Multicriteria Assessment of Short Life-Cycle Materials within the Context of Sustainable Development and Energy Efficiency

On February 2011, the European Commission adopted a new strategy to improve measures and access to raw materials, considering that EU is high dependence of imports of them. The new strategy considers three pillars to improving raw materials access. One of them is boosting resource efficiency and promotes recycling. This paper contains a valuable methodology applicable to some materials substitution based on Life Cycle Analysis. We consider that substitution is a multidisciplinary problem in nature dealing with Multicriteria decision making aid. The problem considers the role of energy use in sustainable development and the potential sources to increase energy efficiency during life cycle use of some materials used in a day to day basis. A set of criteria to make decisions for choosing alternative materials in the substitution process will be among other: Exergy loss, Green House Gases emissions, real energy flows and material balances needed to the chain of manufacturing processes in the production chain and the whole added value. Nevertheless, thinking in alternative materials to substitute the actual ones, it is necessary to look forward. That’s why we will also use some other tools in order of complain a set of alternative materials for a long term use, as the prospective & systems dynamics techniques.