Assessing the environmental impacts of three different types of accommodations in Portugal and Spain by using an LCA approach.

The tourism industry, affected by COVID-19, must reduce greenhouse gas emissions. This study evaluated the environmental impact of three hotels in coastal and mountainous regions of Spain and Portugal using Life Cycle Assessment (LCA). Data was gathered via surveys in the Greentour tool. Results indicate that the 2-star hotel (focused on cultural-urban tourism) has the highest impacts in most categories, except for CC, FRD, and POF indicators. The 3-star hotel (beach tourism) contributes the most to CC and FRD indicators, while the hostel (nature-religious tourism) has the highest value in the POF indicator. LCA findings reveal that diesel consumption in the hostel and electricity usage in both the 2-star and 3-star hotels are major contributors to environmental impacts across various categories. Overall, evidence suggests that fossil fuel and electricity usage significantly affect tourism activities environmentally. Interestingly, this study highlights that a 2-star hotel can have a higher carbon footprint (CC indicator) compared to a 3-star hotel, challenging the notion that higher star ratings imply lower environmental impact.

'Small-scale' tourism versus traditional tourism: Which will be the new key to achieve the desired sustainable tourism?

The tourism sector after COVID-19 has raised different concerns that have lead to a development towards a more sustainable model of tourism. After the health crisis, the increase in environmental awareness of tourists has become evident. In this context, the great paradigm of 'small-scale' tourism has been developed as opposed to traditional tourism. The present work seeks to contribute to sustainable development in the Spanish tourism sector, comparing a hostel in Cantabria (considered as 'small scale' /religious tourism) and a hotel in Lloret de Mar (considered as a traditional tourism) one using the Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) methodology to verify advantages and disadvantages of both types of tourism. The functional unit (FU) used was 'per guest night with breakfast included'. The results have revealed similar results for both establishments in all impact categories, as can be seen in its contribution to Climate Change (4.41 kg CO2 eq./FU caused by the hotel and 4.78 kg CO2 eq./FU by the hostel). The electricity consumption and the impact of the breakfast in the hostel were identified as main contributors to environmental burdens (with 76.72 % of the hotel's impact to climate change and 77.36 % for the hostel); hence, improvement opportunities envisaged were focused on these critical points. On the one hand, a biomass boiler, a solar water-heating system and a hybrid solar/biomass heating are considered a more sustainable alternatives related to electricity. Natural gas and diesel Consumption, respectively. On the other hand, oatmeal, Greek yoghurt and berries are good options for a breakfast with a reduced environmental impact. It is also important to implement responsible and green practices in order to achieve more environmentally sustainable alternative and traditional accommodations. Therefore, it can be concluded by stating that LCA is a tool capable of identifying and studying the processes with the highest environmental impact in order to find out the most sustainable form of tourism.

Life cycle assessment to address the environmental impacts of tourism in a Spanish tourist destination: The case of Rias Baixas (Galicia) holidays.

Tourism has grown steadily in recent decades, becoming a strategic sector for the economy in many countries. However, the environmental impacts associated with tourism have also experienced an upward trend. In this sense, innovation is needed in the tourism sector, to move towards new models and strategies that integrate environmental sustainability with the social aspects of the sector. In this study, a holistic assessment of the environmental impact of tourism has been carried out using the Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) method, considering all stages of tourism activity: transportation from the place of origin to destination and back, accommodation, catering, and activities conducted. For this purpose, a case study has been carried out based on a typical trip made from Madrid to Rías Baixas (Galicia), considering a four-night stay and the performance of two activities (music festival and cultural museum) at the destination. Two alternative transportation scenarios (train or plane) have been defined to analyze the influence of the type of transportation on the overall impact. Other touristic activities such as visiting gardens or thermal baths instead of visiting a cultural museum or attending a music festival have been analyzed and it has been found that the thermal baths and the museum have the greatest environmental impacts. Transportation was the biggest contributor to most of the environmental impacts in the selected categories. On the other hand, the stay at the destination has stood out due to the impact of the consumption of food and energy used at the accommodation facility. The impact of the activities conducted at the destination is also worth highlighting. Finally, alternative scenarios for transportation have shown that the mode of transportation selected is key for lowering the overall environmental impact of the stay at the destination, highlighting the public transportation alternative, such as the train, as the most environmentally friendly option.

