Abstract
The life cycle sustainability assessment (LCSA) is a tool to assess sustainability from a life cycle perspective, which has been receiving increased attention over the years. This work presents a systematic review of the current application of LCSA, presenting the foundations, main methods, current operationalization state, and major challenges to its broad implementation. The review protocol considered the search of keywords in Scopus and Web of Science databases. The search has considered the literature published or in the press until December 2018, resulting in the selection of 144 articles written in English. Of those, 71 articles operationalize LCSA in real case studies, while the remaining consist of review, viewpoint, and methodological development articles. This review demonstrates that the use of LCSA has been increasing in recent years. Today, the most applied approach is to consider LCSA as the sum of life cycle assessment, life cycle costing, and social life cycle assessment because it is built on the methodologies that already exist and are under continuous development. However, the lack of harmonization of the methodology is a central challenge to its operationalization. Therefore, LCSA still requires further improvement in, among others, definition of coherent system boundaries, the development of robust databases to allow the assessment of economic and social perspectives, definition of impact categories that allow comparability between studies, development of impact assessment methods, development of methods to carry out uncertainty analysis, and communication strategies. Besides, further case studies should be developed to support the improvement of the methodology and a better understanding of the interaction of the environmental, economic, and social aspects.
Highlights
Nowadays, there is an increasing need to assess the sustainability of products, systems, and technologies, and several tools have been developed for this purpose (Finkbeiner et al, 2010)
The present study provides a systematic review of the current state of development of life cycle sustainability assessment (LCSA), following the guidelines proposed by Pullin and Stewart (2006)
After removing duplicates (237 publications), publications falling in the following criteria were excluded: publications not written in English (9 publications), gray literature (95 publications), and articles not related with LCSA or that focused on a single pillar of sustainability (117 articles)
Summary
There is an increasing need to assess the sustainability of products, systems, and technologies, and several tools have been developed for this purpose (Finkbeiner et al, 2010). Some disadvantages have been pointed out to the use of the first approach because it is time-consuming, as it requires specifying a life cycle for each one of the methodologies, and it may lead to inconsistencies related to the possibility of establishing different boundaries and different allocation rules (Heijungs, 2010; Heijungs et al, 2010; Kloepffer, 2008) To overcome these issues, the Coordination Action for innovation in Life Cycle Analysis for Sustainability (CALCAS) project, funded by the European Commission, has proposed another conceptual framework for LCSA (where the “A” no longer refers to “assessment,” but to “analysis”). This framework consists of an integrated approach that incorporates environmental, economic, and social aspects into the same technological system (Zamagni et al, 2009)
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