Hybridizing sustainability metric applications with local stakeholder inputs: A life cycle assessment (LCA) with a co-design demonstration

Abstract

Sustainability standards have been criticized as being complex and overlapping, with unclear metrics and messy timelines – all of which have led to sustainability shortfalls. As part of the special issue on addressing sustainability metric shortcomings, we develop a hybridizing protocol for sustainability standards that elicits community stakeholder ideological pre-dispositions, preferences, ratings, and heuristics and injects them into a prioritized, vetted metric in order to reduce immediate and longer-range lifecycle impacts of corporate operations in the local ecosystem. We demonstrate our method using a quasi-field experiment, conducted by expert intermediary facilitators, in which community members co-design Oil Sands wetland reclamation and their choices are integrated into life cycle assessments (LCAs) of wetland designs and remediation products. Hybridizing LCA with local co-design not only generates an effective wetland-material choice, but reduces life cycle impacts and increases the likelihood of community acceptance.