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The importance of aquatic ecosystem services (ES) has been widely recognized. However, complexities among different aquatic ecosystems, the uncertainties of ES delivery mechanism and the lack of a unified accounting method from a production perspective still bring challenges for assessing aquatic ecosystem services valuation (ESV). To address these three concerns, this study develops a coherent accounting method on aquatic ESV. This includes: (1) an aquatic classification system (“source”, “process” and “sink” type); (2) an aquatic ES classification system, which considers their formation mechanisms; (3) a set of detailed ESV accounting techniques. Aquatic ES are divided into direct services, indirect services and existing services. In addition, according to the characteristics and uniqueness of different aquatic ecosystems, the importance degree of each aquatic ES is identified. Further, the aquatic ESV accounting techniques are established to reach three study goals: (1) integration with the characteristics of specific aquatic ecosystems when measuring ESV, (2) aquatic ESV assessment from supply side, and (3) unified metric. The newly developed aquatic ESV accounting is applied to aquatic ecosystems as a case study to test this method. The results show that: (1) Sichuan has the largest aquatic ESV (1.12E+23 sej/yr); (2) Tibet has the largest aquatic ESV per unit area (5.55E+11 sej/m2/yr); (3) Most China's aquatic ecosystems have microclimate regulation as their largest ESV per unit area. This study can fill several research gaps on aquatic ESV evaluation, providing also scientific suggestions on differentiated conservation and management policies applied to specific aquatic ecosystems.

The sustainability of the development of water resources is a pressing challenge. Natural forces, economic pressure and increasing population determine a significant growth in water use and pollution not supported by highly inefficient water supply practices. In this framework, the Italian water services with fragmented management, highly deficient collection and treatment of wastewater - and existing and potential problems in water supply in some areas of the country – explains the reasoning of the drastic restructuring introduced by Law 36/1994 (Act n. 36 on Water Resources, 1994). The impossibility of avoiding natural monopoly and the necessity to industrialize the whole sector determined the imposition of a “for the market” competition in order to exploit possible economies of scale and scope. In this work, a group of Italian water utility companies is used to assess the sustainable efficiency of the Italian water sector, using the mathematical/linear programming of Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) on a set of key variables including, water losses (never considered in the previous studies) to assess technical and environmental efficiency. This well-known technique allows evaluating the systems’ efficiency not only by calculating the efficiency of each unit, but also helping policymakers by suggesting corrective policies and measures which could make the inefficient units efficient. This approach can be useful for policymakers to direct decisions towards a more sustainable and efficient water sector.

This special volume of the JCLP is mainly built upon articles presented at the 6th International Workshop Advances in Cleaner Production held in Sao Paulo, Brazil, in 2017. The event had provided a progressive interdisciplinary meeting for knowledge advance and information trade. Papers in this issue cover a broad range of perspectives of cleaner production strategies and practices, and a special focus was placed upon the type of contribution – practical, conceptual/practical, conceptual - and the scale of their coverage – local, regional and global. The papers provide understanding on the research intended to systematically include cleaner production in the path sustainability, and identifies the extent to which cleaner production practitioners directly and indirectly provide local, regional and global solutions. Key results of this introductory article include research on: efficient and responsive use of energy and resources; the search for reduced emissions, the role of managerial support and environmental assessments, and the implementation/analysis of closed-loop systems of materials.

Global level agreements related to sustainability have changed the way organisations work. Many companies, mainly the larger ones, have assessed their environmental impacts to achieve both economic and environmental benefits by reducing waste generation and by using less energy, water, and materials. Considering this approach, many of these companies have strategically set up environmental management practices guided by Cleaner Production (CP) concepts. Despite its benefits, CP has a low application rate in small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), which is attributed to barriers such as a lack of resources, concentrated decision-making by owners and lack of leadership. Based on CP concepts and focusing on overcoming internal barriers in SMEs, this article proposes a management methodology of CP in small companies. A longitudinal action research of six cycles was carried out to develop a suitable methodology, comprising a meta phase and a five-step cyclic phase, which was a simple and viable way of conducting a CP program. It was found that promotion and monitoring actions, prioritisation of preventive opportunities and employee involvement facilitate the process of continuous improvement. This methodology may facilitate SME environmental management and contribute to developing products and processes towards sustainability objectives more efficiently.

