Integrated life cycle sustainability assessment – A practical approach applied to biorefineries

•Integrated life cycle sustainability assessment provides ex-ante decision support.•It extends LCSA by several features including a barrier analysis.•A benchmarking procedure for result integration is presented.•Practicability has been successfully demonstrated in five large EC-funded projects. Poli...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Applied energy 2015-09, Vol.154, p.1072-1081
Main Authors: Keller, Heiko, Rettenmaier, Nils, Reinhardt, Guido Andreas
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Biorefinery
Decision support
Life cycle assessment
Life cycle sustainability assessment
Sustainability
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Summary:•Integrated life cycle sustainability assessment provides ex-ante decision support.•It extends LCSA by several features including a barrier analysis.•A benchmarking procedure for result integration is presented.•Practicability has been successfully demonstrated in five large EC-funded projects. Politics and industry increasingly request comprehensive ex-ante decision support from a sustainability perspective in complex strategic decision situations. Several approaches have been introduced in the last years to increase the comprehensiveness of life cycle based assessments from covering only environmental aspects towards covering all sustainability aspects. This way, (environmental) life cycle assessment (LCA) has been extended towards life cycle sustainability assessment (LCSA). However, a practical application in ex-ante decision support requires additional features and flexibility that do not exist in the newly devised frameworks. Our methodology of integrated life cycle sustainability assessment (ILCSA) builds upon existing frameworks, extends them with features for ex-ante assessments that increase the value for decision makers and introduces a structured discussion of results to derive concrete conclusions and recommendations. At the same time, the flexibility allows for focussing on those sustainability aspects relevant in the respective decision situation using the best available methodology for assessing each aspect within the overarching ILCSA. ILCSA has so far been successfully applied in five large EC-funded projects. We discuss our methodology based on a concrete application example from these projects.
ISSN:0306-2619
1872-9118
DOI:10.1016/j.apenergy.2015.01.095