Accounting for engineering trade-offs in corporate and public decision-making

Abstract

From experience in developing and testing pollution prevention tools ranging from the opportunity assessment methodology to life cycle assessment and impact assessment, the Systems Analysis Branch (SAB) of the EPA 's National Risk Management Research Laboratory (NRMRL) has acquired a long record of lessons learned in applying these approaches for real world applications. Many of these lessons illustrate several limitations exhibited by each of these P2 approaches. For example, the pollution prevention opportunity assessment (PPOA), perhaps the most intuitive and simplest P2 tool available, is very good at identifying ways to improve operating practices, but the SAB has found several deficiencies in the PPOA 's ability to support the procurement of new equipment, products and substitute materials. Life cycle assessment, by contrast, resolves most of those deficiencies by providing a far more comprehensive picture than PPOA, but it is very complex and more expensive by at least an order of magnitude than the PPOA. Further, while each methodological approach provides information on environmental burdens, neither provides any insights on the inevitable trade-offs that occur in performance and cost resulting from a decision. The failure to account for these trade-offs early in the assessment may result in a decision that inadvertently creates negative impacts in performance, cost and environment. The purpose of this article is to propose a new perspective to account for the trade-offs inherent from making a change.