A sustainability root cause analysis methodology and its application

In the design of chemical/energy production systems, a major challenge is to identify the bottleneck issues and improve its sustainability effectively. Due to the multi-dimensional feature of sustainability, how to account for the impacts of various design factors and the cause-and-effect relationships can be very difficult. This paper will present a sustainability root cause analysis method based on the combination of Pareto Analysis and Fishbone diagram. The sustainability of the process is assessed incorporating