Sustainability is decisive when designing, evaluating, and modifying new or existing chemical processes. One of the promising approaches in the chemical and biochemical processing plants that consider this factor is Process Intensification (PI). An intensified process could decrease the energy consumption and waste generation while improving its cost-effectiveness and safety. Even though there are several methods that include a the sustainability dimension to assess the performance of a chemical process or different intensified equipment, most of them do not explicitly aligned with the Sustainable Development Goals and usually are difficult to compare it with other metrics. Therefore, this work proposes the Sustainable Intensification Index (SII) as a new multifactorial strategy to assess technology performance based on the United Nations (UN) Sustainable Development Goals (SDG). The SII is obtained from three independent methodologies. One of the main advantages of the SII is that it can be a comparable metric across different methodologies which can be used to define an Overall Sustainable Intensification Index (OSII) that to try to dampen the inherited bias that each method might have. The proposed SII and OSII methods were applied to evaluate different alternatives for lactic acid production from previously reported data as a case study. The obtained SII and OSII results showed which technologies could be adopted to improve the process sustainability and aided in identifying opportunity areas of the evaluated technologies. Finally, the SII and OSII are powerful tools in the decision-making process for enhancing existing technologies in sustainability or developing new ones.
López-Guajardo et al. (Mon,) studied this question.