Abstract
Life cycle assessment (LCA) is a powerful tool to support environmental informed decisions among product and process alternatives. LCA results reflect the process stage contributions to several environmental impacts, which should be made mutually comparable to help in the decision-making process. Aggregated environmental indexes enable the translation of this set of metrics into a one final score, by defining the attached weights to impacts. Weighting values reflect the corresponding relevance assigned to each environmental impact. Current weighing schemes are based on pre-articulation of preferences, without considering the specific features of the system under study. This paper presents a methodology that combines LCA methodology and linear programming optimisation to determine the environmental improvement actions that conduct to a more sustainable production. LCA was applied using the environmental sustainability assessment methodology to obtain two main indexes: natural resources (NR) and environmental burdens (EB). Normalised indexes were optimised to determine the optimal joint of weighting factors that lead to an optimised global Environmental Sustainability Index. The proposed methodology was applied to a food sector, in particular, to the anchovy canning industry in Cantabria Region (Northern Spain). By maximising the objective function composed of NR and EB variables, it is possible to find the optimal joint of weights that identify the best environmental sustainable options. This study proves that LCA can be applied in combination with linear programing tools as a part of the decision-making process in the development of more sustainable processes and products.
Highlights
Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) allows to identify methods of sustainable production and consumption and to support environmental decision-making process (Notarnicola et al 2005)
LCA results in an environmental profile that consists of a set of direct or indirect process stages contributions to various environmental impact categories such as climate change, acidification, eutrophication, toxicity, land use or resource depletion
The environmental results are summarised into two macro-categories: natural resources consumption (NR) and environmental burdens (EB), which are integrated by several impact categories and provide a broad overview of the environmental performance of the process
Summary
Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) allows to identify methods of sustainable production and consumption and to support environmental decision-making process (Notarnicola et al 2005). The use of aggregated indexes in LCA requires quantifying and comparing the value of different environmental impacts, which represents a major challenge. A representative example is the impact assessment method ReCIPe (Goedkoop et al 2009), which is a follow up of Ecoindicator 99 (Goedkoop and Spriensma, 2001) and CML2002 methods (Guinée et al 2002) It harmonises a midpoint and endpoint approach in a consistent framework that considers panel weighting. Olinto and Islam (2017) were focused on LCA impact categories, suggesting their direct relationship to the economic and social domains too These methods provide transparency in evaluating the impacts of weighting factors, where equal weights were assumed as a first approach. This paper proposes a methodology that combines LCA and linear programming (LP) to derive an aggregated sustainability index that determines the environmental improvement actions leading to sustainable production. A representative anchovy canning plant located in Santoña (Cantabria, North of Spain) was selected as case study
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