Decision Making Tool in Life Cycle Assessment for Packaging Sustainability

Abstract

The Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) is a method to measure the environmental impact of a product’s life stages from the cradle to the grave, and is widely used for packaging sustainability. Although many successful applications using LCA have been reported, the current state of LCA tools still has many limitations. For example, it is difficult to select the best design among the LCA results of design sets. Moreover, the LCA tool cannot implement a decision maker’s preference into the process easily. To overcome these limitations, we developed a decision making tool using LCA for packaging sustainability. First, Pareto Active Set Selection (PASS) method is proposed to find Pareto Front of packaging options. Additionally, Design Preference Function (DPF) is introduced to implement the designer’s preference for selecting the best packaging options. Case studies are presented to demonstrate this decision making tool.

Multi-Criteria Decision-Making Methods Applied to Achieve Sustainable Design: A Systematic Review

“…Life Cycle Assessment is a tool to assess the potential environmental impacts and resources used throughout a product's lifecycle, i.e., from raw material acquisition, via production and use phases, to waste management (Finnveden et al, 2009). The sustainable design guided by the LCA resulted into a set of design alternatives, which is greatly adaptable for Pareto method (Azapagic & Clift, 1999;Liechty, Mabey, Mattson, Salmon, & Weaver, 2022;H. H. Qi, Lee, Gea, & Asme, 2013).…”