Sustainability indicators for the assessment of eco-industrial parks: classification and criteria for selection

Abstract

A variety of indicators is available for assessing the economic, environmental, and social aspects of an Eco-industrial park (EIP). The managers of a sustainability assessment over these parks should overcome an important task at the beginning of the study: to select indicators.

To support this activity, the challenge is to list and classify a large set of sustainability indicators. Consequently, the main achievements of this article are a wide search and classification of sustainability indicators, and the development of four criteria to filter indicators when assessing an EIP. A literature search in ISI Web of Science's database is presented to explore feasible indicators. The definition of 249 indicators is provided in an annotated list.

An important difficulty to use these indicators is to select a proper subset. To deal with this selection, this work proposes four criteria constructed to be functional, clear, and adaptable to the application context. The proposed criteria are: understanding, pragmatism, relevance, and partial representation of sustainability. The 249 indicators have been filtered using the four criteria, and have been classified according to three dimensions of sustainability (social, environmental, and economic dimensions).

The four criteria provide a formal way to filter a large set of possible indicators, improving the mechanism for their selection. In order to illustrate their application to select suitable indicators for the assessment of ElPs, a hypothetical case is constructed on the basis of an industrial park in Kalundborg. The selected indicators meet the four criteria and the evaluation goal.

Focusing on sustainability dimensions, many of the integrated indicators are related to the economic and environmental dimensions. Nevertheless, few of them are related to social dimension. Therefore, to cover the main aspects of each dimension of sustainability, a combination of single and integrated indicators should be included in this assessment.

Finally, four recommendations are made to select proper indicators during the sustainability assessment of an EIP: start with a large set of possible indicators, as those presented herein, preselect those indicators linked to the objectives of the assessment, apply the four criteria for indicators choice, and prefer comparative indicators.