Integrating Time, Region, and Society Dimensions into a Multi-Dimensional Life-Cycle Analysis for Sustainable Dihydroxyacetone Production

Abstract

Despite the growing importance of life-cycle analysis in achieving sustainable development goals, the community has not yet reached a consensus on how to couple multi-objective and multi-dimensional sustainability assessment methodologies. The current study tackles this problem by employing crude glycerol as a raw material for the production of value-added dihydroxyacetone. We outline a framework for a multi-dimensional life-cycle sustainability assessment that optimizes techno-economic, social, and environmental performance, taking into account factors such as time, region, and markets. We further propose a model that integrates a wide range of parameters including time, region, society, people’s livelihood, environment, and techno-economic analysis methodologies, which is optimized by the NSGA-III algorithm. The efficacy of the framework was demonstrated through analyzing renewable dihydroxyacetone production by catalytic oxidation from glycerol, in comparison with a more traditional fermentation pathway. Detailed life-cycle inventory data were generated to identify the specific advantages of the production process. The results of our life-cycle optimization framework are comprehensive, and the methodology is likely to be extendable to other emerging techniques.

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