The business environment undergoes constant and dynamic changes. The current social, legal and economic contexts where firms operate enable them to meet their stakeholders' needs. Accordingly, efficient management more oriented to meet customers' requirements regarding firm's corporate social responsibility (CSR) practices has been increasingly credited for the achievement of new firm managerial goals such as sustainability. Thus, the aim of this paper is to address the influence of the structure of human values and cultural differences by country on customers' CSR perception taking into consideration a firm's customers as one of its main stakeholders. Unlike the majority of earlier papers focusing on the relationship between customers' CSR perception and firm performance, this paper provides insights under the umbrella of social sustainability according to recent trends based on societal needs and firm commitments. The cross-cultural analysis has been conducted in a Latin American-European context by comparing two different cultural environments, Spain and Brazil, scarcely analysed in the managerial literature. The findings reveal that human values such as self-transcendence, conservation and openness to change exert a significant influence on the CSR's customer perception. Furthermore, cross-cultural differences by country moderate the relationship between these human values and CSR perception. The results allow for an adequate understanding of the drivers influencing customer perception of CSR social and environmental practices, and these drivers in turn are fundamental to firms' sustainability and, thus, firms' sustainable competitive advantage, as well as to academia to advance knowledge.

Education is key to the advancement of environmental sustainability. Climate change education is a complex topic where a number of factors play key roles. One such factor, namely the ongoing debate around whether climate change is real poses a significant challenge to the delivery of a climate change curriculum. This factor and others suggest the need to revisit the question of education for sustainability across wider social contexts. The purpose of the following article is to extend previous research and consider how education for sustainability is envisioned across culturally diverse settings around the world. Drawing from survey and interview data, distinguished scholars from Brazil, China, Germany, Mexico, Saudi Arabia, and the United States of America provided detailed analyses of the social context of climate change and their visions of an education for sustainability. Results of the survey data indicated that the U.S.’s withdrawal from the Paris Climate Change agreement, political and economic barriers to climate change, sustainability initiatives, and university-industry linkages were notable contextual features of a climate change pedagogy across the countries studied. In addition, the scholar's visions of an education for sustainability revolved around five main visions: teaching all forms of scientific knowledge as rooted in some level of uncertainty, complexity, and nuance; comprehensive empirical knowledge of climate change that includes its main principles, myths, and debates; critical inquiry, integration, and engagement with global and cross-disciplinary perspectives; transformative and learner-centered pedagogies conducive to a climate change and sustainability curricula; and student-learner authentic participation in the study and mitigation of climate change. The implications for the practice of education for climate change are discussed. It is argued that global insights have the potential to enrich the practice of education for climate change and towards a more sustainable future.

The 2017 International Workshop on Advances in Cleaner Production held in Sao Paulo, Brazil, May 24–26, 2017, promoted an assisted discussion workshop directed by Donald Huisingh. The workshop focused on the role of the Advances in Cleaner Production Network to meet the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. Discussions with the workshop participants were oriented around five basic subjects: 1. The main objective of the Advances in Cleaner Production Network; 2. The international collaboration in research planning, implementation and in dissemination of research findings; 3. The inclusion of researchers from under-represented regions of the world; 4. The future collaboration among members and 5. The new activities to help society to “Accelerate the Transition to Equitable, Sustainable, Livable, Post-Fossil Carbon Societies.” Furthermore, the participants were asked on which specific set of Sustainable Development Goals they mostly contribute through their research, in order to draw a picture of the main scientific contributions of the Network to the SDGs enterprise. Challenges that emerged from the workshop involved the need for value-added communication and collaboration among members, and further progress in both theoretical and practical cleaner production approaches. Concerning the generation and sharing of new viewpoints, the main issue that emerged was the variety of positive connections that should be strengthened among potential collaborators. Improving and expanding the helpfulness of online sharing platforms and social media, mostly for managing discussion opportunities, was underlined for expanding the partnerships and in improving the networking. This paper reports and shares the results of the assisted discussions to reach our dynamically growing scientific community and to encourage, engage and empower researchers throughout the world to work in partnerships under the umbrella of the SDGs.

