General Theory of Multicriteria Analysis and Life Cycle Assessment

The agro-industrial sector presents relevant environmental pressures in terms of both consumption of non-renewable resources, emissions of greenhouse gases, by-product reuse and waste disposal. Moreover, these environmental aspects must be evaluated assuring the technical feasibility and the economical sustainability of the alternative chains. Therefore, the multicriteria analysis (MCA) implementation is useful to detect all the possible technical solutions and identify the most suitable ones in order to limit the production costs and minimise the environmental pressures. On the other hand the life cycle assessment (LCA) methodology is one of the most effective tools for carrying out the environmental analysis, even if the large variability and complexity of possible scenarios often determine a huge amount of configurations to be investigated, which require considerable computational time and resources. For this reason the methodological approach proposed in this book adopts the MCA at the very first stage as a sort of pre−filtering which should be capable of selecting the most relevant cases to be investigated by means of LCA.