The concept of sustainable development is a challenge that demands cooperation from all levels of society for it to be successful. The focus for this thesis is how politicians within the local councils understand the concept of sustainable development and how they implement it in political decision-making.The basis for the study is a questionnaire that was distributed to 303 local politicians in three municipalities of varying size in Southern Sweden. The study concentrates on departments within the local councils that are directly connected to the Swedish environmental law and the Swedish planning and construction law. One of the primary goals with the aforementioned laws is the achievement of sustainable development within one generation.The outcome of the study was that over half of the local politicians could correctly define sustainable development according to the World Commission on Environment and Development?s (WCED) definition.

The purpose with this report is to make a contribution to Bodycote heat treatments workshop in Värnamo, how to introduce, establish and constantly improve its environmental system. The rapport will help Bodycote with there certifying in ISO 14001: s demand standard. Organizations who continuously work with environmental issues have a lot to gain. Two things an active environmental development process will convey are, building of thrust within the circle of customers, and great financial savings. An increasingly numbers of organizations realize the importance to introduce a functioning environmental system into their activity.

Until 2020, 49% of Sweden's use of energy must derive from renewable sources. Greenhouse gases must as well decline with 40% compared to 1990 as a part of Sweden's 16 Environmental objectives. Biogas is part of the effort to achieve these objectives, but as the demand for biogas increases, more substrates are needed to meet the demand. The purpose is to investigate the conditions for pea residue as substrate by performing lab-scale mesophilic digestion with different fractions and notch lengths and then to summarize pea residue as a substrate for biogas production. During anaerobic digestion, 1000 ml bottles were used as reactors for digestion.

The population growth and urbanisation in low-income countries bring issues of poor living standards and miserable sanitation conditions onto the agenda. If well-functioning waste management systems were developed, this could master some of the problems. The already existing local informal waste handling system that is common in many low-income countries, needs to be developed with proper sorting and composting solutions to decrease the environmental burden and improve the overall situation in the dense cities. This master?s thesis project is performed with the intention of developing functional decentralised waste management units in the city of Pune, India.

Municipalities in Sweden are responsible for physical planning by developing a general plan. This plan contains intended land and water use for the area. This study aims to investigate the level of integra­tion of environmental issues in the general plan of Arboga municipality and also how well adapted the municipality is for climate change. Further on, the study intends to examine the focus of the gen­eral plan and at what rate the national environmental strategies are implemented in the local physi­cal planning of Arboga municipality. Methods used for this study are interviews and reviewing of the general plan itself and other key documents.

A trend since the early 90?s has been that some public libraries offer a special shelf containing environmental information to the community, but it seems as though the subject has been overlooked by the literature and the science community. The purpose of this bachelor thesis is to study how three independent public libraries work with environmental information that is made available to the community. The following questions were addressed: 1) Which arguments can be found as to why the libraries offer this activity? 2) How does the environmental work at the public libraries look and what does it contain of? 3) Are there any similarities or differences in this work between the three libraries?To answer these questions interviews with librarians were carried out; observations were made to complement the interviews.

This thesis calculates and compares the values of improved environmental quality due to future possible investment alternatives in biogas production facilities at Käppalaförbundets Reningsverk (Käppala Sewage Treatment Works) in an attempt to determine which alternative yields the highest such value. Käppala faces three investment alternatives for the usage of biogas. The alternatives are production of vehicle fuel, district heating and thirdly, heat and power production. Estimates of the value of environmental change are calculated for each of the three investment alternatives, and these estimates are then compared. The environmental change in question is the change in discharge levels of carbon dioxide (CO2), nitrogen oxides (NOx), sulphur dioxide (SO2) and particle matter.

In Sweden, detailed development plans (DDPs) go through a screening process to decide whether their implementation could cause significant environmental impact or not. The criteria in the legislation were studied to see if an environmental impact assessment was needed. This study also investigated 26 DDPs from 12 out of 13 of the municipalities in Östergötland and how they meet up to the demands in relevant legislation, for example the rules for Environmental Impact Assessments. Plans that concerned suburban communities and new housing were selected. The environmental issues highlighted in the plan documents were compared to selected topics from the GIS data base 'Östgötakartan' to see if the assessments made by the municipalities were reasonable judged.

