The metrics chosen before design determine which forms of value the project is capable of seeing, protecting and creating.
Many organisations measure sustainability after the important decisions have already been made.
A product is designed, a process route selected, equipment sized, suppliers appointed and capital committed. Only then does a sustainability assessment calculate emissions, waste, energy use or recycled content.
That sequence turns measurement into reporting.
It can be useful for disclosure, but it is too late to influence the architecture that created the result.
A stronger approach treats metrics as design variables. Leaders decide what forms of value and risk matter before alternatives are narrowed. Technical, financial, environmental, social and safety criteria then help shape the solution rather than merely describe it.
The Strategic Context
Three 2017 papers provide a strong conceptual foundation.
Iacovidou and colleagues reviewed metrics used to assess resource recovery from waste and argued that focusing on one or only a few domains can create misleading messages. They proposed the idea of multi-dimensional "complex value": environmental, economic, social and technical benefits and impacts, including how those effects are distributed across the system over time. They also warned that metrics need enough detail to remain meaningful while staying simple, transparent, measurable and specific to the system and stakeholders.
Wijayasundara, Mendis and Crawford developed an integrated methodology for comparing recycled-aggregate concrete with conventional natural-aggregate concrete. Their core problem was that individual technical, financial or environmental assessments could not by themselves answer whether the recycled alternative should be preferred. Their framework combined technical, financial, environmental and social perspectives and used cost-benefit thinking to include internal and external effects.
Ordouei and Elkamel approached the issue from chemical-process design. Their Composite Sustainability Index framework sought to bring energy, material and risk considerations into conceptual design and illustrated the approach through a thinner-recovery case in an automotive paint process. The central idea is strategically important: conceptual design is the stage at which architecture can still be changed relatively cheaply.
Several additional materials studies in this batch provide applied evidence. Alwaeli found that a specific waste-derived concrete composition could improve both compressive strength and gamma-radiation attenuation in the tested configuration. Rashad's phosphogypsum review shows why such claims require wider qualification across toxicity, purification, workability, durability and other properties. Mohajerani and colleagues' biosolids/fly-ash study similarly combined strength testing with leachate analysis because engineering performance alone was not sufficient.
Together these sources support one conclusion:
The decision criteria are part of the design.
What Leaders Commonly Misread
The first misread is believing more metrics always improve decisions.
A dashboard with 80 indicators can be as dangerous as a dashboard with one. Excessive measurement diffuses attention and creates opportunities to select the metric that supports a preferred answer.
The second misread is allowing the available data to define the decision.
What is easy to measure is not always what matters. Recycled content may be easy to report while durability, contamination risk or future recovery value is harder to quantify. If the decision model contains only easy metrics, the design becomes biased towards measurable value rather than important value.
The third misread is adding sustainability criteria after the option set is fixed.
By detailed design, major choices about process route, materials, location, energy source and product architecture may already be embedded. Late assessment can optimise around the edges while leaving the dominant impacts untouched.
The fourth misread is combining unlike values too early.
A single sustainability score can be convenient, but it may hide whether one option is stronger technically and weaker socially, or lower-carbon but higher-risk. Leaders should understand the separate dimensions before accepting aggregation.
Reframing the Issue
The executive question is not:
"How sustainable is this design?"
It is:
"What forms of value, risk and consequence must the design satisfy, and have we built those requirements into the option-selection process early enough to change the architecture?"
This moves sustainability from audit to engineering governance.
Related article: Decarbonisation Is Not One Metric: Avoiding Burden-Shifting in Engineering Decisions
Strategic Analysis: Metrics Change What the Organisation Optimises
What is not measured can become an externality
If an investment case contains capital cost and output but excludes waste disposal, downstream health risk, emissions or maintenance burden, those effects do not disappear. They move outside the decision boundary.
The organisation may still pay later through operating cost, regulation, remediation, reputation or lost flexibility.
This is why system boundaries and stakeholder perspectives matter. Iacovidou and colleagues emphasise that value can be distributed differently across actors and across time. A solution attractive to one party can impose cost on another.
Early metrics create option diversity
At conceptual design, teams can still alter process route, materials, location, energy source and degree of recycling.
Late in delivery, the same change may require redesign, contract variation or asset replacement.
This makes early-stage metrics economically important. Their value is not that they produce a precise final forecast from limited information. Their value is that they expose directions that deserve more detailed investigation before irreversible choices are made.
Technical qualification is part of sustainability
The construction-material evidence is useful because it prevents sustainability from becoming detached from function.
Alwaeli's waste-derived hybrid concrete performed well in both strength and shielding in the study. That is a stronger proposition than merely increasing waste content because the substitute contributes useful function.
But Rashad's phosphogypsum review reminds leaders that waste-derived material cannot be qualified through one favourable property. Source contamination, purification, workability, setting, strength, permeability, chemical resistance and durability can all matter.
Mohajerani and colleagues found different behaviour between biosolids samples from two Melbourne treatment plants because material characteristics differed. Their testing also included leachate assessment alongside load-bearing capacity.
