The Triple bottom line incorporates the notion of sustainability into business decisions. It is an accounting framework with three dimensions: social, environmental and financial. The dimensions are also commonly called the three Ps: people, planet and profit and are referred to as the "three pillars of sustainability". Interest in triple bottom line accounting has been growing in both for-profit, nonprofit and government sectors. Many organizations have adopted this framework to evaluate their performance in a broader context.

Life cycle assessment is somewhat about mass & energy. The technique works to map the sources and destinations of all the mass and energy used to make a given product or as part of a process. By mass we mean the carbon, nitrogen, phosphorous, metals, etc that the thing might be made of. By energy we mean the fuels and electricity that were necessary for the thing to go through its process. One we know all of this technically we can use it as a metric to determine how intensive or sustainable the process is.

A “cradle-to-grave” approach for assessing industrial systems evaluates all stages of a product’s life from the perspective that they are interdependent, meaning that one operation leads to the next. It also Provides a comprehensive view of the environmental aspects of the product or process and a more accurate picture of the true environmental trade-offs in product and process selection


If you are interested in receiving the written slide notes for each lecture, please contact the USDA supported Advanced Hardwood Biofuels Northwest project at; ahb.nw@ad.wsu.edu.

An associated online E-campus course is also offered at Oregon State University; ecampus.oregonstate.edu/soc/ecatalog/ecoursedetail.htm?subject=BRR&coursenumber=350&termcode=all

Advanced Hardwood Biofuels Northwest is supported by Agriculture and Food Research Initiative (AFRI) Competitive Grant no. 2011-68005-30407 from the USDA National Institute of Food and Agriculture (NIFA)

1. Early Bioenergy History
2. Recent Bioenergy History
3. Feedstocks Fossil Fuels
4. Feedstocks Forest & Field Biomass Sources
5. Feedstocks Aquatic Biomass & Urban Wastes
6. Carbon Feedstock Comparisons
7. Biomass Chemistry
8. Fuel Chemistry
9. Bioenergy Industry Overview
10. Mechanical Conversions Oil Extraction & Size Reduction
11. Mechanical Conversions Drying & Densification
12. Combustion & Gasification
13. Pyrolysis & Liquefaction
14. Biomass to Parts
15. Biomass Parts to Products
16. Oil Conversions & Syngas Conversions
17. Fermentations
18. Photosynthetic Organisms and Animals
19. Integrated Biorefineries
20. Biorefining in North America
21. USA Fuel Paradigm
22. Renewable Energy and Fuel Policy
23. Basic Energy Economics
24. Process Analysis with LCA and TEA
25. Emissions and Sustainability Considerations

This series contains 25 short lectures, each between 10 and 15 minutes long. The content in these lectures is flexible and can be used in a variety of ways to communicate bioenergy concepts to audiences from diverse backgrounds. An important objective of this series is to present facts about bioenergy and biofuels, and use them to explore misconceptions.