Diffusion of tools for monitoring environmental sustainability in Industry: challenges and preliminary solutions

Industry is currently required to increase resource and energy-efficiency. Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) is one of the main methodologies to compute potential environmental burdens of a product or service. LCAs in the industrial sector are delivered through static yearly analyses based on the requirements of a single environmental label. Therefore, state-of-the-art LCAs do not capture any temporal dynamics of industrial processes and cannot flexibly deal with changes and developments of LCA databases and specific rules of environmental labels. Here we outline that modular tools can address these challenges and we show an application within the ORI Martin secondary steelmaking plant.