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Sustainability Analysis for Products and Processes
Citation:
Sikdar, S. Sustainability Analysis for Products and Processes. Presented at Sustinable Nanotechnology Organization Conference, Washington, DC, November 04 - 06, 2012.
Impact/Purpose:
Keynote presentation at the Sustainable Nanotechnology Organization conferece, November 4-6, 2012, Wasington, DC
Description:
Sustainability Analysis for Products and Processes Subhas K. Sikdar National Risk Management Research Laboratory United States Environmental protection Agency 26 W. M.L. King Dr. Cincinnati, OH 45237 Sikdar.subhas@epa.gov ABSTRACT Claims of both sustainable and unsustainable technologies need to be substantiated quantitatively. If we accept the premise that current technologies can be continually improved in terms of economic benefit, societal good and environmental performance, all current technologies can be understood to be relatively unsustainable. It is however conceivable that with a particular technology providing a particular service, there can come a point from which no further improvement in any of the three domains of sustainability can be achieved. At that point, we will have achieved a sustainable technology. Since we will not know when that situation will arise, we should judge sustainability in relative terms. More sustainable technologies, therefore, are what we would be seeking. There are however many claims of sustainable technologies, the so-called green washing, that have not been presented with quantitative assessment based on metrics or indicators that cover the sustainability concerns. Typically they would be addressing only one prominent concern, most frequently it appears to be global warming. To elicit credibility, this situation has to change by incorporating all potential indicators of sustainability. There are many types of sustainable systems at global, regional, institutional and technology scales that are considered and reported upon. In this talk only the technology scale will be considered. The first order of business in a sustainability analysis with an eye to ascertain if a technology is more sustainable than another serving the same function, suitable quantitative metrics or indicators need to be chosen. It must be assured that all three dimensions of sustainability will be sufficiently covered. It is possible that some indicators will have attributes that would be over-represented, thus introducing bias in the analysis. Thus a prioritization of the indicators should be conducted to yield the number of necessary and sufficient indicators. Lastly a quantitative analysis must be performed to show that one option is clearly superior to the rest from a sustainability viewpoint. This presentation will show the recent advances made in each of these elements of the process of analysis with examples of industrial systems.