Bark represents 10 % dry weight of spruce trees and is a major side stream from pulp production. Currently, pulp mills burn bark to produce energy with a low economic value, directly emitting biogenic carbon dioxide to the atmosphere. Biorefining bark using a continuous flow-through fractionation process generates high added-value compounds (tall oil, starch, phenol, and pulp) that allow for extended carbon storage durations. This study assesses the potential future environmental impacts of valorising bark instead of burning it. We conduct a LCA study combining a prospective consequential modelling perspective with an input-related functional unit and account for the effects of storing biogenic carbon in the bark-based products. Our findings show that biorefining bark maintains lower environmental impacts than combustion, reducing time-differentiated climate impacts by up to 30 %, but only when the carbon dioxide used for pulping is recirculated and the fractionation processes are integrated with a co-located pulp mill supplying surplus waste energy, considered to have no associated environmental impacts. Storing biogenic carbon for a longer period of time has a positive effect on mitigating short-term climate impacts. However, our analysis reveals that while time-dependent climate impacts decrease, there is an increase in human toxicity and ecotoxicity impacts, with combustion performing better in these categories. This highlights the importance of expanding the scope of LCA studies to include impacts beyond climate change. Overall, this work demonstrates that combining a prospective consequential modelling perspective with an input-related functional unit is a relevant approach to study potential future impacts of emerging biorefineries and thus supports the development of a sustainable circular bioeconomy.

Globally, there is increasing interest in recovering resources from sanitation systems. However, the process of planning and implementing circular sanitation is complex and can necessitate software-based tools to support decision-making. In this paper, we review 24 decision support software tools used for sanitation planning, to generate insights into how they address resource recovery across the sanitation chain. The findings reveal that the tools can address many planning issues around resource recovery in sanitation including analysis of material flows, integrating resource recovery technologies and products in the design of sanitation systems, and assessing the sustainability implications of resource recovery. The results and recommendations presented here can guide users in the choice of different tools depending on, for example, what kind of tool features and functions the user is interested in as well as the elements of the planning process and the sanitation service chain that are in focus. However, some issues are not adequately covered and need improvements in the available tools including quantifying the demand for and value of resource recovery products, addressing retrofitting of existing sanitation infrastructure for resource recovery and assessing social impacts of resource recovery from a life cycle perspective. While there is scope to develop new tools or to modify existing ones to cover these gaps, communication efforts are needed to create awareness about existing tools, their functions and how they address resource recovery. It is also important to further integrate the available tools into infrastructure planning and programming processes by e.g. customizing to relevant planning regimes and procedures, to move them beyond research and pilots into practice, and hopefully contribute towards more circular sanitation systems.

Purpose: Social life cycle assessment (S-LCA) has been developed for almost two decades for assessing the social impacts of product life cycles. Only a limited amount of research, however, considers the full range of social sustainability that is impacted by the cause-effect relationships in the impact pathway (IP) approach in S-LCA. The aim of this study is to provide guidance on the ultimate purpose of S-LCA by presenting an up-to-date overview on human well-being (HWB). Methods: Due to the broadness of the purpose of presenting and assessing an up-to-date set of HWB components, our study was designed as a qualitative literature review. The review includes core characteristics of a qualitative systematic review, a realist review, and an umbrella review. We designed the operationalised review to result in a synthesised HWB component set and guidance on its use. In order to achieve this, we searched for theoretical lenses on how HWB component sets relate to other HWB approaches, searched for HWB component sets, and identified S-LCA relevant sustainability aspects and tested these on the component sets. The component sets were found in sustainability science, philosophy, psychology, and development studies. Results and discussion: The study resulted in a framework that contains both a HWB component set and guidance on its use. The set consists of the five components: having a healthy life; having competencies; having influence and enjoying freedom; having a meaningful life; and enjoying fair treatment. This approach is by philosophers denoted an objective goods list, containing “goods” that are seen as intrinsic parts of HWB because they so clearly can support humans in their lives. Other philosophical perspectives suggest that either desires in choice situations impacting the objective goods or the experienced mental states resulting from the goods, ultimately matters to humans. Challenges with the goods approach are how to define a good life and to relate to actual human activity. Conclusions: The presented updated definition of a HWB components set and guidance on it can benefit developers and practitioners of S-LCA, and in particular the IP approach, by illustrating the scope of social sustainability and the challenge of defining it. Regarding the scope, several other social sustainability aspects than health have been shown to matter. Regarding the challenge of defining social sustainability, it remains to see what the path forward is taking this challenge into account.

