A tool to evaluate what makes a factory sustainable

Industrial sites significantly affect the quality of people’s living environment. Research and practice show increasing attention for the environmental issues at process scale, minor for the social ones at site level; while to get more sustainable factories these aspects must be approached holistically. As part of a larger research on factory landscape compatibility, this study aims to provide companies with a tool to understand what helps make their factory compatible with the surroundings, thus which impacts should be mitigated. To that end, a preliminary detection of a factory’s interferences with the context is required; but current assessment tools lack an integrated approach, while addressing many specific issues. To fill the gap, the study provides: (i) a critical review of existing assessment tools and the reason why the LEED protocol was chosen as reference; (ii) a proposal for its improvement by an additional category of indicators, based on 8 new credits which address perceptual-aesthetic aspects; (iii) the worksheets’ outline of new credits. Moreover the paper summarizes two further research outputs: a Catalogue of good practices for the mitigation of impacts and the tool application on the Italian case study of Orogel facilities. The discussion about limitations and opportunities of the developed tool completes the paper.