Sustainable Product Portfolio Evaluation Methodology for Sustainability Reporting in the Cement and Concrete Industry

Abstract

The sustainability performance of companies, and in particular of construction material producers, is attracting more and more attention by a broad range of stakeholders. Many companies have consequently started to implement sustainability practices into practical action and to report on their efforts. This research aims to develop a methodology to assess the sustainability performance of cement and concrete products. This requires overcoming the main shortage of life cycle assessment, namely focusing on environmental parameters only, by considering a number of social and economic sustainability indicators and ensuring operational ease, without compromising the informative value of the assessment results. A status on sustainable product evaluation is provided as the starting point for the development of the new sustainable product evaluation methodology. The status on product evaluation includes Life Cycle Assessments, the development of indicators addressing environmental, social, and economic parameters, and recent methodology developments in industry. The results obtained with the tool developed in this work confirm the need for considering social and economic parameters along a product’s life cycle when evaluating the sustainability performance of cement and concrete. They also indicate that the new methodology is suitable for R&D orientation, portfolio management and sustainability reporting. 

Keywords: Sustainable products, sustainability indicators, lifecycle, UN Sustainable Development Goals, financial data