At the beginning of the project, a stakeholder questionnaire, workshop, and a literature survey was used to search for existing tools. In total, 69 different tools and methods were collected for further evaluation. An initial assessment was performed to identify promising tools. None of the tools for which the relevant information was available met all of the STYLE criteria; however, 16 of them were promising enough to recommend for testing by the industrial partners.
Industrial testing provided an opportunity to learn about several in-house tools and share experiences of applying the tools in different sectors. The testing confirmed that there was not one tool, or collection of existing tools, that could be used for assessing the sustainability of processes and products, spanning multiple sectors, due to the large diversity of environmental and social issues covered, usability and maturity. Consequently, features of existing tools that could be incorporated into future tool development were identified.
STYLE carried out an independent academic evaluation of 10 tools that were subjected to industrial testing and derived lessons and recommendations for further improvement. The protocol developed provides guidance to analyse a tool’s goal and scope, its sustainability coverage, the methods a tool uses to translate inputs into results, as well as practical aspects such as the skills and time require to work with a tool, its flexibility and analysis options.
Results from the Testing and Validation were brought together to generate an overall gap and research needs analysis. A vision was defined by the STYLE consortium to establish the desired end-point for a roadmap: ‘By 2030, project teams in the EU process industries will routinely use sustainability evaluation tools to make better decisions when assessing process or product improvements’
Gaps and research needs to reach the STYLE vision were divided into Toolkit, Methodological, Data and Uptake categories.
STYLE gathered views and experience from a wide range of stakeholders throughout the project timeline, to ensure that different sectors and sizes of companies were able to contribute to the generation of understanding and recommendations. This was done in collaboration with SAMT and MEASURE through 3 workshops, questionnaires, presentations, and news updates via email, social media and the website.
To communicate some of the main issues surrounding the use of sustainability tools in industry project teams and recommendations for their improvement, STYLE produced six ‘Insight’ documents:
https://goo.gl/gK93gA(odnośnik otworzy się w nowym oknie) A key recommendation of STYLE was the need to develop an Ideal Toolkit for the STYLE scenario (
https://goo.gl/3s4o0A(odnośnik otworzy się w nowym oknie)). The Toolkit is structured as a series of modules:
- Materiality setup
- Integrated Qualitative Screening Tool
- Semi-Quantitative Toolset
STYLE brought together its key recommendations into an interactive Recommendations Roadmap (
https://goo.gl/oxfc1M(odnośnik otworzy się w nowym oknie)).
