Abstract
Sustainability is nowadays accepted by all stakeholders as a guiding principle for both public policy making and corporate strategies. However, the biggest challenge for most organizations remains in the real and substantial implementation of the sustainability concept. The core of the implementation challenge is the question, how sustainability performance can be measured, especially for products and processes. This paper explores the current status of Life Cycle Sustainability Assessment (LCSA) for products and processes. For the environmental dimension well established tools like Life Cycle Assessment are available. For the economic and social dimension, there is still need for consistent and robust indicators and methods. In addition to measuring the individual sustainability dimensions, another challenge is a comprehensive, yet understandable presentation of the results. The “Life Cycle Sustainability Dashboard” and the “Life Cycle Sustainability Triangle” are presented as examples for communication tools for both experts and non expert stakeholders.
Highlights
The main drivers for the scientific developments towards Life Cycle Sustainability Assessment (LCSA) are the paradigm shift from environmental protection towards sustainabilitySustainability 2010, 2 and the current developments with regard to evaluation methods and tools for environmental and sustainability performance.1.1
Further details on the current state-of-the-art methodology can be found for example on the publications pages of the European Platform of Life Cycle Assessment or the UNEP/SETAC Life Cycle Initiative [16,17]
One example of such a method is the life cycle costing approach developed by Bubeck [25], which considered in analogy to Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) an individual product as a reference object and which is already applicable at the stage of product development
Summary
The main drivers for the scientific developments towards Life Cycle Sustainability Assessment (LCSA) are the paradigm shift from environmental protection towards sustainability (see Section 1.1). Sustainability 2010, 2 and the current developments with regard to evaluation methods and tools for environmental and sustainability performance (see Section 1.2)
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