An integrated methodology for environmental impacts and costs evaluation in industrial processes

Abstract

The development of methods for process analysis has contributed to the improvement of production systems. In this context, many models and methodologies have been established in the literature in order to evaluate environmental performance of industrial processes, since it has become an important issue for society. However, few of them analyze environmental impacts and related costs simultaneously. So, this work presents an integrated methodology to perform this evaluation, based on Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) and Activity-Based Costing (ABC) principles. The proposed methodology was applied in a metallurgical industry in Brazil. As result, it allowed to identify the production process stages which have critical environmental impacts and greatest contribution to increase environmental costs of the company. © 2009.