in conventional management properties and a decrease of up to 91% in ecotoxicity in grain + cattle properties. Using homeopathy, the return on assets and profit margin can be increased by up to 43% and income per hour of work and income sufficiency can be increased by 20% and 16%, respectively. This study contributes to discussions about the importance of using homeopathic therapies as a viable strategy that can be used in strategic public policy plans to improve the sustainability of family farms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The world's water resources are under pressure due to human activities. The challenges surrounding water resources management include enhancing long-term water security and minimizing undesirable economic, social, and environmental impacts, along with the production chain. Since water and wastewater treatment plants are designed to maintain and conserve freshwater provisioning services, understanding how they operate—prior to proposing options for sustainability—is of paramount importance. The diagnostic phase calls for scientifically-based, systemic, and more objective methods to provide information for decision-makers regarding strategic management of water resources. This work applied the FIVE SEctor SUstainability (5SEnSU) model to assess twenty major water and wastewater treatment companies (WWTC) in Brazil, to quantify sustainability levels that allowed ranking procedures, and to establish benchmarks for improvements. On a comparative basis, the results identified the top-three sustainable companies—CORSAN, CASAN, and SANEPAR—which should be considered as examples of best practices. Specifically, the following best-ranked companies in each sector within 5SEnSU should be used as benchmark patterns for more oriented best practices: SANEAGO, sector 1; AGESPISA, sector 2; CORSAN, sector 3; CASAL, sector 4; MA, sector 5. This work contributes toward the advancement of sustainability assessment modeling in human-managed systems (applied in WWTCs in this present study) from systemic- and epistemologically-rooted approaches, avoiding shortcomings and misleading discussions on the sustainability issue. Quantifying sustainability of WWTCs using the 5SEnSU model allows for the identification of those sectors/indicators that require immediate cleaner production practices by decision-makers, to improve overall sustainability, as well as to identify which companies are more aligned with the requirements of UN SDGs. The decision-makers would be able to visualize balanced or unbalanced relationships among all sectors and propose actions that would improve the performance in a given sector, realizing what effects a given action would cause in the other sectors of the system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The COVID-19 crisis has highlighted how inadequately prepared humanity is to manage global disasters. Conversely, this crisis also offers an exceptional opportunity to move towards a more equitable and sustainable future. This paper explores three stimuli that can lead people to the change towards sustainable Post-COVID-19 societies: crises, knowledge, and alternative paradigms. From a theoretical approach, the paper addresses the roles of each stimulus and the capacity they may have, individually or together, to encourage the debate about the relationship between environmental conditions and human crisis. This study contributes to the discussions on the importance of strategic transformations of the global consumption and production systems. It takes this unique opportunity to move towards a more sustainable future. Moreover, it urges that this transformation process be articulated with alternative paradigms that seek to go beyond inequalities, conflicts, imbalanced development, and ecological deterioration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Increasing economic and population growth has put immense pressure on energy, water and land resources to satisfy national and supra-national demand. Through trade, a large proportion of such a demand is fulfilled. With trade as one of its key priorities, the China Belt and Road Initiative is a long-term transcontinental investment program. The initiative gained significant attention due to greater opportunities for economic development, large population and different levels of resource availability. The nexus approach has appeared as a new viewpoint in discussions on balancing the competing sectoral demands. However, following years of work, constraints exist in the scope and focus of studies. The newly developed multi-regional input–output (MRIO) models covering the world's economy and its use of resources permit a comprehensive analysis of resource usage by production and consumption at different levels, and bring more knowledge about resource nexus problems. Using the MRIO model, this work simultaneously tracks energy, water and land use flows and investigates the transnational resource nexus. A nexus strength indicator is proposed which depends on ternary diagrams to grade countries based on their combined resources' use and sectoral weighting. Equal sectoral weighting is assigned. The analysis presented a sectorally balanced nexus approach. Findings support existing work by recognizing energy, water and land as the robust transnational connections, from both production and consumption points of view. Resource nexus issues differ from country to country owing to inequalities in industrial set-up, preferences in economic policy and resource endowments. The paper outlines how key resource nexus problems can be identified and prioritized in view of alternative and often opposing interests. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]