Incorporating linear programing and life cycle thinking into environmental sustainability decision-making: a case study on anchovy canning industry

Abstract

Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) is a powerful tool to support environmental informed decisions among product and process alternatives. LCA results reflect the process stage contributions to several environmental impacts, which should be made mutually comparable to help in the decision-making process. Aggregated environmental indexes enable the translation of this set of metrics into a one final score, by defining the attached weights to impacts. Weighting values reflect the corresponding relevance assigned to each environmental impact. Current weighing schemes are based on pre-articulation of preferences, without considering the specific features of the system under study. This paper presents a methodology that combines LCA methodology and linear programming optimisation to determine the environmental improvement actions that conduct to a more sustainable production. LCA was applied using the environmental sustainability assessment (ESA) methodology to obtain two main indexes: natural resources (NR) and environmental burdens (EB). Normalised indexes were optimised to determine the optimal joint of weighting factors that lead to an optimised global environmental sustainability index. The proposed methodology was applied to a food sector, in particular, to the anchovy canning industry in Cantabria Region (Northern Spain). By maximising the objective function composed of NR and EB variables, it is possible to find the optimal joint of weights that identify the best environmental sustainable options. This study proves that LCA can be applied in combination to linear programing tools as a part of the decision-making process in the development of more sustainable processes and products.

Introducing the Green Protein Footprint method as an understandable measure of the environmental cost of anchovy consumption

“…The energy demand of anchovy processing makes it important to include this impact category in the assessment. In fact, energy consumption, mainly in the production of primary packaging, has been reported as one of the main contributors to GWP in European anchovy LCA (Laso et al 2016a;Laso et al 2017a;García-Herrero et al 2017).…”

On analysing sustainability assessment in manufacturing organisations: a survey

“…Authors in (Garcia-Herrero et al, 2017) only focused on the environmental dimension of sustainability and combined LCA and Linear Programming to reach higher level of sustainability in production. By employing LCA and using the environmental sustainability assessment (ESA), the authors meant to obtain two main indices of natural resources (NR) and environmental burdens (EB).…”

“…A brief description of each category is brought in the following as well as the statistics of the papers covering the three category is shown in table 1 and figure 3. (Lillehagen & Petersen, 2015); (Caruso, Dumbacher, & Grieves, 2010); (Tagliaferri et al, 2016); (Atwater & Uzdzinski, 2014); (Garcia-Herrero et al, 2017); (Haanstra, Toxopeus, & van Gerrevink, 2017); (Jayal, Badurdeen, Dillon, & Jawahir, 2010); (Jawahir et al, 2006); (Gutowski et al, 2005); (Güçdemir & Selim, 2017); ; (Santucci & Esterman, 2015); (Rezvan, Azadnia, Noordin, & Seyedi, 2014); (Shin & Colwill, 2017); (Mani, Larborn, Johansson, Lyons, & Morris, 2016); (Haapala et al, 2013); (AlKhazraji, Saldana, Donghuan, & Kumara, 2013); (Hassan, Saman, Mahmood, Nor, & Rahman, 2016); (Huang & Badurdeen, 2017); (Lu et al, 2011); (Ranky, 2010); (Li, Mirlekar, Ruiz-Mercado, & Lima, 2016); (Bakshi, 2014); (Grünwaldt, Hofstetter, & Palm, 2011); (Shi & Yang, 2003); (Petnga & Austin, 2014); (Faezipour & Ferreira, 2011); (Salama, Galal, & Elsayed, 2015);…”

“…Employment of Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) has been one of the most common assessment effort in production planning. In (Srinivasan and Sheng, 1999) a process modelling approach connected with LCA is introduced to make modification on product and process design to assist production planning (as in (Atwater & Uzdzinski, 2014;Garcia-Herrero et al, 2017;Pouyan Rezvan et al, 2014;Gerardo J. Ruiz-Mercado, Gonzalez, & Smith, 2014;Salama, Galal, & Elsayed, 2015;Santucci & Esterman, 2015;Tagliaferri et al, 2016) as examples). Authors in (Caruso, Dumbacher, and Grieves, 2010) employed Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) to optimize the phases of the life cycle to reach sustainability.…”

Monetizing Environmental Footprints: Index Development and Application to a Solar-Powered Chemicals Self-Supplied Desalination Plant

“…Many attempts to obtain the appropriate environmental sustainability index have been made over the years. Literature provides a comprehensive background of references that aggregate different environmental indicators to obtain an integrated index that can easily be used to compare different scenarios. − However, there is not yet one indicator that could catch the various environmental effects of anthropogenic activities and be considered as the “golden standard” . Moreover, developing a novel monetized index, which can also be combined with economic objectives, is of major interest.…”