Sustainability of the Swedish Sugar Sector

The book contributes to the development of tools and §methods for assessing sustainability and applies §them to an assessment of the Swedish sugar §production system. The aims are to compile an §overview of assessment approaches, to suggest a §method(s) for structuring and analyzing §sustainability issues and to appraise sustainability §impacts from Swedish sugar production. The analyses §uncovered a number of regional to global §sustainability challenges stemming from the §production system. An analysis using an assessment §model calculated the impacts for social and §ecological indicators for Sweden. A GIS-based §proximity analysis tool was used to calculate beet §transport distances and then estimated diesel fuel §consumption and air emissions for five pollutants §during the movement of beets from field to §processing facility. The assessment tool survey and §categorization showed that many available approaches §for assessing sustainability are incomplete when §more holistic interpretations of sustainability are §considered. A new approach to structure complex §issues of unsustainability is also presented.