Life Cycle Sustainability Assessments

Abstract

Abstract Assessing the sustainability of products (e.g., chemicals) and their process technologies is a challenging task, and hence key indicators and tools have to be developed continually to manage the impacts of social and economic threats while operating within ecological limits. The conventional life cycle assessment (LCA) method is one of such systems‐based tools, and standardized for environmental impact evaluation of product systems. However, LCA is pertinent to assessing mainly the “environmental dimension” of systems' sustainability; it was not historically developed to evaluate the other sustainability dimensions: economic and social. Hence, recent challenges in LCA have led to its broadening to encompass these other dimensions, which has resulted in what we call now the life cycle sustainability assessment (LCSA). LCSA needs to be a systemwide, integrated, and interdisciplinary analysis over space and time whereby an integrated modeling tool is needed to simulate and analyze the inter‐relationships among/between social, ecological, and economic systems. This article explains the basics of LCSA, LCA, life cycle costing, and social life cycle assessment and includes an initial LCSA application to palm oil‐based products. We introduced a framework here to provide a systematic basis for LCSA operationalization and identified a set of key economic, environmental, and social indicators at each stage of the palm oil biodiesel life cycle. The LCSA application thus helps to understand the complexity of a palm oil biodiesel life cycle through an integrated sustainability assessment and modeling.