The principle is simple:
A recycled or lower-impact input is not a sustainable solution until the whole application remains fit for purpose.
Related article: Circular Materials Must Pass the Same Performance Gates as Virgin Materials
Social and institutional value can be real even when difficult to monetise
Integrated frameworks often struggle with social effects because they are harder to price than materials or energy.
The answer is not to omit them automatically. It is to decide whether they are material to the decision and, if so, use an appropriate qualitative, quantitative or threshold measure.
This is especially important in infrastructure and public-sector investments where community effects, safety, local capability and long-term service outcomes may be central to value.
Simplicity is a governance requirement
Iacovidou and colleagues make an important counterpoint: complex systems do not justify incomprehensible metrics.
Decision measures should be as simple as possible while retaining the minimum detail needed to avoid distortion.
That is an executive design problem. The metric set should help leaders see the trade-offs, not produce an analytical system that only specialists can interpret.
Decision Framework
ERANORTH recommends a Five-Domain Design Value Model.
1. Technical value
Does the alternative perform its required function reliably?
Consider strength, quality, durability, reliability, maintainability, processability, compatibility and applicable safety requirements.
2. Financial value
What is the full economic effect?
Include capital, operating cost, maintenance, disposal, downtime, working capital, replacement and opportunity cost where material.
3. Environmental value
What resource use, emissions, waste, toxicity, land, water or other impacts are materially changed across the relevant lifecycle boundary?
4. Social and stakeholder value
Who benefits, who bears cost or risk, and which workforce, community, customer or public outcomes materially affect legitimacy and value?
5. Risk and reversibility
What can fail, how severe would the consequence be, how uncertain is the evidence, and how difficult is it to reverse the decision?
The model should not force every dimension into one score. Some can be thresholds, some can be quantitative objectives and some can remain explicit judgement criteria.
Designing the Metric Set
For each domain, apply five tests.
Material: Could this measure change the decision?
Causal: Does it describe a real consequence rather than a convenient proxy?
Transparent: Can decision-makers understand how it is calculated?
Proportionate: Is the effort to measure it justified by the decision's scale and irreversibility?
Stakeholder-aware: Does it capture where value and burden actually occur?
Metrics that fail these tests should be challenged rather than accumulated.
From Strategy to Execution
Immediate action: move sustainability and lifecycle criteria into option-definition workshops, business-case templates and concept reviews. Do not wait for final design to ask what impact matters.
Medium-term capability building: create reusable metric libraries by decision type, not one universal scorecard. A structural material decision, a digital platform and a logistics network require different technical and social measures even if some enterprise-level criteria are shared.
Long-term strategic positioning: build an integrated design governance system in which investment, engineering, risk and sustainability measures use common boundaries and assumptions. The objective is to make trade-offs visible early enough that architecture can still change.
Related article: Waste Is Not a Resource Until the System Can Capture Value
Signals to Monitor
Watch sustainability assessments that begin after preferred-option approval; proposals claiming improvement through one metric only; recycled materials evaluated without durability or contamination evidence; composite scores with opaque weighting; metrics that cannot be traced to a decision; external costs excluded because they sit outside the project budget; and options rejected because early evidence is imprecise even though the decision is still at concept stage.
A particularly important warning sign is when the preferred design would change if one currently omitted dimension were included. That means the metric architecture, not the engineering, is determining the answer.
Questions for the Leadership Team
- Which forms of value are currently invisible in this decision?
- Are the metrics shaping the design early enough to change the architecture?
- Which measures are genuine outcomes and which are convenient proxies?
- What technical qualification must a lower-impact or recycled option pass before it is credible?
- Who receives the benefits and who carries the external costs or risks?
- Which criteria should be hard thresholds rather than weighted trade-offs?
- Could a simpler set of measures preserve decision quality while improving transparency?
Closing Perspective
Sustainability metrics are often treated as a measurement layer placed over engineering and investment decisions. That understates their strategic role.
Metrics determine what the decision system can see. What the system can see influences which options survive. Which options survive determines the architecture that is eventually built.
The best time to design the metrics is therefore before the design becomes expensive to change.
Source basis: This article is an original ERANORTH synthesis principally informed by Iacovidou et al. (2017), Metrics for optimising the multi-dimensional value of resources recovered from waste in a circular economy: A critical review; Wijayasundara, Mendis and Crawford (2017), Methodology for the integrated assessment on the use of recycled concrete aggregate replacing natural aggregate in structural concrete; Ordouei and Elkamel (2017), New composite sustainability indices for Cradle-to-Cradle process design; Alwaeli (2017), Investigation of gamma radiation shielding and compressive strength properties of concrete containing scale and granulated lead-zinc slag wastes; Rashad (2017), Phosphogypsum as a construction material; and Mohajerani et al. (2017), Physical, mechanical and chemical properties of biosolids and raw brown coal fly ash, and their combination for road structural fill applications, all in Journal of Cleaner Production, volume 166. Historical standards and regulatory references are not presented as current requirements.
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