Track: Energy and Resource Efficiency

Abstract

— Over the past decades, the primary goal of business corporations has customarily concentrated on the economic growth, and meanwhile keeping consumers happy by meeting their needs. Nevertheless, due to ever-increasing pressure regarding ecological and social concerns from governments, non-governmental organizations, and consumers have forced various organizations, mainly electricity utilities and manufacturing companies, to reconsider their goals by taking the environmental and social aspects into account. However, a global challenge has emerged concerning the development of such concept. Because, there is a lack of a rational and trustworthy approach designed for measuring environmental burdens, which remain a complex task for various business corporations. Especially for the energy sector that is considered as the driving-factor of ecological deterioration all over the world. Considering this, this paper reviewed a set of previous environmental frameworks applied to energy sector. The results indicate that there is a lack of a holistic framework in the current literature, since many studies focused on evaluating the environmental impacts generated during the extraction of raw material and production of energy stages, thus, ignoring other life cycle stages such as processing of raw material, transportation of raw material, and transmission and distribution of end-product to end-users. Therefore, this paper seeks to bridge this gap by assisting decision policy makers to have a comprehensive understanding regarding the connections between all the life cycle stages and thus identifying ways to analyse them