Integrating life cycle assessment and life cycle cost: a review of environmental-economic studies

Abstract

The purpose of this document is to carry out a critical review of the existing literature by specifically addressing the following: (i) the integration of life cycle assessment and life cycle cost assessment from the perspective of research topics, category and scope of study, authors, institutions, countries, and journals working on or publishing related studies, and (ii) the main aids, challenges, opportunities, methodological difficulties, and current research efforts on the integrated approach of both tools. A systematic review was conducted to identify studies with an integrated use of life cycle assessment and life cycle cost in several areas. An analysis of the main aspects of the studies identified, such as bibliographic reference, year of publication, institution where the research was conducted, country, area of application, category of study, journal of publication, impact factor, and number of citations was conducted. After a search in the Science Direct, Scopus, and Web of Science databases, 349 documents were identified. After a series of filters (excluding gray literature, reading titles and keywords, reading abstracts, and reading full-texts), which helped ruling out articles that did not contribute to investigating the integration of life cycle assessment and life cycle cost assessment, 90 documents were selected for a detailed analysis. The leading role of the USA and European countries in this issue should be highlighted. The integration of life cycle assessment and life cycle cost seems to be most advanced in the areas of building design and civil construction. Different strategies for the integration of the methodologies are also found, being mathematical modelling and programming for optimization, and multi-criteria decision-making the most recurrent methods. Moreover, there seems to be more challenges than opportunities in said integration. The challenges include the monetization of environmental impacts, higher volatility of economic data compared to environmental data, and differences in environmental and economic background data. These challenges can be turned into opportunities in the development of more comprehensive methodological approaches. Challenges (e.g., time-, resource- and knowledge-intensive, different scopes) and opportunities (e.g., common system boundaries, benefitting from LCA structure to conduct LCC) for the integration of life cycle assessment and life cycle cost were identified. This combined approach allows projects, products, and services to reduce environmental and economic impacts, which can be quantified and compared through improved assessment of potential trade-offs.