The methodology developed to evaluate the sustainability of railway projects, unifies the indicators chosen in the three pillars of sustainability (environmental, social and economic). Thus, LIFE HUELLAS tool facilitates the understanding of the results of sustainability evaluation of different project alternatives.
Economic factor of sustainability is not included in this calculator because it depends directly on company costs.
Stages developed in the LIFE HUELLAS project:
The Decision Tree is the hierarchical ordering of selected sustainability issues (criteria, sub-criteria and their respective measurement units).
For each indicator, a value function is defined associating each indicator as a value in the range [0, 100], corresponding respectively to minimum and maximum satisfaction.
For "Job Creation" indicator, the maximum value has been determined studying working hours/km ratio on reference projects. The function's Max Value is the largest value of reference projects, multiplied by a safety factor.
It should be mentioned that this value function is inverse to the others, because the more working hours, the greater satisfaction gained (greater job creation).
In multi-criteria decision making it is usual that some aspects are more relevant than others. The weight measures the relative importance of different aspects.
Weights assignment has been performed by branch, i.e. comparing homogeneous aspects. Thus, indicators weight are calculated related to others belonging to the same criteria.
Values established by the EPA-TRACI (Tool for the Reduction and Assessment of Chemical and Other Environmental Impacts), developed by the EPA (Environmental Protection Agency of United States) have been taken as a reference, due to its international recognition.
In the context of LIFE HUELLAS project, such values have been adapted to project objectives, giving more relevance to water footprint derived impact.
The use of QALY (Quality Adjusted Life Years) as weighting method involves the use of their relationship with Social Life Cycle Assessment, so it has been discarded, trying to maintain independently social and environmental assessments. However, the aspects considered for evaluation (severity and duration of effects) have been considered by the LIFE HUELLAS team as a neutral factors and allowing a weighting based on the actual effects on each country for each of the subcategories. Therefore, the project has developed its own assessment method, inspired by the factors affecting the QALY, which includes three factors: severity, duration of effect and data variability.
Each of these three factors has been evaluated for each subcategory with three ranges of effects: positive, neutral and negative.
LIFE HUELLAS tries to obtain impact values in a simple way and without additional data introduction by users. Therefore, socio-demographic data for the above indicators, classified by country, have been associated with a profile on products and manufactured goods used in the construction.
Every social indicator combines the impact of the national and import shares on material or manufactured product. To this end, each TARIC (Integrated Tariff of the European Communities) code has been associated an import profile based on percentages of origin of each of the countries based on data obtained from DATACOMEX .
The social indicator by TARIC code only has a social panorama for imported material or manufactured goods. However, some of the material or manufactured product will also have a national origin.
A series of broad groups of products with relevant projects presence have been established, allowing the user a quick way to give a profile of product national vs. imported volume. The categories for the materials of project unit items are:
In Setup the user can indicate a percentage of national origin, except for the National category (which correspond with e.g. water, whose origin is always considered national).
Copyright(©) 2015 LIFE HUELLAS Consortium
This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.
LCA, Environmental Footprints and Intelligent Analysis for the Rail Infrastructure Construction Sector (LIFE HUELLAS)
LIFE12 ENV/ES/000686
Start Date: 01/10/2013
End Date: 31/03/2017
Proof of concept developed by Fundación CARTIF
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Developed with:
Fundación CARTIF
Parque Tecnológico de Boecillo, parcela 205 - 47151 Boecillo (Valladolid)
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