SUSTAINABILITY ASSESSMENT METHODS AND TOOLS TO SUPPORT DECISION-MAKING IN THE PROCESS INDUSTRIES

Executive summary: The aim of the SAMT project (2015-2016) is to review and make recommendations about the most potential methods for evaluating sustainability and therein the energy and resource efficiency in the process industry. SAMT will collect, evaluate and communicate the experiences of leading industrial actors from cement, oil, metal, water, waste and chemical industry and review the latest scientific developments within the field of sustainability assessment. SAMT is a coordination and support action that will promote the cross-sectorial uptake of the most promising tools by conducting case studies, organising workshops and producing recommendations for further implementation of the best practices in sustainability assessment. This report is presented as an Appendix to the main SAMT case study report (Deliverable 2.2). It provides a case study addressing the environmental, economic and social impact of the activities related to the production, consumption and disposal of one unit of an industrial product at two hypothetical locations in Spain and Germany. The main goal of our assessment was to test and validate complementary methods for sustainability assessment, rather than accurately characterise the environmental, economic and social impacts of the two production alternatives. The methods tested in this case study include a full life cycle assessment (LCA), a Material Footprint (MIPS), a Life Cycle Costing (LCC) and a Social-LCA (S-LCA). Additionally, two integrated methods including one Eco-Efficiency Analysis (EEA) and one Eco-Productivity analysis (GP method) were also applied. Thus, the analysis tackles all the three spheres of sustainability: the environmental, economic and social impacts of the product. The evidence collected in the study shows that there are still a number of areas for improvement in sustainability assessment practice. This is applicable even to those methods that seem most mature, like the environmental Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) method and related methods such as the Material Input per Service (MIPS) method. Those are methods whose implementation is underpinned by consistent and reliable databases. Similarly those are methods with agreed standards and guidelines that are the outcomes of long lasting harmonisation efforts. Although these aspects guarantee an overall solid basis for implementation, some issues can potentially emerge due to the intrinsic complexity and diversity of options within the different phases of a LCA/MIPS, including deciding on the following aspects: (i) the system boundaries and cut/off criteria; (ii) the impact categories included; (iii) the impact methods and the characterisation level – midpoints or endpoints –, and; (iv) the normalisation and weighting options. Similarly, life cycle costing (LCC) methods are well established methods that can provide valuable information on the structure of costs over the entire value chain of a given product or process. However, these methods seem to be challenged by the intrinsic difficulty of collecting good quality value chain data, as well as by the uncertainties linked to the estimation of financial costs – that are based on projected interests, amortisation or discount rates. On the contrary, social assessment methods such as Social-Life Cycle Assessment (S-LCA) seem to be on an early stage of development yet. Despite such methods represent a very promising contribution to comprehensive Social Impact Assessment along the life cycle of products, these methods rely on rather poor or difficult to collect data. Additionally, S-LCA has to face other well-known methodological shortcomings shared with the integrated methods. These integrated methods, such as the Eco-Efficiency Assessment (EEA) and the Green Productivity (GP) analysis applied in this case study prove that relevant information can be disclosed when efforts are put in the definition of consistent normalisation and weighting approaches. Still, these methodological aspects present some intrinsic limitations that are difficult to overcome. These include the definition of relevant reference values for benchmarking and the adoption of transparent, stable and easy to communicate approaches for weighting. Altogether, there is a perceived need for reliable value chain data, in particular for the social dimension, as well as further testing and harmonisation of methods before consensus on all the methodological choices involved in the application of the different methods is reached. Similarly, there seems to be a need for more simplified tools for cost-efficient sustainability assessment.