Selection of environmental parameters to estimate an industrial sustainability index

It is necessary to take into account economical, social and environmental aspects to get a good sustainability index. The sustainable development main challenge is to reach an equilibrium state within the economical growth, the social welfare and natural resources ways and rhythms of appropriation in accordance with the recovery rates and opportune substitution of resource lacks. Because there are a lot of parameters and disciplines focused on different objectives it will be necessary to only include the most representative and specific ones in order to integrate a sustainability index. This paper includes a methodological proposal used to select and validate statistically the natural system or environmental parameters, to be applied jointly with other representative economic and social ones, to construct an interdisciplinary sustainability index related to the petroleum refining industry. Diagrammatic representations of inwalls and outwalls estimates were constructed for the Industrial Sustainability Index. Some of the included parameters are air and water quality indicators, like air pollutants criteria; dissolved oxygen, solids, total hydrocarbons, among many others. Some of the land quality parameters are currently used, change of use, soil type, wastes kind and volume, etc. The validation techniques include statistical criteria, like multivariate techniques, legal and toxicological ones. In some cases the utility function is based on the Mexican environmental legislation, which establishes the non-native limits of compounds related to the petroleum industry, such as stationary sources like oil refineries, the wastewaters from cities, including atmospheric gases or the toxicological information which determines the limits for different water uses like drinking, fishing or aquaculture waters associated to the human and ecosystem health. The ISI will be applied to the Miguel Hidalgo Refinery in order to compare its sustainability with that of other refineries or from other countries.