Tourism under a life cycle thinking approach: A review of perspectives and new challenges for the tourism sector in the last decades.

Sustainable tourism should be promoted as a new system for the sustainable management of resources from a socioeconomic and environmental point of view. For this purpose, it is necessary to develop a tool capable of assessing the impacts associated with the sector and to identify which actions are currently being addressed in order to achieve the desired sustainability. This timely study aims to describe the current framework of Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) and its application to the tourism sector. To address these questions, a total of 83 documents (77 reviews and 6 international reports) were evaluated, assessing the geographical distribution, the temporal evolution of the publications, as well as the most relevant characteristics of the tourism industry articles were evaluated such as, life cycle inventory (LCI), system boundaries, functional unit (FU), methods, environmental indicators and impact categories considered. The study identifies key recommendations on the progression of LCA in tourism sector. As important results, it stands out that 94 % of articles were from the last decade and 21 % of the articles reviewed cover sustainable tourism term, considering the three dimensions. This review showed that in LCA studies the most common method was CML 2001; the most widely used environmental indicator was the Carbon Footprint (CF) and the Global Warming Potential (GWP) was the impact category used in all the studies. Hence, LCA is a highly effective tool capable of assessing direct and indirect carbon emissions in tourism as well as the socioeconomic and environmental impacts generated in this sector. COVID-19 pandemic is also an object of discussion in the framework of the sustainable tourism together with advocating support for the eco-labelling and digitalisation of the tourism experiences as valuable tools to minimize environmental negativities, to promote mechanisms to access green markets and to frame successful synergies.

An energy- and nutrient-corrected functional unit to compare LCAs of diets.

Dietary choices, a main driver of food production, play a significant role within the climate change arena. Consequently, there is a growing trend on publishing research assessing the environmental impacts of diets and dietary shifts, mainly following the life cycle assessment (LCA) methodology. However, several methodological issues still bring a challenge, especially in the definition of the function and the quantification of the functional unit (FU). The FU is the reference unit of an LCA study, and it is the basis for allowing comparison among different systems. This short communication defines the function of diets as the supply of the daily required amount of calories and nutrients, and it proposes a novel FU that accounts for the energy intake and the nutritional quality of the diet. In order to compare the performance of the proposed FU to the most commonly ones used for diet LCAs (mass-based and isocaloric), dietary scenarios within the Spanish context are assessed. On the one hand, using a mass-based FU, greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions are underestimated, since the nutrition properties of food are not considered, and, on the other hand, the isocaloric substitution does not allow comparison among diets with different levels of energy intake. In contrast, the proposed caloric- and nutrient-corrected FU allows to compare diets that differ in energy and nutritional quality in a fairer way. Finally, it is recommended to use this FU for future diet LCAs.

First steps in life cycle assessments of cities with a sustainability perspective: A proposal for goal, function, functional unit, and reference flow.

This study highlights the need and suggests some basis for working on the Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) of cities with a sustainability perspective. Cities are relevant actors in sustainable development and contribute to the generation of significant environmental impacts upstream and downstream their internal activity. LCA is precise in assessing environmental aspects of sustainability but lacks social and economic inputs. It is important to avoid problem shifting, even between the different dimensions of sustainability. A systematic literature review has been performed so as to extract the procedure for defining the goal, function, functional unit, and reference flow of a complex system. The existing literature is mainly product focused, although services are also considered somehow. The procedure for defining the abovementioned items is previously applied to a relatively simple system, a power generation plant, so as to find parallelisms to define those items for a complex system such as a city. To obtain a feasible (i.e., simplified) city Life Cycle Sustainability Assessment, the authors propose to introduce the social and economic aspects through the use of the City Prosperity Index (CPI) as technical performance within the FU of the city LCA. The CPI combined with the number of inhabitants is the normalization factor which is found to be more suitable to avoid problem shifting among sustainability dimensions and to avoid the interference of the number of inhabitants when comparing two different cities. An exemplification of the variation of the results after the application of these two factors in 18 cities' CO2-eq emissions is described. Even though this is not a large sample, it includes cities from different continents and levels of development and, thus it can be useful to see the how the suggested method is affecting cities' ranking.

