Page 158 - Materials Chemistry, Second Edition

CHAPTER

8

Framework of life cycle

sustainability assessment

a a b
Ruojue Lin , Yi Man , Jingzheng Ren
a
Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University,
b
Hong Kong SAR, People’s Republic of China The Hong Kong Polytechnic University,
Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering, Hong Kong SAR, China

6.1 Introduction

With continuous growth of population globally, the conflict between growing resources
demand and worsening environment has become obvious and urgent to solve. Most environ-
mental issues have been found to be worsened by overusing of limited resources and
unsuitable waste treatments. To alleviate this trend, the sustainable development concept
has been raised and attracted a lot of attention. In the “Our Common Future” conference
published by World Commission on Environment and Development (WCED) in 1987, the
Brundtland Commission defined sustainable development as “development that meets the
needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their
own”. This definition has been used until today. For this purpose, tools need to be developed
to assist practitioners or stakeholders in developing more sustainable products, services, or
production processes. As researchers are aware of the importance of tool development, the
life cycle concept was developed to emphasize the significance of overall assessment. Life
cycle assessment (LCA) was the first and the widest accepted tool developed to evaluate
environmental sustainability. With revision and further studies, LCA has been standardized
as ISO 14040 and ISO 14044 and been adapted in several areas such as sustainability assess-
ment of projects in the construction industry, sustainability assessment of new technologies in
manufacturing industries, and environmental assessment of new production development.
However, since LCA only considers the environmental impacts of the research targets, it
leads to ignorance of economic benefits and social impacts. Because of this, life cycle sustain-
ability assessment (LCSA) considering environmental, economic, and social aspects
was raised.

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Life Cycle Sustainability Assessment for Decision-Making Copyright # 2020 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
https://doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-12-818355-7.00008-7