A concern about the current state of relations between industry and the environment is
often neglected. However, it is important to underline that industry and sustainability are
not mutually exclusive. There are many industrial processes to blame when analyzing the
negative impact on current socio-ecological environment. The emerging question is whether
companies nowadays are ready to face challenges in the name of sustainability, the future
of the planet and generations to come. In addition, an assessment of industrial processes
may be very time-consuming and costly in financial terms. This fact allows developing sustainability
assessment approach and its measures for keeping track on to evaluate scale of
environmental, social and economic changes. The goal of the paper is to develop a multicriteria
decision-making approach for sustainability assessment of renewable energy technology.
A sustainability assessment approach combines life cycle-based methods integrated with
multi-criteria decision-making method based on analytical hierarchy process. The resulting
assessment method allows finding a compromise between industry and the environment and
identify potential intervention points for further research. As a result of decision-making
process, string ribbon technology was considered as the most sustainable. The applicability
of the proposed method is assessed based on photovoltaic panels.