On the Weighting Factors of the Environmental Impacts in Sustainable Manufacturing

The Integrated Prevention Pollution Control (IPPC) and the Integrated Product Policy (IPP) have been considered efficient regulations to increase the Environmental performance of the european process industries and its  related products respectively. IPPC identifies 90 main pollutants of concern and the threshold to be considered  to inform to the administration and the public in general (E-PRTR  European-Pollutants Release and Tansfer Register).

In this contribution the pollutants thresholds have been used as weighting factors in order to account the dimensionless impacts allowing to get a quantitative assessment of the environmental sustainability. The method has been applied to the comparison among the main manufacture sectors in the different european countries.

The procedure allows a way to order the investments in the manufacture sectors and countries in order to get the higher efficiency in the use of the economic resources. Social considerations can be also included in the sustainability assessment