A literature review on life cycle tools fostering holistic sustainability assessment: An application in biocomposite materials

Abstract

Sustainability of products and services has become a compulsory requirement and an essential requirement for organizations, governments, markets and society in general. Among the various ways of measuring sustainability that have been developed, those based on life cycle thinking provide one of the frameworks for assessing the potential impacts of products and services. However, despite sustainability of triple bottom line parameters (ecological, financial and social), the life cycle assessment is the most mature and prominent available tool. In addition, integration methodologies have come up, like life cycle sustainability assessment (integrating the three sustainability dimensions) and life cycle engineering (including the technical or functional aspect). The application of these methodologies to emergent materials and technologies represents a huge challenge, because there is lack of proper indicators, lack of information and contradictory information is common. This is the case of biocomposites, built with nature-based materials harvested in a myriad of ways in several regions of the globe. So, this paper presents a systematic literature review about the research done on the realm of sustainability assessment methods application to biocomposites. It reveals knowledge and information gaps to apply these methodologies. The integration of the existing methodologies is proposed as a way to allow a holistic sustainability assessment of biocomposite materials.