Mapping environmental issues within supply chains: a LCA based approach

This work addresses the optimization of Supply Chain (SC) planning and design considering economical and environmental issues. The SC operations model applied does not require a superstructure definition a priori for the material flows. The strategic decisions considered in the model are facility location and equipment allocation. For the environmental aspects of the problem a Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) approach is applied. IMPACT 2002+ methodology is selected to perform the impact assessment within the SC since it proposes a feasible implementation of a combined midpointendpoint evaluation. No aggregation of damage categories and analysis of partial environmental impacts for each of echelon are performed. The formulation leads to a multi-criteria MILP program. The criteria adopted as objective functions are damage categories impacts, overall impact factor and net present value (NPV). The main advantages of this model are highlighted through a case study of a maleic anhydride SC.