The circular economy, from an urban organic waste perspective, is seen as an approach to deal with increasing waste streams, while contributing to meeting the increasing demand for water, energy, food and other resources in urban areas. However, there is need for a systematic assessment of the broader environmental and social ben-efits and trade-offs of resource recovery from organic waste streams. This paper presents a framework for assessing the societal impacts of increased circularity in terms of resource recovery from organic waste streams at city scale, building on the design of alternative scenarios for future technology systems. The framework was developed based on a literature review of current frameworks in the area, adapting and combining some of their aspects and adding required features to allow for a broad sustainability assessment. It was also informed by stakeholder interviews. The framework was applied to the case of Naivasha, Kenya to illustrate its applicability and usefulness. The outcome of the application in the Naivasha case indicate potential sustainability improve-ments from increased circularity, where resource recovery could lead to a reduction of greenhouse gas emissions, more efficient natural resource usage and job creation. It indicated also some risks of negative impacts on the health of workers in resource recovery facilities, and, in this specific case, negative impact on smallholder farmers. The framework proved applicable and useful in the case study, and hence could provide input at early stages of planning even with low availability of data. Thereby it could provide policy-relevant insights towards circular economy implementation approaches that harness the benefits while mitigating any identified potential negative impacts.

Social sustainability is an important aspect of supply chains. This is of particular interest during innovation stages, due to the opportunity to early in the process select design and production that align with sustainable development. The methodology social lifecycle assessment (SLCA), aimed at assessing social impacts, is still under development. Approaches to identify the cause-effect chains from supply chains to final impacts on social sustainability have only been developed and used to a limited extent so far, but the area has received considerable attention lately. In order to identify and describe these cause-effects chains, it is useful to thoroughly and clearly define what to be safeguarded and supported – the human wellbeing. A literature review was conducted in order to provide guidance on which components of human wellbeing matters to people. The literature reviewed covers a range of disciplines, including philosophy, psychology and development studies. Snowballing technique was used for selecting the literature, which means that we follow citations of and from already identified sources in order to capture the publications most relevant to the aim of our study. Preliminary results show that it cover aspects such as health, friendship and meaning-making. Further, indications are that also very poor people highly value more aspects of life than only basic health and life support. Combined with the trend towards considering positive impacts on social sustainability in SLCA, this points to both opportunities and challenges of products regarding the impacts from activities along supply chains on a range of actors. Defining human wellbeing, to enable the safeguarding and support of it, is only a first step towards modelling cause-effect chains for effective use of SLCA. However, such a definition can be a useful tool also in itself, not least for allowing in innovation projects consideration of design issue to enhance its support of wellbeing in the society.

Climate change has impacts, on its own and from measures for mitigating it. Environmental impacts influence humans through our abilities to uphold services such as providing food and through our moral caring for nature. Therefore, a framework on social sustainability can be relevant for addressing the climate challenge and other sustainability issues. Such a framework could help identifying how humans can be affected by different proposed climate actions. We consider, as a first step, an overview of what ultimately can be seen as human well-being, which is strongly connected to aspects of justice. Scholars in ethics, psychology and development studies have for several decades been theorising human well-being. The results so far are typically lists that include elements such as life itself, friendship and religion. This far, however, researchers have only to a limited degree explicitly related the notions of human well-being to the challenges of actions for sustainability. The challenges include aiming to be holistic in the sense of covering a large enough share of the central aspects of human well-being, delays between cause and effect, and using an accessible vocabulary due to the already high complexity of the sustainability issues. In this study, we focus on these and other challenges through a conceptual analysis. The analysis is applied to material collected through a theoretical literature review, using a snowballing technique. Our starting point is the social sustainability approach social life cycle assessment (SLCA). SLCA has been developed for systematic evaluation of the impacts from a product’s production, consumption and waste management on human well-being. The approach clearly aims to support human well-being, but we have identified opportunities to complement SLCA literature on it. We expect to have comprehensive results from the study at the time of the conference.

Transitioning to a circular economy requires strategic investments in infrastructure, but it also requires policy coherence, coordination and collaboration among stakeholders across sectors and governance levels. In this paper, we aimed to identify the factors that facilitate or impede governance capacity to adopt circularity in the form of resource recovery from urban organic waste streams. We conducted a literature review and semi-structured interviews using the ‘Governance Capacity Framework’ in a case study of Naivasha, Kenya. Our findings emphasize the importance of leadership from the public sector in co-developing visionary strategies for circularity and using their convening power to facilitate cross-sectoral collaboration. Moreover, we identify a need for bridging theoretical circular economy concepts to initiatives in local communities of practice. The insights in this paper are relevant for advancing the understanding of challenges for governance of the circular economy especially in low-and middle-income country contexts.