Technology change is a well-known strategy used by Cleaner Production (CP) practitioners, and it refers to modifications in the process and/or equipment to increase production efficiency and reduce waste and emissions. These changes can range from small, low-cost options to the replacement of processes that involve large capital investments. The improvements and advantages of the new alternatives must be evaluated in a way to measure and assure its real benefits. This work presents an emergy evaluation of a fasteners manufacturing company planning to replace the zinc-coating process by a water-based organo-metallic coating process. Accounting for the use of resources and the environmental services to dilute the Cr (VI) in the effluent, the study shows that the effluent treatment is efficient and that the emergy invested by the environment to dilute the Cr (VI) released is lower than 0.1% of the emergy used in the coating process. The case study is an example of the application and evaluation of CP options (good operational practices, material and raw material changes, technological modifications, and product change) and is presented to motivate product manufacturers to prioritize environmental performance assessments to their products and services equally as well as to save manufacturers substantial time and efforts during their first attempts to implement CP actions.

Over the last 30 years, distance learning has rapidly spread in developed countries, and to niche markets in developing countries. In Brazil, approximately 5 million people are currently either achieving formal education or corporate training, or obtaining specific knowledge and skills on a wide range of subjects, via distance learning. Motivated by the ongoing expansion of the Brazilian federal chain of public schools, several new campuses, extra classrooms and distance teaching centers have been built, as a function of the intensive promotion of social inclusion by means of education, and specifically allocated budget. Concomitantly, a considerable number of papers discussing reduction of energy and materials consumption in university campuses have been published. Intended as a contribution to this discussion, this work evolves from a comparison of the implicit environmental cost – i.e. the use of natural resources as the prime-matter of infrastructural and operational material, and source of energy to human work-in forming management technicians in a classroom course, and in a distance learning course, obtained from the results of two case studies carried out at a Federal Institute campus in Brazil. The groups were selected for their relative closeness in proportion of attending students. Data were collected by means of measurements and interviews, and a synthesis of the use of natural resources by both modes was obtained by using the emergy accounting method, and then compared. The emergy method was also used to assess current use and underuse rates of the available infra-structural resources. Scenarios based on different numbers of students and teaching staff attending capacity for both modes, distance learning and classroom, were created and compared. Results point out that, under the current configurations, forming a management technician via distance teaching requires a 90% higher environmental support than via classroom teaching. The scenarios, however, do indicate a turning point.

Energy efficient policies and the appropriate management of energy supplies have become essential in developing and keeping competitiveness across all industries and forms of industrial production. The scientific contribution of this article is the presentation of competitive advantages that can be developed from efficient management of energy resources in two Mexican maquiladoras and that might be replicated in more organizational structures. In order to ascertain how energy efficient Mexican maquiladoras are, several in situ visits were carried out; hard data were collected following a proposed energy efficiency program developed by the UNEP, as well as other auditing instruments to acquire first-hand information about the maquiladoras. The results show that the larger maquila tends to have stronger policies in place. The audits were carried out in maquiladoras that focus on the manufacture of electronic and electric goods and whose sole source of energy is electricity. Thus, the practical contribution is that revealing of unexplored opportunities for maquiladora operators and managers alike to build and maintain an edge over competitors through optimized energy use.

