Page 271 - Materials Chemistry, Second Edition

CHAPTER

13

Multi-criteria decision-making after

life cycle sustainability assessment

under hybrid information

a b
Jingzheng Ren , Sara Toniolo
a
The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering,
b
Hong Kong SAR, China University of Padova, Department of Industrial Engineering,
Padova, Italy

13.1 Introduction

Life cycle assessment (LCA), also called “environmental life cycle assessment” regulated
by ISO 14040 standard has been recognized as one of the most powerful tools for assessing the
environmental performance of a product or process in life cycle perspective from the extrac-
tion of raw materials to the end of the product (Saad et al., 2011). However, as a tool, LCA
which is environmental-centric cannot incorporate the economic and social performances.
Life cycle costing (LCC), which refers to an economic performance technique, can encompass
all associated costs of a product in its whole life cycle (Sherif and Kolarik, 1981). Social life
cycle assessment (SLCA), is a social assessment technique to assess the social performance
of products and the potential impacts, including both positive and negative, in their life cycle
(UNEP, 2009). Similarly, life cycle costing (LCC) and social life cycle assessment (SLCA) can
only investigate the economic and the social pillar of sustainability, respectively. Life cycle
sustainability assessment (LCSA), which combines LCA, LCC, and SCLA, can assess the eco-
nomic, environmental, and social aspects of products or processes (Guin ee, 2016). Therefore,
life cycle sustainability assessment has been widely used for sustainability assessment of
energy and industrial systems recently for its advantage of incorporating economic, environ-
mental, and social dimensions of sustainability simultaneously.
LCSA can be employed to compare the relative performances of different energy and
industrial systems with respect to the indicators in economic, environmental, and social

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Life Cycle Sustainability Assessment for Decision-Making Copyright # 2020 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
https://doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-12-818355-7.00013-0