Use of environmental vulnerability indicators to assess the safety sustainability of a production process

In the present paper several parameters adopted for the assessment of the sustainability of a production process will be introduced, with specific reference to safety issues and the interaction between the process and the surrounding territory. The main accident scenarios associated with the different phases of the production process, and the corresponding impact areas have been estimated, taking into consideration all the target typologies: people, environment, structures . Then, a number of sustainability indicators have been introduced, either intrinsic to the process only, or including the characteristic of the territory. The proposed methodology has been applied to a real medium-size oil refinery and the results provide very useful information about the effectiveness of the indicators and their limits