Sustainability assessment for the chemical industry: Onwards to integrated system analysis

The chemical industry has been struggling to conduct sustainable operations within safe planetary limits, while being socially sound and profitable. Industrial systems are composed of complex arrangements that can vary from system's boundary, production phase, management level and sustainability dimensions. The integration of such concepts is essential for sustainable development. Another crucial point is the procedure for unbiased decision-making. Contrarily to past works that separately address these concepts, this work integrates all aspects under a system's perspective. This review covers methods applicable to the chemical industry seeking to answer the following question: are the existing sustain ability assessment methods able to comparatively discriminate complex chemical industry arrangements to support design and corporate decisions? The adopted framework encompasses definition of focus and scope; investigation of prior reviews; definition of literature classification; search and screening the literature; classification of the literature extract; analysis, review and findings; and identification of gaps for future developments. The framework identified 60 methods on sustainable chemical process design and production up to the present date. A sharp increase of articles occurred from 2010, but reported methods are seldom fully integrated and are mostly applied to gate-to-gate boundaries. The main identified literature gap is the lack of simultaneous coverage of all sustainability dimensions within the life-cycle boundaries. Additionally, decision-making is mostly arbitrary, either overlooking indicator screening or critical evaluation of the proposed techniques. This review unveiled the need for integrated systems analysis for product/process life-cycle and company-levels. (C) 2020 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Automated summary

The chemical industry is striving to achieve sustainable operations within safe planetary limits, while also considering complex system arrangements and unbiased decision-making processes. Current sustainability assessment methods lack comprehensive coverage of all dimensions within life-cycle boundaries, and decision-making procedures often lack thorough evaluation of proposed techniques. Integrated systems analysis is identified as necessary for product/process life-cycle and company-levels.