Page 135 - Biofuels for a More Sustainable Future

122 Biofuels for a More Sustainable Future

Finally, it is often beneficial for sustainability assessment to involve as
much quantification as possible in order to aid evaluation of the outcomes.
Typical sustainability reporting approaches often rely heavily on identifica-
tion and description rather than quantification.
To this end, the existing literature in the field of sustainability assessment
has generated a large number of suggested metrics, otherwise referred to as
sustainability indicators. The purpose of such indicators is to simplify, quantify,
and communicate information across a range of relevant environmental, eco-
nomic, and social issues. A variety of journal articles have reviewed the use of
such indicators and assessment frameworks, such as Singh et al. (2012), and
interested readers are directed to these works for a more detailed overview,
as well as to the case studies discussed later. Specifically in the energy sector,
examples of the use of sustainability indicators are found in Switzerland
(Roth et al., 2009; Volkart et al., 2017), the United Kingdom (Stamford
and Azapagic, 2012; Cooper et al., 2018b), Turkey (Atilgan and Azapagic,
2016), Mexico (Santoyo-Castelazo et al., 2014), China (Ren et al., 2015),
and many other countries.
In many cases, and in line with the holistic principles of sustainability,
these suggested sustainability assessment frameworks have taken a life cycle
approach to their development and application. Consequently, they have
often used, and encouraged the advancement of, related tools and techniques
such as environmental life cycle assessment, economic life cycle costing, and
social life cycle assessment. Together, tools such as these form the basis of life
cycle sustainability assessment, an approach which is continuing to evolve
and find application across varied disciplines.

2 Life cycle sustainability assessment
Just as sustainability has often been described as an integration of environ-
mental, economic, and social issues, sustainability assessment typically adopts
environmental, economic, and social techniques. However, a key element
of life cycle sustainability assessment (LCSA) is its adoption of a life cycle
approach, and consequently LCSA often shares many characteristics with
the more established practice of LCA, which is described later. Therefore
following the outline of LCA, this section describes methodologically con-
sistent approaches to the other two pillars: namely, life cycle costing (LCC)
and social life cycle assessment (SLCA).