Technical feasibility and life cycle assessment of an industrial waste as stabilizing product for unpaved roads, and influence of packaging.

The use of industrial solid wastes with a high content of SiO2 and Al2O3, called "precursors", is often studied in the construction industry when combined with NaOH as "activator". The precursor and activator system is generally proposed as a binder material with similar characteristics to Portland cement. In this work, we technically and environmentally evaluated such a system elaborated with an industrial waste: coal ash with caustic soda in solid state. This product, mixed with the soil, acts as a stabilizer to increase the capacity of load support, allowing the improvement of the conditions of performance in low volume traffic roads. An experimental design applied to the stabilizing product showed the incidence of different factors on the load carrying capacity response: packaging material, type of seal, baling moisture and storage humidity. The application of the stabilizer product was found to increase the resistance of the ground over a 500%. Finally, the environmental aspects were evaluated through a simplified Life Cycle Assessment methodology (LCA), the scope of the study was restricted to cradle to gate, collecting data up to the packaged stabilizing product. The results showed that the highest impacts were caused, for most impact categories, by NaOH production, and transport was relevant as well.

Towards life cycle sustainability assessent of cities. A review of background knowledge.

This article analyses whether existing LCA and sustainability methods can be used in the assessment of a city or an urban region. The approach is performed through the review of current existing LCA-based and sustainability standards and guidelines. A focus is put into those LCA-based standards specially designed for the built environment. Moreover, a review of non-LCA based standards, indices and guides for the assessment of the sustainability of countries, cities or urban regions is done. The purpose is to check if these assessment tools can provide good results in the absence of LCA-based assessments for cities and urban regions. This review demonstrates the lack of consensus in the definition of both, the city and its boundaries, which hinders the development of useful sustainability standards. Furthermore, it is concluded that current sustainability assessment tools miss, at least, one of these aspects: (i) holistic point of view, (ii) focus on various environmental impacts, (iii) a Life Cycle (LC) perspective, and (iv) the possibility to compare the results among different cities or urban regions. From the LCA perspective, the deficiencies found also include the need for a definition of the function, functional unit (FU), and reference flow (RF) of neighbourhoods, cities, and urban regions.

Inventory analysis and carbon footprint of coastland-hotel services: A Spanish case study.

Tourism is a key industry in the Spanish economy. Spain was in the World top three ranking by international tourist arrivals and by income in 2015. The development of the tourism industry is essential to maintain the established economic system. However, if the environmental requirements were not taken into account, the country would face a negative effect on depletion of local environmental resources from which tourism depends. This case study evaluates, through a life cycle perspective, the average carbon footprint of an overnight stay in a Spanish coastland hotel by analyzing 14 two-to-five-stars hotels. Inventory and impact data are analyzed and presented both for resource use and greenhouse gases emissions, with the intention of helping in the environmental decision-making process. The main identified potential hotspots are electricity and fuels consumption (6 to 30kWh/overnight stay and 24 to 127MJ/overnight stay respectively), which are proportional to the number of stars and unoccupancy rate and they produce more than 75% of the impact. It is also revealed that voluntary implementation of environmental monitoring systems (like EMAS regulation) promotes collection of more detailed and accurate data, which helps in a more efficient use of resources. A literature review on LCA and tourism is also discussed. Spanish hotels inventory data presented here for the first time will be useful for tourism related managers (destination managers, policy makers and hotel managers among others) to calculate sustainability key indicators, which can lead to achieve real sustainable-tourism goals. Further data collection will be needed in future projects to gather representative data from more hotels, other accommodation facilities and also other products/services offered by tourist sector in Spain (like transport of tourists, food and beverage, culture-sports & recreation and others).

[Mortality due to asthma in the city of Barcelona (1983-1993)]. / Mortalidad por asma en la ciudad de Barcelona (1983-1993).

