Page 228 - Materials Chemistry, Second Edition

226 11. A composite life cycle sustainability index for sustainability prioritization of industrial systems

FIG. 11.1 From sustainability assess-
ment to life cycle sustainability
assessment.

economic prosperity, and social life cycle assessment (S-LCA) for social responsibility, which
is preferred to be denoted as LCSA¼E-LCA+LCC+S-LCA (Heijungs et al., 2010).
However, assessing the sustainability of industrial systems from a life cycle perspective is
still at its development stage. In order to make a contribution to this issue, this chapter offers a
reviewregardingthe lifecycle sustainabilitycriteria fortheprioritizationof industrialsystems;
in which, typical environmental, economic, and social indicators from the well-known tools of
E-LCA, LCC, and S-LCA are summarized, while some other typical indicators that can be
employed for evaluating the life cycle-based sustainability of the industrial systems are also
introduced. Subsequently, a composite life cycle sustainability index for the prioritization of
industrial systems is developed, which can effectively aggregate multiple criteria from the
environmental, economic, and social concerns into a composite index. The developed compos-
ite index is characterized by integrating the absolute score and relative balance of the
multi-criteria in a compromise way for offering a rigorous ranking result, while its feasibility
and robustness are also confirmed by implementing a case study and sensitivity analysis.

11.2 Life cycle environmental indicators

With an increasing prominence of environmental problems from the middle of the twen-
tieth century, multiple indicators are available for evaluating the environmental performance
of the industrial systems. In this section, the indicators from the life cycle assessment, from the