Cleaner Production concepts and practices have matured with outstanding success since their introduction in the 1980s, currently being a central part of the agenda of companies, sectors, and governments by integrating theory, applied science, and policies. This VSI of the Journal of Cleaner Production reunites contributions from the 8th and the 9th International Workshop on Advances in Cleaner Production and aims at underscoring the role of Cleaner Production in contributing to sustainable development from the application of local actions to global interventions. The 62 articles that compose this VSI provide an overview of how Cleaner Production has evolved in scope, content, the range of sectors covered, and the targets to be achieved: from less pollution/waste generation to the food-energy-water nexus to the green/blue and the circular economy. The selected articles clearly show that the integration of multiple viewpoints has created a novel field of scientific collaboration.

About one-third of annual global food production for human consumption is wasted, increasing the pressure on the environment in providing resources to support food supply-chains. Food waste reduction is of fundamental importance towards a more sustainable world, as recognized by the United Nations in the twelfth of its seventeen sustainable development goals for 2030. Among other practices, food donation appears as an alternative to overcome the existing social and environmental issues related to food waste, however, donation also causes environmental pressure by requiring additional energy investment on infrastructure and operational goods, while releasing gases to atmosphere, due to its processes. This work applies the life cycle assessment (LCA) method to evaluate the environmental impacts of plausible food donation scenarios in the ‘CEAGESP’ food distribution center in Sao Paulo city, Brazil, the third largest in the world regarding marketable food (about 3 million tons/yr). Under the concept of waste hierarchy management options, six scenarios for the CEAGESP's non-marketable food (37,652 tons/yr) were established, from landfilling as a baseline to a donation alternative. Results show that donation scenarios have the least environmental burdens for all nine LCA impact categories. Worst-case scenarios were obtained by landfilling the non-marketable food, considering electricity generation or otherwise. Differences over tenfold in comparative bases among the best and worst-case scenarios were obtained by fossil depletion, global warming, human toxicity, water and metal depletion LCA's impact categories. Results highlight the environmental advantages of donating the non-marketable food of distribution centres, which is aligned with the concepts of circular and regenerative economy towards a sustainable development that should be promoted by public policies. Regional variables as the Brazilian electricity grid based on hydropower plants have considerable influence in some LCA impact categories, especially when accounting for the avoided emissions, emphasizing the importance of carrying out this study for Brazilian conditions.

Although there are substantial benefits by using an adequate strategy in order to reach competitive advantage, little attention has been given to the strategy formulation process for environmental sustainability. The aim of this research is to propose a basic model to formulate strategy for companies that compete pursuing the sustainable environmental development. Based on a literature research of 231 papers, 14 papers were selected and analyzed in detail using content analysis. These papers were categorized into 10 strategy perspectives and compared to the criteria of the Fields and Weapons of the Competition model. From this comparison, a basic process of strategy formulation was devised. The originality and practical implications of this research is to present a basic, adaptable model that can guide entrepreneur, executives and leaders in the process of strategy formulation for sustainable environmental development, especially in times when companies become surrounded by so many environmental sustainable initiatives that confuse rather than guide.

Understanding the potential prosperity of municipal economies, the welfare and the role of trade of these economies is an important issue in a world in which more than 50% of the population lives in urban centers. ABC Paulista groups three cities which act as production centers combining the abundance of labor and knowledge with the proximity to big consumer centers. The emergy approach recognizes the existence of deterministic principles in economic systems but emphasizes the role of resources, energy and environment. This approach was applied to ABC Paulista to evaluate municipal potential prosperity in the context of the energy resource constraints and showed that ABC municipalities are not autonomous and depend almost entirely on external resources. Indices for assess the human carrying capacity and the standards of living showed that only 2% of the population could be sustained indefinitely by the local emergy. The results lead to the idea that ABC can be seen as an “industry”, which holds the know-how and assets transforming raw materials into vehicles and chemicals that are feedback to the surrounding system. However, the analysis of ABC trade shows that both the Brazilian and the foreign markets take advantage when buying from ABC suggesting that the search for the chances of the prolongation of this specific urban settlement may require different policies and management designs.

