Purpose New environmental strategies are emerging for cities to become more self-sufficient, such as hydroponic crop production. The implementation of such systems requires materials that usually originate in countries with low labour costs and other legal regulations. To what extent could these strategies be shifting problems across the globe? To answer this question, we performed a comprehensive environmental and social asse...

Summary Cities are rapidly growing and need to look for ways to optimize resource consumption. Metropolises are especially vulnerable in three main systems, often referred to as the FEW (i.e., food, energy, and water) nexus. In this context, urban rooftops are underutilized areas that might be used for the production of these resources. We developed the Roof Mosaic approach, which combines life cycle assessment with two roofto...

Summary Evaluating the sustainability of the urban water cycle is not straightforward, although a variety of methods have been proposed. Given the lack of integrated data about sewers, we applied the eco‐efficiency approach to two case studies located in Spain with contrasting climate, population, and urban and sewer configurations. Our goal was to determine critical variables and life cycle stages and provide results for deci...

Summary To support effective urban policies aimed at decreasing the environmental impacts of cities, it is important to develop robust tools for accounting those impacts. Environmentally extended input‐output analysis (EEIOA) is among the most used tools for this purpose, allowing the quantification of both direct and indirect impacts. Life cycle assessment (LCA) is also a holistic and comprehensive tool that accounts for dire...

Summary The environmental characterization of the charging infrastructure required to operate electric vehicles (EVs) is usually overlooked in the literature. Only rudimentary life cycle inventories of EV charging facilities are available. This lack of information is especially noticeable in environmental studies of the environmental performance of electric two‐wheelers (E2Ws), none of which have included an analysis of chargi...

Summary For many companies, the greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions associated with their purchased and consumed electricity form one of the largest contributions to the GHG emissions that result from their activities. Currently, hourly variations in electricity grid emissions are not considered by standard GHG accounting protocols, which apply a national grid emission factor (EF), potentially resulting in erred estimates for the G...

Summary Sustainable manufacturing has increasingly included design for environment methodologies with the objective of improving the environmental performance of products over their entire life cycles. Current European Union (EU) directives on eco‐design focus on the use phase of energy‐related products (ErPs). However, the maintenance of various household non‐ErPs is performed with ErPs; therefore, the environmental impacts o...

Summary We used a thermodynamic framework to characterize the resource consumption of the construction sector in 2001 in Catalonia, the northeast region of Spain. The analysis was done with a cradle‐to‐product life cycle approach using material flow analysis (MFA) and exergy accounting methodologies to quantify the total material and energy inputs in the sector. The aim was to identify the limitations of resource metabolism in...