Sustainability Assessment Of Renewables-Based Products - Methods And Case Studies

An extensive update and sequel to the successful title Renewables-Based Technology: Sustainability Assessment. Over the past decade, the field of renewable resources has grown tremendously and sustainability assessment methods have undergone significant changes and improvements. This book brings together the wide range of sustainability assessment methods in current use, together with case studies to demonstrate their applications.

The book is divided into four sections as follows:
Part 1 – Introduction: Discusses the growing role of renewables as resources and their applications, together with an introduction to the principles of sustainability assessment
Part 2 - Assessment Methods: Presents a wide variety of sustainability assessment methods and tools that are currently used. This includes land, water-and material use analysis, energy and exergy use, carbon footprints, life cycle analysis, ecological footprints, life cycle costing, social sustainability analysis, Prosuite methodology and Seebalance (the SocioEcoEfficiency Analysis developed by BASF.
Part 3 – Case Studies: Provides context buy demonstrating the application of these methods within the major industries benefiting from renewables. The case studies apply sustainability assessment methods to the production of renewable energy (wind energy, solar energy and biofuels), bio-based chemicals and bio-based materials.
Part 4 – Conclusions

Prof. Dr. Jo Dewulf, Institute for Environment and Sustainability, JRC, European Commision, Italy and Sustainable Organic Chemistry and Technology, Ghent University, Belgium
Professor Dewulf performs research in the areas of environmental chemistry, environmental technology and clean technology at Ghent University. Since December? 2013, he has been working as a senior researcher in the Institute for Environment and Sustainability at the Joint Research Institute of the European Commission. Key in his work is managing natural resources in a technically efficient way, performing thermodynamics based sustainability analysis at process, plant and cradle-to-gate level to support the development and assessment of new technologies.

Supported by:

Dr Steven De Meester, Sustainable Organic Chemistry and Technology, Ghent University, Belgium
Dr De Meester works on the development of sustainability assessment methodologies for new technologies and applications of Life Cycle Assessment in industry.

Dr Rodrigo Alvarenga, Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina, Brazil