Sustainable development life cycle

Economic (cost perspective) with the most popular method in the literature quoted of assessing the economic aspects of sustainable development— life cycle cost (LCC). 

The integration of the sustainability and environmental impact analysis to the framework provides a more comprehensive decision making and multicriteria evaluation to enable the users to screen for economic but sustainable biorefmery concepts early on in the project development life cycle. 

A useful example of sustainable design comes from BASF, and their development of the eco-efficiency tool. This tool seeks to integrate the combined aspects of each of the three pillars in an attempt to quantify the most sustainable products and illustrates some of the concerns associated with evaluating sustainable products. For example, the economic analysis includes a total cost of ownership that goes beyond the purchase price of a product to incorporate the cost of operation, the cost of environmental health and safety, and the cost of labour. Thus, even though a product may have a lower purchase price, it may be more expensive to use and thus costlier over the total life cycle of the product. 

Resource efficient syntheses and production processes of fine chemicals contribute significantly to sustainable development. This has also been pointed out in Agenda 21 Promote efficient use of materials and resources, taking into account the life cycles of products, in order to realize the economic and environmental benefits of using resources more efficiently and producing fewer wastes (Agenda 21, Chapter 9.18). 

The ECO method was developed to aid environmental impact and cost optimisation of chemical synthesis pathways or processes suitable for the research and development (R D) stage. In order to represent terms of ecological as well as economic sustainability, three objective functions which incorporate (i) energy demand (EF), (ii) risks concerning human health and the environment (EHF) and (iii) costs (CE), were defined. Their calculation follows the life cycle approach and is based on the data available already in R D. Because the application of a comprehensive LCA is both, too complex and based on data which are partially not available at the R D stage, the determination of the three objective functions is based on the SLCA approach extended by economic issues. The key objectives are introduced below. 

Development of Integrated Systematic Engineering Approaches to Sustainable Resource Exploitation (e.g., life-cycle analysis, soft-systems analysis) in fields such as Mining, Forestry, and Agriculture,... 

The United Nations Industrial Development Organization (UNIDO) defines cleaner production as the conceptual and procedural approach to production that demands that all phases of the life-cycle of products must be addressed with the objective of the prevention or minimization of short- and long-term risks to humans and the environment. A total societal commitment is required for effecting this comprehensive approach to achieving the goal of sustainable societies. 9... 

Within the broad framework of sustainable development, we should strive to maximize resource efficiency through activities such as energy and nonrenewable resource conservation, risk minimization, pollution prevention, minimization of waste at all stages of a product life-cycle, and the development of products that are durable and can be re-used and recycled. Sustainable chemistry strives to accomplish these ends through the design, manufacture and use of efficient and effective, more environmentally benign chemical products and processes". 

The relatively new field of industrial ecology provides a useful organizing framework for DEE (Lowe, 1993). Design for Environment (DEE) is the terminology for the third component of the LCA life-cycle improvement assessment. The principle of sustainable development suggests that companies or individuals should try both to minimize the consumption of virgin natural resources and to minimize the generation of waste material that has no productive use. 

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