Many critics of ‘big industry’ perceive the idea of sustainable corporate strategy to be inherently oxymoronic, particularly in sectors such as fast-moving consumer goods, where high production volumes and resource-intensive supply chains contribute significantly to global environmental challenges. The work herein aims to counter this ideology, developing a fast-moving consumer goods value chain oriented holistic sustainability assessment methodology. Through this approach, the commissioning organisation’s strategy or values are also directly incorporated. Sustainability in fast-moving consumer goods (environmental, economic, and social) is particularly complex due to the sector’s reliance on resource extraction, energy-intensive manufacturing, and extensive logistics networks. Carbon dioxide utilisation has emerged as a potential strategy to reduce industrial emissions by transforming CO₂ waste into valuable products, offering a promising pathway toward circularity in industrial operations. However, existing sustainability assessment frameworks often fail to comprehensively account for the integration of carbon dioxide utilisation within fast-moving consumer goods value chains.
Several key gaps in historic capability are first identified via literature review (data architecture and social impact characterisation methods). The closure of these was deemed necessary for the attainment of an efficacious framework; meaningfully integrating environmental, economic, and societal assessments. To rectify these shortcomings a novel ‘hub and spoke’ methodological architecture is developed, delivering objective (practitioner oriented) and subjective (industrial decision maker oriented) results streams. The objective results are comparable to those seen in existing environmental and economic studies, with the addition of first of their kind quantitative and repeatable social indicators. In contrast, the subjective results are derived through the parallel application of multicriteria decision making techniques, delivering a single overall score for each considered value chain permutation. To fully align the social strand with its environmental and economic counterparts, new impact pathway-based characterisation models are developed, covering seven United Nations endorsed indicators across 129 countries. These two methodological developments are then evaluated for efficacy through a proof-of-concept study, examining soda ash production in India.
The framework was used to examine Hou process based soda ash production in the Asia and Pacific region, delivering cradle-to-gate holistic sustainability profiles for 14,580 unique value chain permutations while assessing a total of 19 impact indicators. As the most commonly assessed indicator, accuracy of the framework’s results generation procedure was verified through comparison of the average global warming potential value across the assessed permutations to literature value; specifically, industry average values for the Hou process extracted from the Ecoinvent database. This revealed a negligible 0.72% difference between the hub and spoke framework’s result (2.77 tonnes CO2-eq. per tonne of soda ash) and the literature value (2.79 tonnes CO2-eq. per tonne soda ash). Opportunities for significant impact reductions were also identified, although these are realised at the expense of other indicators. Again, using global warming potential as an example, a potential 91.1% emission reduction scenario is identified (0.25 tonnes CO2-eq. per tonne soda ash), utilising a direct air capture CO2 feed, with biogas combustion and electricity supplying process energy. Overall, the hub and spoke framework was shown to effectively rank large numbers of value chain alternatives based on their objective performance, as well as the value choices prescribed by industrial decision makers. Consequently, this work is deemed to present a notable step towards operationalising holistic sustainability assessment both within, and beyond, practitioner audiences.
