Towards Life Cycle Sustainability Assessment

By Matthias Finkbeiner, Erwin M. Schau, A. Lehmann, M. Traverso. 2010

813 citations recorded by the source corpus.

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.

Subfields: Environmental Engineering, Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering, Management, Monitoring, Policy and Law

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/ebfe9bf41dc173d37b29ee39037eead692083114

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Citations in the corpus

Metrics for optimising the multi-dimensional value of resources recovered from waste in a circular economy: A critical review (2017, methodology): “Even the development of new methods that incorporate metrics previously coined for use in LCA, LCC and sLCA, such as the newly developed life cycle sustainability assessment (LCSA) have emerged (Chong et al., 2016; Finkbeiner et al., 2010; Gencturk et al., 2016; Giannakis and Papadopoulos, 2016; Gui”
Towards Life Cycle Sustainability Assessment of Alternative Passenger Vehicles (2014, methodology): “In the literature, Kloepffer [42] first formulated the current LCSA framework with editorial comments obtained from Finkbeiner and Reiner, where the “LCSA = LCA + LCC + S-LCA” [43].”
Ten Years of Sustainability (2009 to 2018): A Bibliometric Overview (2018, methodology): “[21] published in 2010 ranks first with 162 citations.”
Social aspects for sustainability assessment of technologies—challenges for social life cycle assessment (SLCA) (2013, methodology): “The concept of life cycle sustainability assessment (LCSA) (Kloepffer 2007, 2008; Finkbeiner et al. 2008, 2010) combining the methods of life cycle assessment (LCA) (International Standard Organisation 2006), life cycle costing (LCC) (Swarr et al. 2011), and social life cycle assessment (SLCA)…”
Systems Thinking for Life Cycle Sustainability Assessment: A Review of Recent Developments, Applications, and Future Perspectives (2017, background): “A limited number of researchers have focused on the MCDM and integrated expert weighting for sustainable product selection based on LCSA results [60,138,139].”
Life Cycle Sustainability Assessment: What Is It and What Are Its Challenges? (2016, background): “Broadening of impacts: LCSA = LCA + LCC + SLCA 2.”
A UNEP/SETAC approach towards a life cycle sustainability assessment—our contribution to Rio+20 (2013, methodology): “The idea of combining three LCA techniques into an LCSA was first formulated by Klöpffer (2008), followed by Finkbeiner et al. (2010), and is expressed in the following way: LCSA ¼ environmentalð Þ LCAþ LCCþ S LCA The formal equation introduces the concept that the assessment of sustainability…”
Exploring the Current Challenges and Opportunities of Life Cycle Sustainability Assessment (2019, background): “[8] of 150 different societal objectives and indicators proposed in the scientific literature showed that many topics were not coherently addressed, and that a practical methodology for social indicators cannot be directly derived for products or processes, or if they can, only a few indicators coul”