Abstract
This chapter provides a review of the current state of the art in sustainability indicators or metrics for business and technology scales. These are the two scales at which the scientists and engineers have the most control over sustainability performance. At the business scale the purpose is to ensure investments to be secure and profitable, and for business to provide adequate support for the environment and the society. Three measurement systems are analyzed: the Global Reporting Initiative, the Dow Jones Sustainability Index, and an emerging method developed by the American Institute of Chemical engineers (AIChE), the first two being widely used. Of the technology systems, we cover the ones provided by the professional societies. The indicator system suggested by the Institution of Chemical Engineering (UK) explicitly lists the indicators under environmental, societal, and economic categories, but the AIChE system lists the most important technical indicators. Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) and Life Cycle Assessment techniques are also presented to provide the context and tools needed for sustainability assessment at these scales.
“I often say that when you can measure what you are speaking about, and express it in numbers, you know something about it; but when you cannot express it in numbers, your knowledge is of a meager and unsatisfactory kind; it may be the beginning of knowledge, but you have scarcely, in your thoughts, advanced to the stage of science, whatever the matter may be.”
— Lord Kelvin
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Environmental Life Cycle Assessment (ELCA), normally referred to as Life Cycle Assessment (LCA), Life Cycle Costing (LCC), and Social Life Cycle Assessment (SLCA) are often used approaches to measure separately environmental, economics and societal aspects of sustainability. A comprehensive discussion on these approaches is presented in the document Guidelines for Social Life Cycle Assessment of Product (UNEP 2009, Guidelines for Social Life Cycle Assessment of Products. United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), Belgium). This guideline is in line with the ISO 14040 (ISO 14040:2006—Environmental management—Life cycle assessment—Principles and framework.) and ISO 14044:2006—Environmental management—Life cycle assessment—Requirements and guidelines, standards for Life Cycle Assessment. It sets out the larger challenge and “establishes a framework for addressing social and socio-economic LCA guidelines complementing environmental LCA and Life Cycle Costing, contributing to the full assessment of goods and services within the context of sustainable development.”
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In an operating unit some discreet change takes place such as heating to a higher temperature or increasing the pressure, or conducting a chemical reaction. Generally, when a chemical conversion takes place it is called a unit process, otherwise unit operation. In this book when one of this is not specifically mentioned, the statement should be understood to apply to both.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life-cycle_assessment. Accessed 25 Sept 2015, http://www.unep.org/pdf/UNEP_LifecycleInit_Dec_FINAL.pdf. Curran, M.A.
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Hofstetter P (1998) Perspectives in life cycle impact assessment: a structured approach to combine models of the technosphere, ecosphere, and valuesphere. Springer Science & Business Media, New York.
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ISO, ISO14040 (2006) 14040: Environmental management–life cycle assessment–principles and framework. British Standards Institution, London.
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Van Marrewijk M (2003) Concepts and definitions of CSR and corporate sustainability: between agency and communion. J Business Ethics 44.2–3:95–105.
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Sikdar, S.K., Sengupta, D., Mukherjee, R. (2017). Sustainability Measurement for Technology and Business Systems: Use of Currently Available Tools for Quantification. In: Measuring Progress Towards Sustainability. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-42719-5_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-42719-5_5
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