Professor Michael Zwicky Hauschild from
DTU Management Engineering was this year's recipient of the Aase and Ejnar Danielsen Foundation's environmental award of DKK 250,000.
On Wednesday 26 November, Professor Michael Zwicky Hauschild received the Aase and Ejnar Danielsen Foundation's environmental award for 2014. The award was accompanied by cash prize of DKK 250,000.
The award is given in recognition of the dedicated efforts of the professor throughout his career to promote research into methods for sustainability assessment and thus also his efforts to facilitate more sustainable production for the industrial sector:
"The industrial sector plays a key role in the development towards a sustainable society. The companies must develop and manufacture products that can meet our generation's needs without destroying the ability of future generations to meet theirs. This will require both a varied and precise knowledge base for making decisions. Professor Michael Zwicky Hauschild has played a key role in the establishment of this knowledge base," as is stated in the motivation from the foundation for its choice of award winner.
20 years of research
Professor Hauschild is head of the Quantitative Sustainability Assessment (QSA) research division (http://www.qsa.man.dtu.dk/) at DTU Management Engineering. For the past 20 years, the division has developed scientific quantitative methods and tools that are applied to assess the environmental footprints of products or systems—from the ideas stage to the time of scrapping or recycling.
Right from the outset, the division has not only provided international-level research, but has also helped to define and develop the scientific area Life Cycle Assessment. Therefore, it is not least thanks to the researchers in QSA that the recognized International Journal of LCA recently named DTU the most cited university in the world within this area.
But according to the award winner, that is no reason to rest on the laurels.
"In future, industrial business models must have sustainability as their backbone, which requires continued research and development to ensure that we are capable of quantifying all environmental impacts. This is the only way for decision-makers to see where the largest impacts occur and the only way for us to achieve more sustainable production," says Michael Hauschild Zwicky Hauschild.