Syntheses of sustainable supply networks with a new composite criterion - Sustainability profit

- A new metric sustainability profit is proposed for evaluating the sustainability.
- Sustainability profit is composed of economic, eco and social profits.
- Sustainability profit is viewed from a micro- and macro-economic perspectives.
- Three illustrative case studies are presented for different supply chains.
- Systems with positive sustainability profit are sustainable.

This study proposes a new concept and a new metric for multi-criteria evaluation of sustainable systems. The new metric, termed “sustainability profit”, is composed of economic, environmental and social indicators. Since all of these are expressed by monetary terms, the different criteria are now merged, and a multi-objective optimization problem can be reduced to a single-objective one. The new concept for measuring sustainability is based on micro-economic (company's viewpoint) and on wider macro-economic perspectives (combined government's and company's viewpoint). The concept and metric presented are illustrated by three examples of supply networks including a large-scale biorefinery supply network. The obtained results give the insights into sustainable technologies from the overall sustainability viewpoint, and also evaluate the stimulations from governments in the form of subsidies and taxes for deployment of (un-)sustainable systems. The results also indicate that this metric provides good compromise solutions between economic, environmental and social pillars of sustainability.

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