Abstract
Sustainability decision making is a complex task for policy makers, considering the possible unseen consequences it may entail. With a broader scope covering environmental, economic, and social aspects, Life Cycle Sustainability Assessment (LCSA) is a promising holistic method to deal with that complexity. However, to date, this method is limited to the hotspot analysis of a product, service, or system, and hence only assesses direct impacts and overlooks the indirect ones (or consequences). This critical literature review aims to explore the challenges and the research gaps related to the integration of three methods in LCSA representing three pillars of sustainability: (Environmental) Life Cycle Assessment (LCA), Life Cycle Costing (LCC), and Social Life Cycle Assessment (S-LCA). The challenges and the research gaps that appear when pairing two of these tools with each other are identified and discussed, i.e., the temporal issues, different perspectives, the indirect consequences, etc. Although this study does not aim to remove the shadows in LCSA methods, critical research gaps are identified in order to be addressed in future works. More case studies are also recommended for a deeper understanding of methodological trade-offs that might happen, especially when dealing with the consequential perspective.
Highlights
In 2015, an international agenda was agreed upon in an attempt to move society towards improved wellbeing and surroundings, through a collective plan called the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) [1,2]
The ideas of life-cycle thinking from LCA are being extended to other pillars, such as the economic pillar (Life Cycle Costing—LCC), the social pillar (Social Life Cycle Assessment—S-LCA), and sustainability as an entire concept (Life Cycle Sustainability Assessment—LCSA)
For the temporality issue (Issue 1), some progress has been made in its clarification, with the treatment of time in LCA addressed in recent studies, highlighting dynamic life cycle inventory [96] and the characterization factor [97]
Summary
In 2015, an international agenda was agreed upon in an attempt to move society towards improved wellbeing and surroundings, through a collective plan called the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) [1,2]. S-LCA is gaining much attention in the scientific community It can be seen from the efforts proposed to advance the method (i.e., revisions on the current guideline, linking life cycle thinking to SDGs) and the different contexts of its application, including cutting-edge topics such as circular economy [26,27], renewable energy [28,29], and bio-based economy [30,31]. What makes it different is that, as part of broadening the scope, rather normative aspects such as discounting, weighting, and the notion of weak versus strong sustainability could be incorporated [33] Both types of LCSA models (or frameworks) are included in this review.
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