Overcoming the inadequacy of single-criterion approaches to Life Cycle Assessment

In this work, the authors intend to introduce to the scientific community a novel integrated approach to environmental impact assessment, appropriately named SUstainability Multicriteria Multiscale Assessment (SUMMA). Its main objective is to overcome the inherent shortcomings of all single-criterion approaches, which constitute the vast majority of the Life Cycle Assessments performed to date in the scientific literature, and which invariably lead to partial and often misleading results. Furthermore, SUMMA is structured so as to enable a consistent sensitivity analysis of all the calculated impact indicators, a procedure that is of crucial importance for assessing the variability and reliability of the results, but which is only rarely adopted. The suggested framework is applied to selected case studies (coal gasification, bauxite mining, aluminium production and fuel cell manufacture), the results of which are discussed.