The unprecedented scale of packaging waste in global soft drinks supply chains is attracting increasing attention due to its environmental, social and economic impacts. The selection of the most feasible packaging options is one of the key approaches towards reducing resources depletion and packaging disposal. From an environmental point of view, selection requires knowledge of all product life stages including the type and the amount of materials used and the manufacturing practices such as recycling and reuse. In this context, decision makers in industry are looking for assessment methods that address the problem as a whole and not only as a sum of parts for selecting the most appropriate and reliable option. This paper introduces environmental accounting based on emergy as a tool to assist materials selection. This tool can help decision makers in industry providing information on the environmental cost of each decision. Emergy has low cost compared to other methods that require extensive information databases and commercial software. To exemplify the application of the emergy as a tool for material selection, options for the production of soft drinks are compared. The results obtained for the Brazilian case make it possible to select refillable glass bottles as the best option according to the resources available in the country; establishing the best production model for the selected option and determining when and if a recycling stage should be implemented.

Pest control in pasta processing industries is considered to be one of the activities that can have the greatest impact on the environment. However, the adoption of techniques with a lower environmental impact can result in increased production costs that may discourage their adoption by firms, if not adequately compensated by corresponding increase in revenue. The main objective of this study is to evaluate the economic feasibility of High Heat Treatments, a physical method for pest control in industrial plants that produce pasta in Sicily (Italy). A Benefit-Cost Analysis has been conducted in which the costs refer to the implementation of the High Heat Treatments and the benefits were estimated in terms of the potential increase in the pasta factory's turnover. Increases in turnover derive from the impact of a hypothetical eco-friendly mark, based on the consumer's Willingness To Pay for pasta produced by a production process that reduces environmental impact. The results of the Benefit-Cost Analysis have demonstrated that the premium price that consumers recognise for pasta produced with eco-friendly techniques could ensure an increase in turnover of firms making High Heat Treatments economically feasible for the pasta-making industry. Furthermore, this paper could be a guideline for future research towards an integration of non-hypothetical open-ended choice experiment and the economic analysis tool within Benefit-Cost Analysis.

Two Brazilian hydropower plants (Jupia and Porto Primavera) located in the same watershed were explored in terms of the global resources needed to support these enterprises using a donor-side approach. Emergy theory and methods although commonly used by environmental scientists, may seem difficult to interpret for policy and decision-makers. Because of this, the possibility of transforming emergy flows and indices into money and area measures is explored in the present paper. Both hydropower plants deliver the same power and rely on practically the same infrastructure but involve very different flooded areas. Indirect areas calculated in terms of emergy show the different spatial distribution of resources. Some realistic alternatives for development were explored from both environmental and economic perspectives by using the emergy investment ratio and taking into account the matching between the enterprises emergy flows and the regional ones.

Cleaner production is a lively concept in which new procedures and technologies constantly emerge introducing methods and practices to prevent damages to the environment. A broad range of cleaner production initiatives contribute to sustainable development not only through the efficient management of resources and energy, but also through the development of new and smart technologies, new ways of assisting policies development, and organizing supply chains, sectors and individual companies. The authors of this Virtual Special Issue sought to introduce first-hand knowledge and discussions identifying and highlighting the ways cleaner production can contribute to reach the United Nations sustainable development targets. The intent of the Virtual Special Issue is to provide an overview of the recent trends that cleaner production practitioners/researchers are following in the chase of the sustainable development goals, and in this context, this editorial was designed to summarize and underscore the link between cleaner production concepts and practices and the sustainable development goals. An adequate response to this challenge required scientific knowledge and reassessment of the papers ensuring that the science is responsive to the evolving needs of sustainable development. This Virtual Special Issue of the Journal of Cleaner Production is mainly dedicated to the 7th International Workshop on Advances in Cleaner Production, held at Universidad de La Costa, Barranquilla, Colombia on 21–22 June 2018. Based upon the examination of the papers of this Virtual Special Issue, the authors were able to establish that there is an pressing need for research on the assessment on which/when cleaner production interventions are more effective; inter and multidisciplinary cooperation among social and technical scientists to distinguish and address the cleaner production/sustainable development goals interactions and connect cleaner production solutions and large-scale sustainability approaches.