A heuristic-based technique for carbon footprint reduction for the production of multiple products

Journal article, 2018

Carbon footprint (CF) reduction is a common trend for many industrial processes in recent years. However, not many analytical tools have been developed for visualising CF reduction at enterprise level. A graphical technique known as the CF Composite Curves to aid decision making in CF reduction at enterprise level has been developed in previous work. However, the method was limited to the production of a single product. In this paper, the CF reduction procedure is extended to the more general case of multiple products. The CF of shared and independent facilities are analysed. An illustrative example shows that for cases when the CF intensity of shared facilities is higher than that of the independent facilities, CF reduction should focus on the shared facilities, before efforts are put forward for the independent facilities. In contrast, when the CF intensity of independent facilities is higher than that of the shared facilities, it is necessary to explore ways to reduce CF of the independent facilities.