Addressing decision-making in the process industry using life cycle approach coupled to Linear Programming: A case study on anchovy canning industry in Cantabria Region (Northern Spain)

The main objective of Life cycle assessment (LCA) studies is to support decision-making in environmental sustainable production and consumption. Nevertheless, stake-holders are often forced to choose among several environmental profiles, comprised by a wide range of environmental categories for each alternative. The variety of metrics may hinder the decision-making process, especially when there is no scenario scoring better than the rest in every metric simultaneously. Aggregated indexes can simplified this task by defining attached weights to impacts. Moreover, environmental decisions are usually subjected to economy costs, since production processes are embedded into the product system value. This work proposes a methodology that combines LCA and life cycle cost (LCC) to linear programming in order to define a composite eco-efficiency index. Our model is subjected to optimization to determine a valid range of weighting factors within which the solutions are potentially optimal. This approach is applied to the anchovy canning sector and allows the translation into economic terms of the environmental damage caused when a given alternative is chosen.