Environmental Life Cycle Analysis (LCA) has emerged over the past years as a method to assess environmental impacts of products and processes. In this case study we use LCA to obtain an environmental measure for refined oils, which are inputs for fat blends. As a start, an inventory is drawn up of the environmental effects of the oils. Then we use the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) to aggregate the scores of these effects to one environmental index for oil. This multiple criteria decision tool involves making pairwise comparisons between the environmental effects, resulting in relative weight factors. Multiplying the effect scores with the relative weights yields an environmental index. It is now possible to improve the environmental impact of a fat blend composition using the environmental index in a linear programming (LP) blending model. With this combination of methods, environmental aspects of products can become part of product portfolio management.

Reprinted with Permission from Springer's Open Choice