Towards Life Cycle Sustainability Assessment

TLDR

Sustainability is widely accepted, yet organizations struggle to implement it, particularly in measuring product and process performance across environmental, economic, and social dimensions. This paper examines the current status of Life Cycle Sustainability Assessment (LCSA) for products and processes. The authors present the Life Cycle Sustainability Dashboard and Life Cycle Sustainability Triangle as communication tools for experts and non‑experts.

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.