Integrating Time, Region, and Society Dimensions into a Multi-Dimensional Life-Cycle Analysis for Sustainable Dihydroxyacetone Production

Despite the growing importance of life-cycle analysisin achievingsustainable development goals, the community has not yet reached aconsensus on how to couple multi-objective and multi-dimensional sustainabilityassessment methodologies. The current study tackles this problem byemploying crude glycerol as a raw material for the production of value-addeddihydroxyacetone. We outline a framework for a multi-dimensional life-cyclesustainability assessment that optimizes techno-economic, social,and environmental performance, taking into account factors such astime, region, and markets. We further propose a model that integratesa wide range of parameters including time, region, society, people'slivelihood, environment, and techno-economic analysis methodologies,which is optimized by the NSGA-III algorithm. The efficacy of theframework was demonstrated through analyzing renewable dihydroxyacetoneproduction by catalytic oxidation from glycerol, in comparison witha more traditional fermentation pathway. Detailed life-cycle inventorydata were generated to identify the specific advantages of the productionprocess. The results of our life-cycle optimization framework arecomprehensive, and the methodology is likely to be extendable to otheremerging techniques. Amulti-dimensional life-cycle sustainability assessmentinvolving factors such as time, region, environment, and society isapplied to chemical production.