Elucidating Values for Sustainable Decision Making

Decision making for sustainability is multi-faceted. A method will be described for using marginal rates of substitution between utility scores to calculate total utility. This method will simplify the relationships between the utility scores and present a powerful and intuitive way to calculate total utility based on the values of the decision-maker. While the methods presented are general to various sustainability decisions, an example will be presented utilizing indicators derived from EPA’s sustainability evaluation and design tool, GREENSCOPE (Gauging Reaction Effectiveness for the Environmental Sustainability of Chemistries with a multi-Objective Process Evaluator). GREENSCOPE has ~140 indicators in four basis areas: environment, economics, energy, and efficiency. Previous work has developed absolute sustainability limits for these indicators and provided data needs and solutions for calculations. The combination of GREENSCOPE with weighting / marginal rate of substitution methods and explicit representations of implied tradeoffs will provide users with tools to support multi-objective decisions.