Supporting Process Design by a Sustainability KPIs Methodology

Achieving sustainable plants in the chemical and process industries requires sustainability issues to be addressed from the early process and plant design stages, where the main determinants of the impacts during the plant life cycle are actually defined. Adequate metrics, able to account the specific factors of design activities, are needed to support the effective implementation of sustainability principles in process design. In this chapter, the Sustainability Key Performance Indicator (KPI) methodology is described. The methodology provides a procedure for the definition of a specific set of quantitative key performance indicators suitable to capture the environmental, economic and societal impacts of process options, and thus trace the sustainability footprint of alternatives. It includes specific approaches for the selection of relevant indicators and for the introduction of site-specific factors in the normalization and aggregation of the results. The methodology constitutes an advancement of previous techniques, particularly regarding decision making in the assessment of preliminary process flow diagrams (PFDs).