My last two building projects have worked towards integrative design to reduce material intensity and promote sustainable energy paradigms.
Everywhere else you need to factor in "trucking" vast distances, so the material intensity figures must be multiplied by truck miles, at which point the lightest wins.
The collective and therefore social nature of these enterprises, and their material intensity, means that the ways they are organized and supported (and to what extent) is vital to their successful functioning.
You ask for a straight comparison: using basic material intensity figures, a PET (a thermoplastic polymer resin) jar versus a glass one uses twice as much abiotic material (minerals and fossil fuel) to produce and 17 times more water (predominantly from cooling power plants) and produces five times the greenhouse gas emissions.
Six factors that can be considered for reduction in the manufacturing process are: material intensity, energy intensity, amount of waste not recycled or reused, amount of depleting resources used, service intensity, and health and environmental risk.
We introduce a set of indicators that can be used to measure the sustainability performance of chemical process, such as net present value, material intensity, energy intensity, CO2 capture efficiency, global warming, and inherent safety, etc.
Life cycle engineering of injection moulded components is often aimed at minimizing the material intensity mainly by decreasing the part volume and increasing the use of recycled materials, while fulfilling structural and manufacturability requirements.
In other words, material intensity of the economy has generally decreased due to increased efficiency, but the absolute amount of material use has increased, although at a lower rate of increase than economic growth.
These factors can provide insights into the current operating context of the UK automotive industry and help explain why the average material intensity of vehicles and vehicle throughput are increasing.
B1 storyline and scenario family: a convergent world with the same global population as in the A1 storyline but with rapid changes in economic structures toward a service and information economy, with reductions in material intensity, and the introduction of clean and resource-efficient technologies.
