A quantitative framework for Sustainability Assessment in the Process Industry
Special Symposium - Environmental Protection & Sustainability
Environmental Protection & Sustainability - III
Keywords: sustainability assessment, process industry, normalization, inherent safety
The adoption of a sustainable behaviour is presently a central issue for process industry and represents an effective answer to several problems that the management and the further development of the industry has to face: societal acceptability, environmental damage, efficiency, safety, etc. In the process design, in particular at early stages, it is essential to have quantitative tools to guide decision-making and design improvement in the framework of reducing the impact on sustainability. Despite of the considerable efforts devoted to the development of quantitative assessment tools, an approach to perform a balanced analysis of the multiple specific aspects, aimed to support decision making concerning process alternatives is still missing.
The present work was dedicated to the development of an assessment framework specifically addressed to the comparison of alternatives in early design stages. The assessment is based on the identification of an array of indicators addressing specific categories of impact related to the process of concern within the three main aspects of sustainability (environmental, economic and societal). In particular, among societal indicators, a specific indicator for process inherent safety evaluation was developed and introduced in the assessment. The indicators are combined through a multi-criteria approach aimed to the definition of a hierarchy of indexes with different levels of aggregation. In this framework, the fundamental importance of the normalization stage is outlined in order to evaluate the considered process in the context where it has to be located. Specific criteria for the determination of site reference values, able to account for the different spatial scales of any impact, are also discussed. Through the use of weighting factors, the presented approach thus allows a connection between the technical choices at the design level and the sustainability management policy of the specific location of process activities. The outlined approach was applied to a case study of industrial interest in which different process alternatives were compared. The procedure developed allowed the assessment of the impact fingerprint of each process alternative and the ranking of alternatives with respect to the overall expected impact on sustainability.
Presented Monday 17, 15:00 to 15:20, in session Environmental Protection & Sustainability - III (S-7C).