To integrate environmental concerns into non-environmental policy making has become an important policy objective within the European Union. This essay investigates policy instruments in use to achieve environmental policy integration in the EU's transport sector respectively fisheries sector. The point of departure is a theoretical discussion about governance and the use of different policy instruments for environmental management at the EU-level. The focal point is the argumentation that regulatory policy instruments alone cannot achieve environmental policy integration satisfactory. By using Jordan et al's classification of so called "new" environmental policy instruments (market-based instruments, voluntary agreements and ecolabels) as complements to regulatory measures, the essay investigates whether the first-mentioned are used within the two sectors.

During the 90s most companies organized and adopted routines for their environmental work. This work included for example eco-efficiency improvements and the introduction of environmental managing systems. At the UN conference in Rio in 1992 the concept Sustainable development was defined, but it was not until about the year of 2000 that companies in Sweden shifted their work from environmental management to sustainable management. A consequence of this is that they now have to focus on environmental aspect in conjunction with social and economic aspects.The purpose of this study is to gain understanding of what a change of focus to sustainable development means for companies. Has the environmental work suffered in the competition with social/economical aspects under the new sustainable focus? How will the new way of working affect the balance between environmental and social aspects? Changes were studied in five companies by analysing their annual-, environmental- and sustainability reports and through interviews of sustainable managers.

BACKGROUND & During the last century, the Swedish chemical industry has developedPROBLEM: considerably in regard to respecting the environment. Following various discharges and pollutions during the first half of the 20th century, environmental concepts such as CSR, Responsible Care and REACH have developed in order to improve the situation. Today, environmental issues play a central role in the society, but what are the reasons behind this increased environmental commitment? PURPOSE & The purpose of this thesis paper is to study the driving forces behindDELIMITATIONS: the increased environmental awareness in companies. Is this mainly due to stricter legislations, or do factors like pressure from the general public, the industry or customers play a more vital role? Furthermore, do economic incentives exist, that make it interesting for companies to invest in environmental awareness? Since the chemical industry spans over a wide spectrum in regard to environmental issues, this paper will focus on a specific area of the industry.

This thesis examines the process of securitization of the environmental issue in the United States. By using the theories of sectoral security and securitization by Barry Buzan and Ole Waever, commonly known as the Copenhagen school we go beyond the traditional security frames and examine where the environmental issue in the United States stand today within the securitization spectrum. The securitizing spectrum includes three levels in which an issue can be place: non-politicised, politicised and securitized.The problem, which we wish to address, is if there is a movement of the environmental issue in the United States towards becoming a securitized issue. In the light of these circumstances we also wish to explore who is behind the movement and also find out where the issue stand today. We do believe that Al Gore is a securitizing actor and examine his role in the movement of the environmental issueWe have come to the conclusion that there is an ongoing process of securitization in which the environmental issue have moved from being politicised to becoming securitized..

The purpose of this study was to implement an energy analysis and environmental evaluation of the property Hemsta 12:16 in Gävle. Based on two different methods, Energy Balance calculation and Environmental Building, the result of the property's energy use, energy performance and environmental impacts are presented. Except that, measures to reduce final energy consumption are presented.      The proposed measures can reduce energy usage by 100 400 kWh / year, which represents a decrease of 18% of the present energy usage. This would represent a total savings of 63 000 SEK per year. In addition, the environmental performance is improved by adopting the suggested measures..

The first of May 2005 changes were made in the Annual Accounts Act. The 2006 Annual Report of companies with more than ten employees or assets over 24 million SEK must include environmental information in the directors' report if it affects the company's development, result or position. A survey made by KPMG 2007 investigating the environmental information of companies listed on Large Cap Segment of the OMX Stockholm exchange showed that only a third of the companies, included in the survey, complied with the new law requirements. I have examined how the environmental information in the directors' report is formulated and why the information is formulated in that fashion. I have examined seven companies listed on the Large Cap Segment of the OMX Stockholm exchange. Four companies from the materials sector and three banks from the financials sector were included in the survey.

A possible explanation for the inability of the governments of the world to implement necessary environmental policies is that they are worried of being punished by voters for implementing too forceful policies. But do voters actually punish governments that implement more stringent environmental policies? Few studies have explored this question directly. Parts of the literature on environmental policy and public opinion indicate that voters would predominantly reward governments that implement more stringent environmental policies, while other parts indicate that voters would predominantly punish them. It is also possible that voters punish governments that implement more stringent environmental policies in some contexts, but reward them in others.