Page 329 - Materials Chemistry, Second Edition

CHAPTER

16

Integrated data envelopment analysis,

weighting method and life cycle

thinking: A quantitative framework for

life cycle sustainability improvement

Jingzheng Ren
The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering,
Hong Kong SAR, China

16.1 Introduction

Industrial processes usually consume various energy sources and natural resources,
and lead to various solid wastes, liquid wastes, and emissions. Accordingly, the sustainability
of industrial processes attracts more and more attention nowadays. Sustainability can usually
be defined as the management of resources (including natural, social, financial, and techno-
logical) to assure that the resources can satisfy the present human needs and will not influence
the needs of future generation (Valenti et al., 2018). Three main pillars of sustainability includ-
ing economic, environmental, and social (the so-called “triple bottom line”) aspects are usu-
ally considered for sustainability assessment (Lim and Biswas, 2018; Hammer and
Pivo, 2017).
Life cycle tools including life cycle assessment (LCA), life cycle costing (LCC), and social
life cycle assessment (SLCA) were developed to investigate the performance of different pro-
cesses or products with respect to the three pillars of sustainability. Heijungs et al. (2010) de-
veloped life cycle sustainability assessment (LCSA) by combining LCA, LCC, and SLCA to
investigate the three pillars of sustainability from a life cycle perspective. After LCSA of pro-
cesses or products, the economic performance, environmental impacts, and social influences
of different processes or products can be obtained; but the users can only compare two alter-
native processes or products with respect to one evaluation criterion, and they may face a

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Life Cycle Sustainability Assessment for Decision-Making Copyright # 2020 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
https://doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-12-818355-7.00016-6