Page 233 - Materials Chemistry, Second Edition

11.2 Life cycle environmental indicators 231

FIG. 11.4 Multiple “footprints” for life cycle-based environmental evaluation.

11.2.4 Other typical environmental indicators

As a research focus during the past decades, the environmental assessment of the indus-
trial systems has been well-developed, offering a great number of indicators that can be
adopted for creating a comprehensive environmental index system. In this sub-section, some
other typical indicators are summarized. Consequently, users can select proper indicators
according to their preferences and the actual conditions of the investigated system.
Except for the environmental indicators summarized in Table 11.3, some other criteria,
such as the energy balance (consumptions and/or savings), use of materials (mass flows),
(Iba ´n ˜ez-For es et al., 2014), the degree of clean production (Cobuloglu and B€ uy€ uktahtakın,
2015), etc., could also be used as alternative indicators for assessing the environmental per-
formance of an industrial systems with life cycle thinking.