Identification of Key Sustainability Performance Indicators and related assessment methods for the carbon fiber recycling sector

Abstract The need for the extensive use of sustainability assessment as a standalone tool to evaluate the environmental, economic and social aspects of an activity be it at project, product, company or region level has resulted in the development of various methods and standards. There are several indicator issues to address each aspect of sustainability and it is not easy for decision makers to understand the result due to the use of multiple indicators. In this regard, the paper aims at the identification and combination of indicators allowing to assess the sustainability which is applicable to a carbon fiber recycling sector. Indicators selection were carried out by performing an extensive literature review on existing publications dealing with the different pillars of sustainability and setting a number of selection criteria to prioritize indicators that are relevant to the sector. For the environmental aspect global warming, acidification and human toxicity seem to be the most relevant. The social-economic aspect can be addressed through considering the resource impact assessment by considering the supply risk due to the geological scarcity of a resource and the potential supply disruption due to geopolitical and other social factors. The finding shows that three indicators have been identified enabling the assessment of the environmental pillar. Then the necessity to use extra resources indicators was shown and justified by the need of providing a shorter timeframe perspective as well as to consider the amount of fiber to be recycled in the future and also to determine the potential benefit provided by the creation of this sector to the resource strategy point of view. This will be made possible by using such method as the criticality assessment that enable the consideration of geological and geopolitical supply risk as well as the characterization of the system dependence to a specific resource. Finally, these results lead to the expression of the need to the development of a novel indicator assessing the criticality of carbon fibers as well as the expression of the necessity for further research on the socio-economic perspectives.