Rajib Sinha

Rajib Sinha is a researcher at the Department of Sustainable Development, Environmental Science and Engineering (SEED), KTH. He obtained his Ph.D. in Industrial Ecology.

Research Interest

He is interested in understanding the complexity and dynamics of societal metabolism to identify the drivers of environmental pressures to take proactive actions to improved management. His interests cover physical resource management to sustainable production-consumption, urban metabolism, material efficiency and circular economy, rebound effects and unintended consequences, implications of life cycle thinking and systems thinking in practice. His research specifically focused on the modeling aspects of industrial ecology, e.g., MFA/SFA, LCA, Input-Output analysis, system dynamics, agent-based modeling.

On-going projects

• REFLOW – Visualization of cities' hidden resource flows. (Coinvestigator with the City of Stockholm, RISE and EcoLoop AB. Funded by FORMAS, 2022-2023)
• Urban circularity assessment framework. The aim is to improve urban circularity while ensuring the transition is just, enhancing equality and compensating losers in the process.
  Funded by VINNOVA for three years (2020-2023).
• Mainstream monitoring predominantly focuses on the impacts and outflows from society. This approach is a reactive response since society takes necessary measures when the impacts are perceived. Instead of focusing on the mainstream monitoring approach, we propose to monitor physical resource stocks and flows in terms of environmental pressure from a life cycle perspective. The aim of the project is to develop a physical resource accounting model to monitor the environmental pressure of urban
  metabolism. I am the principal investigator of the project collaborating with international research teams led byProf. Richard Wood andProf. Edgar Hertwich at NTNU, Norway,Prof. Tommy Wiedmannat UNSW, Australia, andProf. Christopher Kennedy, University of Victoria, Canada.
  The project is grounded on the REFLOW project at the City of Stockholm and funded by FORMAS for three years (2019-2021).
• A new sustainable route to polysaccharide hydrogel formation for medical and cosmetic applications. Funded by FORMAS for three years (2020-2022)

Past projects

• Marine bioeconomy for circular nitrogen and phosphorus flows in Sweden: Alternatives, hurdles and policy tools funded by FORMAS. I am leading work package 1 - Circular N and P flows: Mapping the potential of loop closure.
• Energy-efficient commuting at Industrial Ecology, KTH and in collaboration with Karlstad University, Värmlandstrafik AB and Blekingetrafiken, Sweden. My role is to develop a model for calculating energy use in commuting to work, depending on the choice of different modes of transport and thus able to calculate the energy potential of various behavioral changes. Funded by the Swedish Energy Agency.
• REFLOW project collaboration with the City of Stockholm aiming at developing a demonstrator of urban metabolism in order to provide increased insight into physical resources (energy, water, materials) at all levels of society (e.g., individuals, authorities, and decision-makers), thus creating incentives to contribute to a more resource-efficient society. Funded by the Environmental protection Agency.
• LCA-oriented comparison for the redevelopment of a building at Industrial Ecology, KTH and in collaboration with Skanska, Stockholm. My role is to analyze different scenarios of construction, refurbishment, and demolition of the building. (2015-2016)
• Environmental Load Profile (ELP) of Building construction at the collaboration of Industrial Ecology, KTH, Sweden and the City of Stockholm. My role was to investigate and evaluate whether the ELP of building structures can be used or developed to be used as a simple standard model for calculating the environmental footprint of building structures. A comparison between the ELP, GaBi, and SimaPro. (2014-2015)
• Closing the material flow loop- An inspiring project to 6 Ph.D. students from different disciplines and universities in Sweden funded by the KTH-Sustainability. In this collaborative project, we deepened the analysis of the drivers of synchronized growth for end-of-life collection systems to the production from multidisciplinary perspectives. (2013-2014)
• Modeling of Smart Energy Systems for cities at Industrial Ecology, KTH, Sweden. This project focuses on the modeling of the decentralized energy system for future cities and to evaluate how the system can respond to different optimization criteria like Economy, Renewables, GHG emissions, Low Carbon, resilience, etc. My role was to model and optimize the system adopting an agent-based modeling approach. (2011-2012)
• Household metabolism at Industrial Ecology, KTH, Sweden. Modeling the indirect environmental load of household purchase decisions and using the results to explore options for reductions and systems effects. (2010-2011)
• Modeling the effects of mixing and spreading on biodegradable BTEX in groundwater and Reactive Transport Modeling for radionuclide migration at the collaboration of Land and Water Resource and Industrial Ecology at KTH, Sweden. (2009-2010)

Supervision

Ongoing

Doctoral student: Asterios Papageorgiou (co-supervisor)

Master thesis: Elisabet Larsson, Lina Bergström, Ludvig Wingårdh

Previous

Master thesis: Vincent Lernbecher, Alva Helin, Charles Edward Sawyer, Shaozhe Wang, Shihui Wang, Karl Anders Wikberg, Nazila Ravan, Anuj Dahiya, Erik Wikström, Asterios Papageorgiou, Ted Forslund, Timmy Rosendal, Janis Gedusevs, Jana Marie Mille, David Martínez Rodríguez, Archana Ashok, Rainer Link, Tanjil Al Aziz, Goutam Saha

Teaching

He is responsible for two master level courses: i) Introduction to Industrial Ecology and ii) Material and Energy Flow Accounting for Cleaner Production. He also teaches partly in many other courses. See below: