 Hello, and welcome to the podcast for the journal Integrated Environmental Assessment and Management, better known as IEAM. I'm Jenny Shaw. The July 2015 issue of IEAM contains an article that uses life cycle assessment to evaluate the environmental benefits of reuse. That's reuse, as in one of the three R's in the mantra, Reduce, Reuse, Recycle. The article is part of a special series that resulted from a CTAC Life Cycle Assessment Symposium held in Rome, Italy. Co-author Valentina Castellani is with us today to discuss the study. Valentina is a researcher at the University of Milan, Italy. Hi Valentina, thanks for joining us today. Thank you Jenny. Hi to everybody. So I think the term life cycle assessment is something that people hear a lot about, but they might not have a clear understanding of it. I know that's the case for me. Could you give us a brief overview of the field? Yeah, life cycle assessment is a methodology for assessing environmental impact throughout the whole supply chain of product and services. So from the extraction of raw materials through the production and use phase and to the end of life, so disposal or recycling. And it was developed in the late sixties, mainly as a way to account for resource consumption. Then it was later developed again and more deeply to include also other environmental impacts. And there are many methods for life cycle impact assessment. But the final aim of all these methods is to identify the main environmental impacts of products and services throughout the whole supply chain. And to find out which is the most effective way to reduce them. So in the paper, you evaluate the potential environmental benefits of reuse. Buying used items as opposed to new ones. Can you elaborate on the case study? Yeah, the case study was proposed by an Italian NGO working mainly in projects for international cooperation and developing countries. This NGO is called Manitese and they have shops where they sell items donated by people. And these items are sold mainly to other people who are in economic troubles or that are not so able to buy new items on the market. And moreover, the revenue of this selling is used for financing these projects of international cooperation. So this has mainly a social value. But in the last years, they recognized that this could have also environmental implications. So this can generate environmental benefits. And they asked to us in the University of Milan to identify and to quantify these potential benefits. So what we did was to analyze the products that were sold in the shop and cluster them into product categories and to select one or more than one representative item for each product category. Then we did the lifecycle assessment, so an evaluation of environmental impacts for these products. And we used the results to quantify the potential environmental burden avoided through the reuse. Because when you reuse an item, you are usually avoiding to buy a new one. So avoiding to produce a new one. So in the end, what we obtained was a calculation of the potential environmental benefits for each kind of product category. And multiplying these results for the quantity of products for each category that are sold in the shop during one year. We evaluated the potential environmental benefit of the whole activity of the shop during one year. Of course, this is related to a case study, so to one shop, but can be extended to all the second hand market and habits. And this can have a relevant implication for a sector of the market that is growing so much during the last years. Because people are more interested in reuse and are more environmentally conscious and so on. What do you think are the main challenges in getting people to embrace the reuse of products? And by people, I mean both consumers and industry. Well, actually, if we think about consumers, I think that small items are already reused in larger quantities. Because you can have these vintage shops or there's more interest in vintage clothes or vintage glasses or something like this. Whereas for big pieces, the interest is different because in these cases, they are bought by people who have a real need to avoid buying a new one, which could be more expensive. So I think it refers to different kinds of consumers. But as a general comment, I think that consumers are becoming more and more environmentally conscious and they are more likely to buy second hand products. And this is testified also by the enlarging of the second hand product market or also on the web, for example. But for what concerns the industries and mainly this kind of organization that promote the second hand selling, we have to think that big items can generate more problems because of course they need larger space to be stored and so maybe higher costs for the seller. So this could be in the end again a balance between the two. Do you think that the government and regulations could also play a role in facilitating reuse of more limited resources or materials? Well, they can play a role but sometimes the current regulation, which is very good and very detailed, the regulation about waste, for example, can sometimes prevent the development of these kinds of initiatives because the regulation is very strict about who can handle a waste. And this is good because it has the aim of preventing wrong management of waste. But in the end, it ends up with the fact that if you are not a waste operator and if you try to reuse the item, after they are, for example, delivered to a waste platform, they are considered waste so you cannot reuse it anymore just for a matter of regulation. So I think this could be one problem in the future that needs to be solved. I'm wondering though with more analysis like yours, if these types of analyses will have some effect towards changing the regulation to be more reuse friendly? Well, I hope and I think so because at the end of the project that I mentioned, we presented the results in a public workshop where also local administrators, local politicians were there and they were very impressed by the results. And they were thinking about how to enlarge this market and how to promote the reuse through the avoidance of waste, so through these kinds of initiatives. So I think there's room for discussion and there's room for improvement and for finding solutions to this. Great. Thank you so much, Valentina, for joining us today and chatting about your work. Thank you. It was really a pleasure to talk with you. You've been listening to Valentina Castellani discuss her article, Beyond the Throwaway Society, a life cycle based assessment of the environmental benefit of reuse. Access the article in the July 2015 issue of IEAM. Just go to ctechjournals.org. I'm Jenny Shaw and thank you for listening to the IEAM podcast.