Revision and Extension of Eco-LCA Metrics for Sustainability Assessment of the Energy and Chemical Processes

详细信息    查看全文

• 作者：Shiying Yang ; Siyu Yang ; Andrzej Kraslawski ; Yu Qian
• 刊名：Environmental Science & Technology
• 出版年：2013
• 出版时间：December 17, 2013
• 年：2013
• 卷：47
• 期：24
• 页码：14450-14458
• 全文大小：349K
• 年卷期：v.47,no.24(December 17, 2013)
• ISSN：1520-5851

文摘

Ecologically based life cycle assessment (Eco-LCA) is an appealing approach for the evaluation of resources utilization and environmental impacts of the process industries from an ecological scale. However, the aggregated metrics of Eco-LCA suffer from some drawbacks: the environmental impact metric has limited applicability; the resource utilization metric ignores indirect consumption; the renewability metric fails to address the quantitative distinction of resources availability; the productivity metric seems self-contradictory. In this paper, the existing Eco-LCA metrics are revised and extended for sustainability assessment of the energy and chemical processes. A new Eco-LCA metrics system is proposed, including four independent dimensions: environmental impact, resource utilization, resource availability, and economic effectiveness. An illustrative example of comparing assessment between a gas boiler and a solar boiler process provides insight into the features of the proposed approach.