Process sustainability and feasibility optimization
Environmental issues are no longer an exclusive concern of NGOs, but citizens, governments and industries are showing interest in limiting the impact of the products that are massively consumed and willing to make efforts to achieve this. However, finding the best solutions is not always trivial. On the one hand, there is no clarity on which strategies are better and more desirable by society. On the other hand, it is also not evident which strategies would be feasible to implement in the current market conditions. In this context, it is necessary to have a methodology able to identify strategies that are feasible, implementable, and environmentally and economically optimal according to the preferences of the society towards a circular economy.
The iPRACS group develops a methodological framework to analyze the performance of the different strategies and to identify the optimal ones according to economic and environmental criteria. To this end, we use both Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) and Techno-Economic Assessment (TEA) in an integrated manner, and often collaborate with the Department of Engineering Management. Moreover, we extend the currently available methods by analyzing the interactions between horizontal and vertical competitors in order to propose contract agreements and policy instruments that would make these stakeholders choose the desirable options. We finally study the integration of sustainability assessment and optimization methods into early stage research, ideally allowing real-time decision making on desirable processing routes in ongoing projects.