OBJECTIVE: To find asthma mortality in the city of Barcelona. DESIGN: Descriptive study of mortality. SETTING: City of Barcelona. MAIN MEASUREMENTS: Deaths due to asthma in the city of Barcelona in the period 1983-1993 were studied through the register of mortality at Barcelona's Municipal Institute of Health, which in turn is supplied by the Statistical Gazette of Deaths. Rates of mortality per 100,000 inhabitants were calculated, overall and broken down by sex and by age. The ratio of mortality comparing city districts and the place and season of decease was also worked out. RESULTS: There were 716 deaths due to asthma (overall rate of 3.82/100,000 inhabitants; 3.3 in men and 4.33 in women). Almost two-thirds of deaths occurred in people over 65. Mortality was stable in the entire period except in the over-65s, in which a downwards trend was discerned (beta=-0.63; P=.037). For the 5-34 year old group, the rate oscillated between 0.1 and 0.6/100,000 inhabitants. The number of deaths in the over-65s was greater in winter (31.7%; 95% CI, 27.8-35.7). 56.2% of deaths occurred at home. Hospital deaths were more common among women (P<.001) and the under-65s, and their trend is upwards (P=.004). CONCLUSIONS: Asthma mortality in the city of Barcelona was stable during the period studied. Its rate for the 5-34 year-old age group was higher than for Spain and slightly greater than in similar nearby countries.

Mortalidad por asma en la ciudad de Barcelona (1983-1993) / Mortality du to asthma in the city of Barcelona (1983-1993)

Objetivo. Conocer la mortalidad por asma en la ciudad de Barcelona. Diseño. Estudio descriptivo de mortalidad. Emplazamiento. Ciudad de Barcelona. Mediciones principales. A través del registro de mortalidad del Instituto Municipal de la Salud de Barcelona, que se nutre del Boletín Estadístico de Defunción (BED), se estudian los fallecidos por asma en el período 1983-1993 en la ciudad de Barcelona. Se calculan las tasas de mortalidad por 100.000 habitantes, crudas y específicas por sexo, y las estandarizadas por edad; y la razón de mortalidad comparativa (RMC) entre los distritos de la ciudad y el lugar y la época del año del fallecimiento. Resultados. Hubo 716 fallecimientos por asma (tasa global de 3,82/100.000 habitantes; 3,3 en los varones y 4,33 en las mujeres). Casi dos tercios de los fallecimientos se produjeron en personas mayores de 65 años. La mortalidad se ha mantenido estable en todo el período, excepto en el grupo mayor de 65 años, en el que se detecta una tendencia a su disminución ( = -0,63; p = 0,037). Para el grupo de 5-34 años la tasa oscila entre 0,1 y 0,6/100.000 habitantes. El número de fallecimientos fue mayor en invierno en los mayores de 65 años (31,7 por ciento; intervalo de confianza del 95 por ciento, 27,8-35,7). El 56,2 por ciento de los fallecimientos suceden en el domicilio; las muertes en el hospital son más frecuentes entre mujeres (p < 0,001) y en menores de 65 años, y su tendencia es creciente (p = 0,004).Conclusiones. La mortalidad por asma en la ciudad de Barcelona es estable en el período de estudio y presenta una tasa para el grupo de 5-34 años más alta que en España y ligeramente mayores que las de los países de nuestro entorno (AU)

[Relationship between coffee and blood cholesterol in a sample of working women]. / Relación entre el café y el colesterol plasmático en una población laboral femenina.

BACKGROUND: Experimental studies have demonstrated that unfiltered coffee increases cholesterolemia. In Spain, filtered coffee is mainly consumed and its effect on cholesterolemia is controversial. METHODS: The relationship between coffee intake and the serum levels of total cholesterol was transversally studied in a population of 609 women between 18 to 65 years in age. The questionnaire and analyses were carried out in the context of periodic health examination. RESULTS: The consumption of coffee was positively associated with cholesterolemia in subjects under 30 years of age (p < 0.01) and in the group from 30 to 45 years in age (p < 0.05). This association was found to be statistically significant on multivariant analysis (multiple lineal regression) after adjusting for age, body mass index, cholesterol consumed in the diet, smoking, alcohol consumption and physical activity. CONCLUSIONS: Coffee was found to increase cholesterolemia in the female population and therefore a reduction in coffee intake would be recommendable in hypercholesterolemic subjects.