A new paradigm for evaluating environmental sustainability in a complex systems context and recommendations for incorporating that paradigm into sustainable design and LCA
| dc.contributor.advisor | Seepersad, Carolyn | |
| dc.contributor.committeeMember | Chen, Dongmei | |
| dc.contributor.committeeMember | Crawford, Richard | |
| dc.contributor.committeeMember | Rai, Varun | |
| dc.contributor.committeeMember | Webber, Michael | |
| dc.creator | O'Rourke, Julia Marie | |
| dc.date.accessioned | 2018-02-22T15:15:50Z | |
| dc.date.available | 2018-02-22T15:15:50Z | |
| dc.date.created | 2017-12 | |
| dc.date.issued | 2017-12 | |
| dc.date.submitted | December 2017 | |
| dc.date.updated | 2018-02-22T15:15:50Z | |
| dc.description.abstract | As consumers become increasingly eco-conscious, environmentally sustainable design has arisen to meet their demand for lower-impact products. Unfortunately, the sustainable design process as it is currently implemented often results in designs that do not ultimately result in reduced environmental damage. This occurs for a variety of reasons, including a failure to account for contextual factors and how they influence environmental impact, as will be discussed in Chapter 5, and the adoption of an overly-reductionist approach to addressing environmental problems, as will be argued in Chapter 9. The purpose of this research is to: (1) identify and discuss the problems in the current paradigm for sustainability that undermine efforts to address environmental issues via sustainable design; (2) propose a new paradigm for environmental sustainability and environmental impact that addresses the problems with the current paradigm and conceives of sustainability as an emergent property of a complex system composed of global energy and material flows; and (3) show how this new paradigm can be applied in practice to life cycle assessment (LCA) methods, the sustainable design process, efforts in eco-consumption, and research in related fields to more reliably address environmental problems. Chapters 1 through 4 introduce this work and provide background information related to LCA, scale and system boundaries, and network-related approaches to environmental impact assessment. Chapters 5 through 7 discuss context in LCA and sustainable design, namely, how contextual factors can affect the environmental impact associated with a given design and the environmental damage associated with a given impact, the implications of variability in impact due to contextual factors, and how other environmental impact measurement frameworks account for context. Chapters 8 and 9 present the current paradigm for environmental sustainability and problems with the reductionist approach. Chapter 10 presents a new paradigm for environmental sustainability as an emergent property of complex global systems; Chapter 11 presents a summary of findings, with examples; and Chapter 12 concludes. | |
| dc.description.department | Mechanical Engineering | |
| dc.format.mimetype | application/pdf | |
| dc.identifier | doi:10.15781/T2QB9VP17 | |
| dc.identifier.uri | http://hdl.handle.net/2152/63716 | |
| dc.subject | Sustainable design | |
| dc.subject | Life cycle assessment | |
| dc.subject | Complex systems | |
| dc.subject | Environmental sustainability | |
| dc.title | A new paradigm for evaluating environmental sustainability in a complex systems context and recommendations for incorporating that paradigm into sustainable design and LCA | |
| dc.type | Thesis | |
| dc.type.material | text | |
| thesis.degree.department | Mechanical Engineering | |
| thesis.degree.discipline | Mechanical Engineering | |
| thesis.degree.grantor | The University of Texas at Austin | |
| thesis.degree.level | Doctoral | |
| thesis.degree.name | Doctor of Philosophy |