Life cycle sustainability assessment indicators

In summary, LCSA is a hohstic approach to assess the life cycle sustainability of a product/service, which is inclusive for three pillars of sustainability. It overcomes the difficulty in quantifying social indicators to provide relatively indicative quantitative results. 

The quantitative assessment of environmental impacts can be made using life-cycle assessment (LCA) methodology, which accounts for both inputs and emissions. LCA can be used to identify the major environmental impact categories and the sources of those impacts within a chemical processing plant. LCA can also be used to identify the major contributions to environmental impact within a product s life cycle. Impact scores derived from LCA can be used along with economic assessment scores and social indicators to provide indicators of overall sustainability of processes and products. Economic assessments are often limited through failure to account for all internal costs and especially the external costs associated with waste. 

LCSA extends the environmental boundaries of traditional LCA in an attempt to incorporate the concept of sustainable development. It is defined as a method of addressing environmental, economic, and social sustainabiHty of a product system over its life cycle, indicated through the measurement of either positive or negative impacts [3]. LCA has been implemented through an integration of E-LCA, hfe cycle costing (LCC), and social life cycle assessment (S-LCA) [3]. Brief definitions of E-LCA, LCC, and S-LCA are described in Table 14.1. 

Being different from other approaches to assess fife cycle sustainability, PROSUITE methodology utiHzes five endpoint impacts, which reduce the risk of overlapping between three pillars of SustainabiHty. For example, the indicator of income, which can be used as a pathway to social SustainabiHty, brings better quality of life. At the same time, income indicator can be considered under the economic sustainabihty point of view [14],... 

Limdin, M., Morrison, G.M., 2002. A life cycle assessment based procedure for development of environmental sustainability indicators for urban water systems. Urban Water 4,145-152. 

A wide range of sustainability-assessment methods have been developed in recent years. Some well-known and commonly used tools for sustainability assessment are Criteria and Indicators (C I), Life-Cycle Assessment (LCA), Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA), and Cost—Benefit Analysis (CB A) (Buytaert et al., 2011). This section focuses on LCA, aiming to present its basic stages. 

These indicators are a shortlist of the sustainability issues related to biofuels production and not all of them can be estimated with current life-cycle assessment (LCA) methodologies. For instance, none of the LCA studies discussed in the Uterature included ILUC (indirect land-use change that may displace existing agricultural activity) in the analysis (Humalisto, 2015). This specific problem remains a major unsolved factor for the assessment of the carbon footprint of biofuels as it is tightly Unked to deforestation, which endangers the local habitats and biodiversity. 

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