Page 177 - Materials Chemistry, Second Edition

CHAPTER

9

Life cycle decision support framework:

Method and case study

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

9.1 Introduction

Lifecyclesustainabilityassessment(LCSA)isawell-knownmeasurementtoolforanyservice,
industrial system, or manufacturing process to standardize and quantify its impacts in environ-
mental, economic, and social aspects (Ren et al., 2015; Wulf et al., 2018). The three individual as-
sessmentsfor environmental, economic,and social analysis,respectively,containedinLCSA are
life cycle assessment (LCA), life cycle costing (LCC), and social life cycle assessment (SLCA)
(Berriel et al., 2018; Ioppolo et al., 2019). Those assessment methods are instructed by interna-
tional standards (ISO14040, ISO14044, ISO14047-ISO14049, and ISO14072 for LCA, and
ISO15663 for LCC), so that they provide scientific and standardized results for research objects
with respect to their impacts on environment, finance, and society. Therefore, LCSA has been
widely used in industries such as construction (Caruso et al., 2017; Balasbaneh et al., 2018),
transportation (Onat et al., 2016; Ekener et al., 2018), energy generation (Moslehi and Reddy,
2019; Roinioti and Koroneos, 2019), and other industries to assess their sustainability.
However, problems were faced when a comparative LCSA study was studied. The results
of LCSA cannot be directly compared for ranking alternatives, since it is hard to judge when
each alternative has its own strengths and drawbacks in most cases. For example, in a com-
parative LCSA study of urban water reuse (Opher et al., 2018a), the no-reuse scenarios score
best in LCA, while the semidistributed reclamation performs the best in both LCC analysis
and SLCA analysis. It is hard to say the semidistributed reclamation is the best option, be-
cause the environmental performance of the semidistributed reclamation is far inferior to
the no-use reclamation. In this case, the authors (Opher et al., 2018a) used a decision making
model to assist the ranking process.

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Life Cycle Sustainability Assessment for Decision-Making Copyright # 2020 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
https://doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-12-818355-7.00009-9