Page 425 - Biofuels for a More Sustainable Future

378 Biofuels for a More Sustainable Future

costing”), and social life cycle assessment (SLCA) has been recognized as a
promising methodology for sustainability assessment and measurement of
biofuel production pathways from life cycle perspective (Berriel et al.,
2018). LCA can be used to study the environmental impacts, ELCA can
be used to measure the economic performances, and SLCA can be employed
to measure social influences (Ren and Toniolo, 2018; Ren et al., 2018).
However, sometime it is still difficult for the decision-makers to determine
the sustainability sequence of the alternative biofuel production pathways,
because one biofuel production pathway may perform better on some cri-
teria, but it may also perform worse on some other criteria, and the decision-
makers/stakeholders are puzzled when facing various conflicting criteria for
sustainability assessment. Accordingly, multicriteria decision analysis
(MCDA) was usually combined with LCSA for sustainability prioritization
of different alternatives. For instance, Ekener et al. (2018) combined LCSA
and MCDA to analyze the sustainability of biofuels and fossil fuels for trans-
portation. Ren et al. (2015b) combined LCSA and VIKOR
(VlseKriterijumska Optimizacija I Kompromisno Resenje) which is a typical
MCDA method for sustainability ranking of different bioethanol production
pathways. Martı ´n-Gamboa et al. (2017) combined life cycle thinking and
DEA (Data Envelopment Analysis) to a sustainability-oriented MADA for
ranking and benchmarking energy systems. All the methods can help the
decision-makers/stakeholders to select the most sustainable biofuel produc-
tion pathway. However, the decision-makers/stakeholders still do not know
the life cycle sustainability performance of each biofuel production
quantitatively.
To address this issue, composite sustainability index and aggregated sus-
tainability index are introduced with considerable investigations. The inves-
tigations involve all the agricultural, construction, and industrial sectors with
the research scale from local to global. von Wir en-Lehr (2001) assessed the
sustainability in agriculture by aggregating seven goal-oriented concepts.
Kamali et al. (2018) proposed a life cycle sustainability framework using
aggregated sustainability indices for residential modular buildings. Ren
(2018) developed a life cycle aggregated sustainability index method for
the prioritization of industrial systems under data uncertainties. Roth
et al. (2009) outlined the approach to the evaluation of sustainability of cur-
rent and future electricity supply options by multicriteria decision analysis.
Clerici et al., 2004assessed the sustainability at the province scale by aggre-
gated environmental performance indicators. Tilman and Clark (2014) ana-
lyzed the sustainability linked to the environment and human health under