(778c) A Roadmap for Sustainable Development

To help chemical companies with sustainability considerations in their business and technology evaluations the American Institute of Chemical Engineers (AIChE), has established the Center of Sustainable Technology Practices (CSTP) to develop tools for such undertaking. To account for all aspects of sustainability, organizations must consider issues encompassing the complete life cycle of a project or product and the impacts either one would have on the social and environmental surroundings. To accomplish this objective, it was concluded that organizations can benefit from a model to help with the decision making in such processes.

In response to this concern, CSTP has developed a tool called the Sustainable Development (SD) Roadmap. This is expected to become a generic model that industry can use in the thought process of introducing a new product to the market or undertaking a new project. In the process, CSTP realized that considering all issues concerning sustainability requires in depth analysis of multiple components. The SD Roadmap streamlines the process of considering these issues through a categorized list of questions that thoroughly evaluate the sustainability of the considered product or project. The categorization of the Roadmap allows users to evaluate sustainability in an organized and documented manner.

We have tested the SD Roadmap to evaluate its completeness and user friendliness by a the tool to compare the sustainability of ethanol fuel derived from corn and willow biomass. Our use of the tool consisted of answering all questions related to two categories (from a total of 15) namely, the upstream input and commercialization of the bioethanol. We concluded that in the examined two categories, the SD Roadmap is relatively comprehensive and user friendly. While the model can use some minor adjustments, it encourages a multi-aspect view of sustainability.