Multi-objective assessment for industrial sustainability

Increasing environmental issues, overpopulation, energy consumption, and waste production necessitate our focus on sustainability.Several global issues have elevated its importance, such as anthropogenic climate change, severe depletion of crucial resources, rapid urbanization, inequality among human beings, and energy security associated with geopolitics.The notion of sustainability revolves around the concept of circular economy, which concentrates on minimizing waste by ensuring resource efficiency, reuse, and recycling (Morseletto 2020).As one of the resource-intensive sectors, industries play a pivotal role in keeping up with sustainability through a symbiotic relationship.Following sustainable practices, industries can improve resource efficiency, lower environmental impacts, and ensure long-term feasibility (Dao et al. 2024).Operationalizing sustainability is essential in ensuring any organization's long-term success and resilience.It includes organizing and prioritizing several processes comprising setting clear sustainability goals, integrating them with organizational objectives, executing resource management techniques, and engaging stakeholders.Sustainability assessment complements the operationalization of these procedures by serving as a tool to measure, evaluate, and document their effectiveness.Several technical tools and methodologies are proposed to perform sustainability assessment.These methods include life cycle assessment, benefit-to-cost analysis, integrated assessment models, environmental justice assessment, etc.All these methods deal with complex systems associated with sustainability, encompassing social, economic, and ecological dimensions.As a multi-dimensional notion, sustainability highlights the application of multi-objective and multi-criteria methods to simultaneously assess environmental, financial, and social objectives.The objectives of sustainable practice are often contradictory to making