QUANTITATIVE SUSTAINABILITY ASSESSMENT THROUGH KEY PERFORMANCE INDICATORS IN ULCOS PROJECT

The measure of sustainability is the scientific step for the introduction of sustainability criteria in the industrial sector. In order to give an accurate picture in the sustainability evaluation, along with environmental and economic aspects, the social dimension need to be taken into account. Despite the development of environmental and economic indicators, the measurement of social impacts and the calculation of suitable indicators are less developed. During the last years the social features are receiving increasing attention in decisionmaking processes whether in policy or in industry. In particular issues related to the local community impacts have an utmost importance in determining the social acceptance of industry, because of the negative perception of industrial plants and technologies, in particular of steelmaking plants. The main problem to measure the social sustainability is related to the lack of quantitative data. The aim of the first part of this paper is to describe the methodology, based on both qualitative and quantitative approach, for a social indicator development, in order to analyse and compare the social impacts whether a new process or a new project. In the presented study, both approaches have been carried out: on the one hand a quantitative evaluation for categories that are directly measurable, thanks to the quantitative data availability; on the other hand a qualitative evaluation for categories that require subjective scales and associated guidelines. These methodologies have been developed inside the ULCOS project, focused on the radical reduction of CO 2 emissions from iron and steel production, in order to evaluate the sustainability of new technologies and processes that are being carried out through the use of Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). The importance of the social KPIs, such as the one illustrated in the paper, need to be suitably weighted with respect to other KPIs related to economical and environmental factors. Moreover, when comparing different technologies, a fair evaluation of the different KPIs through a unified approach is mandatory. Thus, in the second part of the paper, a software tool for the evaluation and comparison of different technologies through KPIs is presented. This tool takes into account a series of KPIs and considers different importance weights for each indicator and group of KPIs. It works hierarchically in the sense that it firstly provides a sustainability index for each group of indicators (economical, social and environmental); subsequently it supplies the overall evaluation of the technology. This way, group and general sustainability indexes are available for a more transparent sight of the characteristics of each technology. Furthermore the developed software is fully customizable in order to be easily adapted to different applications.