Page 227 - Materials Chemistry, Second Edition

CHAPTER

11

A composite life cycle sustainability

index for sustainability prioritization

of industrial systems

a b b
Di Xu , Weichen Li , Lichun Dong
a
School of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering, Chongqing University of Science & Technology,
b
Chongqing, China School of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering, Chongqing University,
Chongqing, China

11.1 Introduction

Although industrial systems play a critical role in the global economy, they also cause a
variety of environmental burdens and social issues. Therefore, the concept of sustainability
or sustainable development has been a hot topic for the industrial systems, which aims to im-
prove the performances of environmental impacts, economic prosperity, and social respon-
sibilities, simultaneously (Heijungs et al., 2010; Xu et al., 2018a). However, the traditional
sustainability assessment only focuses on the manufacturing stage of the industrial system,
failing to track the comprehensive performance/impacts with respect to the stages of
construction, production, transportation, utilization, and disposal of the investigated system.
For addressing this issue, a life cycle perspective can bring powerful insights into the sus-
tainability assessment of industrial systems, by providing extended information on the
traditional triple-bottom-line (TBL) sustainability, as depicted in Fig. 11.1, where environ-
mental, economic, and social concerns can be fully collected and then evaluated along the
whole supply chain, from extraction of raw material to its end of life (Heijungs et al., 2010;
Xu et al., 2017). As an emerging method for assessing the sustainability of industrial systems
with life cycle thinking, the life cycle sustainability assessment (LCSA) could be essentially
denoted as the combination of three life cycle-based assessment tools, i.e., the environmental
life cycle assessment (E-LCA or LCA) for environmental impacts, life cycle costing (LCC) for

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Life Cycle Sustainability Assessment for Decision-Making Copyright # 2020 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
https://doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-12-818355-7.00011-7