ALBERT

Description: Human nutrition is responsible for about 30% of the global natural resource use. In order to decrease resource use to a level in line with planetary boundaries, a resource use reduction in the nutrition sector by a factor 2 is suggested. A large untapped potential to increase resource efficiency and improve consumers' health status is assumed, but valid indicators and general guidelines to assess these impacts and limits can barely be found. Therefore we will have a try to define sustainable limits towards the individuals' daily diet and therefore stimulate current available scientific debate. Within the paper an examination of existing indicators and assessment methods is carried out. We set the focus on health indicators, such as energy intake, and environmental indicators, such as the carbon or material footprint. The paper aims to provide first, an assessment of core indicators to explore the sustainability impact of foodstuff, and second, a deeper understanding and a discussion of sustainable limits for those dimensions of food and nutrition. Therefore we will discuss several ecological and health indicators which may be suitable to assess the sustainabilty impact and indicate differences or similarities. As a result it becomes obvious that several ecological indicators "point in the same direction" and therefore a discussion about the variability and the variety of these indicators has to be faced in the future. Further the definition of sustainable levels per indicator is an essential aspect to get an idea about the needed barriers for a sustainable nutrition, by now first steps had been made, but no binding guidelines are available yet. Therefore the paper suggests a few indications to set up sustainable levels for health and environmental indicators, based on the idea to reduce the resource use level up to 30-50% in 2030.

Description: Since human nutrition is responsible for about 30 % of the global natural resource use and in order to decrease resource use to a level in line with planetary boundaries, Lukas et al. (2016) proposed a re-source use reduction in the nutrition sector by a factor 2 (Material Footprint). The catering sector needs clearly defined indicators to assess their business activities' impact on ecology, social aspects, economic value, and health status. Within the project NAHGAST two sets of indicators, called NAHGAST Meal-Basis and NAHGAST Meal-Pro were developed. The indicator sets are proposed to measure several, with sustainability-associated challenges, such as such as the ecological, social and economical effects, which may come along with the production and the consumption of a meal. Basically, the NAHGAST Meal-Basis deals with qualitative indicators, such as the amount of organic food per serving or the percentage of food wasted. This set is supposed to enable leaders to assess the sustainability of their meals and to visualize future improvements on a simplistic level. The NAHGAST Meal-Pro deals with a more sophisticated set of indicators, such as the carbon and material footprint or the cost recovery per meal. Both sets are underpinned with sus-tainable targets and elaborated as an Excel-based assessment tool, which is tested within a one-year case study. The usefulness and the limits of the tool, as well as current results of the implementation including pro-posed challenges, are discussed.

Description: Food labels are able to support consumers in making more sustainable food choices in out-of-home consumption situations. Thereby, the effect of changing consumption behaviour depends on the format of food labels and on the information it provides. In order to assess the importance of the amount of information as well as the design of food labels displaying sustainability aspects, we test different formats of food labels using a best-worst choice design. So far, no research tested a variation of information depth while keeping label designs fixed. We find clear preferences across both dimensions. Results indicate that consumers regard labels with a higher information depth as more helpful in order to choose a sustainable meal. For the label design it became obvious that the slider-design is preferred over footprints and traffic light label design.

Description: Sustainable out-of-home nutrition can help achieve overarching sustainability goals through a transformation in demands of consumers in this growing market. Studies indicate that individual food choice behaviours in out-of-home settings relate to a wide set of personal, social and situational factors. These factors can be influenced by various intervention strategies. In an expert meeting and a focus group we invited caterers and consumers to generate, discuss and evaluate various practical intervention ideas. Both parties largely perceive the explored ideas as useful and agree on key intervention ideas. Overall caterers and consumers state to prefer nudging strategies over information and participation interventions.

Description: Small-scale residential biomass combustion for space heating and warm water production already holds a considerable share on overall energy production from biomass in Europe. In the existing regulative framework of EU air quality and climate protection targets, an extended usage of renewable biomass heating without an increase of harmful emissions is urgently needed. In this context, the FP7 project "EU-UltraLowDust" (ULD) aimed at the demonstration of highly efficient and ultra-low emission small-scale biomass combustion technologies and the development of supporting policy recommendations. New combustion technology operating at almost zero particulate matter (PM) emissions has been demonstrated, rivalling even the performance of state-of-the-art natural gas fuelled systems. In this context, the authors analysed EU policy options for a faster diffusion of these new innovative technologies. The analysis presented in this paper is based on results from an original impact assessment with special focus on energy efficiency and emission scenarios, including the potential effects of a broad deployment of the new ULD technologies as well as the early replacement of poor performing existing installations. As the derived results show that major shares of energy consumption and emissions from residential biomass combustion in the EU are caused by old heating systems, specific policy measures for new and existing installations have been analysed. Following this, a recommended and harmonized policy package for new Small Combustion Installations (SCI) to be put on the market as well as for existing SCI in the stock has been developed, which will be presented in this paper. The basic policy package addresses new installations and consists of a two-step approach, aiming at enhancing the current and forthcoming policies addressing the SCI market in Europe. A complementary second policy package for existing installations aims specifically at the early replacement of SCI already installed in the stock, which are characterized by low efficiency and high emissions.

Description: Contemporary combined heat and power (CHP) systems are often based on fossil fuels, such as natural gas or heating oil. Thereby, small-scale cogeneration systems are intended to replace or complement traditional heating equipment in residential buildings. In addition to space heating or domestic hot water supply, electricity is generated for the own consumption of the building or to be sold to the electric power grid. The adaptation of CHP-systems to renewable energy sources, such as solid biomass applications is challenging, because of feedstock composition and heat integration. Nevertheless, in particular smallscale CHP technologies based on biomass gasification and solid oxide fuel cells (SOFCs) offer significant potentials, also regarding important co-benefits, such as security of energy supply as well as emission reductions in terms of greenhouse gases or air pollutants. Besides emission or air quality regulations, the development of CHP technologies for clean on-site small-scale power generation is also strongly incentivised by energy efficiency policies for residential appliances, such as e.g. Ecodesign and Energy Labelling in the European Union (EU). Furthermore, solid residual biomass as renewable local energy source is best suited for decentralised operations such as micro-grids, also to reduce long-haul fuel transports. By this means such distributed energy resource technology can become an essential part of a forward-looking strategy for net zero energy or even smart plus energy buildings. In this context, this paper presents preliminary impact assessment results and most recent environmental considerations from the EU Horizon 2020 project "FlexiFuel-SOFC" (Grant Agreement no. 641229), which aims at the development of a novel CHP system, consisting of a fuel flexible smallscale fixed-bed updraft gasifier technology, a compact gas cleaning concept and an SOFC for electricity generation. Besides sole system efficiencies, in particular resource and emission aspects of solid fuel combustion and net electricity effects need to be considered. The latter means that vastly less emission intensive gasifier-fuel cell CHP technologies cause significant less fuel related emissions than traditional heating systems, an effect which is further strengthened by avoided emissions from more emission intensive traditional grid electricity generation. As promising result, operation "net" emissions of such on-site generation installations may be virtually zero or even negative. Additionally, this paper scopes central regulatory instruments for small-scale CHP systems in the EU to discuss ways to improve the framework for system deployment.