Life cycle sustainability assessment (LCSA)
- Addresses all three dimensions of sustainability (environment, society and economy) from a life cycle perspective
Allows for a comprehensive sustainability assessment of products and processes by combining different life cycle based methods
LCSA(*) = LCA + LCC + S-LCA
Goal & benefits of LCSA
- Enables practitioners to organize complex environmental, economic and social information and data in a structured form
- Promotes awareness on sustainability issues & helps in clarifying the trade-offs between the three sustainability pillars, life cycle stages and impacts & products
- Supports enterprises…
– to become more responsible for their business
– in identifying weaknesses and improvements of a product life cycle
– innovation in enterprises and value chain actors - Helps decision-makers choose sustainable technologies and products
- Can support consumers in determining which products are not only cost-efficient, ecoefficient or socially responsible, but also more sustainable
Challenge: different maturity levels of LCA, LCC & S-LCA
How to conduct an LCSA?
Goal & scope
Purpose & target audience
Common goal & scope
System boundary should contain all processes relevant for at least one of the techniques (any exclusion of life cycle stages should be justified)
All relevant impact categories should be selected
–> Challenge: consistent system boundaries
Inventory
* Collection of input and output data
* Data collected at the unit process and organizational level
Impact assessment
* LCA: classification, characterization
* S-LCA:
– few defined methods available
– mostly scoring of indicator results by using performance
reference points (e.g. international agreements, country
averages etc.)
* LCC:
– no defined method available
– Some proposals exist (e.g. EcLCA)
Interpretation:
* Few methodologies are proposed…even fewer have been applied….
– Life Cycle Sustainability Dashboard (LCSD)
– Life Cycle Sustainability Triangle
– Adaptation of the Sustainability Index for LCSA
LCSA evaluation
- LCSA requires an appropriate multi-criteria evaluation scheme, addressing…
– Indicators and impacts (and their relation)
– the weighting between the indicators/impacts - weighting of individual indicators within each of the three sustainability dimensions, i.e. between environmental indicators like global warming acidification potential
- weighting among the 3 sustainability dimensions
- Evaluation scheme needs to be understandable,
comprehensive and transparent
Main challenges of LCSA & further research demand
Challenges:
* Different maturity levels of the 3 techniques
(e.g. missing links: indicators, impact categories, AoPs for
S-LCA and LCC)
–> Align maturity level, e.g. develop LCIA methods
- Applicability challenges (e.g.Consistency & lack of data/databases, e.g. for S-LCA)
–> Develop more streamlined, approaches/use of simplified approaches as a start - Interpretation of LCSA results & dealing with tradeoffs
(within one dimension & between the 3 dimensions)
–> E.g. develop weighting systems or monetization
Life Cycle Sustainability Triangle (LCST)
- Graphical representation applicable to the weighting of any three parameters
Example:
* Parameters: social, economic and environmental aspects
– environmental value: Ei
– social value: Si
– economic value: Eci
* Calculation of the sustainability value by…
– normalizing these three values
– multiplying the values by a weighting factor
– summing up the values
–> The triangle supports decision by transparently displaying the “superior alternative” based on individual stakeholder´s preferences
Normalization
- “Problem”?
– Units of impact scores are often difficult to grasp, e.g. kg CO2eq
– Different indicator/impact category have different units - “Solution” offered by normalization
– Impact scores are divided by reference value (“normalization factor”), e.g. - one person’s average share of all emission/ resource use in the world during one year (pE)
- European or global emissions
- Normalization brings everything to the same unit / gets rid of different units…
can make interpretation easier
BUT has challenges (e.g. missing /insufficient data for calculating the references/ normalization factors - Normalization & weighting will create single scores (adding up the values of all ICs)
Creating single sustainability values
- Calculation of the sustainability value by… – normalizing these three values (S=Si/Refs ; Ec=Eci/Refec ; E=Ei/Refe)
– multiplying the values by a weighting factor
– summing up the values - Weighting
– weighting factors
We (for E), Ws (for S), Wec (for Eec)
– (We, Ws, Wec) = weighting set
– We, Ws, Wec > 0 - Sustainability value (SV)
SV = S∙Ws + Ec∙Wec + E∙We
Life Cycle Sustainability Dashboard (LCSD)
- LCSD is a specific application of the Dashboard of Sustainability
- Dashboard of Sustainability
– established by a research group of the Joint Research Centre (JRC), Ispra, Italy
– developed to assess communities regarding economic, social, environmental factors
– displays results in a single graphical and numerical evaluation form
Life Cycle Sustainability Dashboard (LCSD)
How does it work?
- A certain number of indicators and their values can be inserted in the software
- For the application to LCSA simply the indicators used for LCA, LCC & S-LCA
can be used and implemented - Software ranks all values for each indicator
– 1,000 points to the product with the best performance
– 0 points to the worst performance
– All other values of the same indicator are linearly interpolated
(weighting factors for the indicators can be handled by the software)
Evaluation results for each topic:
weighted average of all included indicators values
Overall evaluation:
arithmetical average of the topic evaluations
Life Cycle Sustainability Dashboard (LCSD)
Summary (benefits & challenges)
- Benefits:
+ User-friendly tool & clear facilitation of the communication of complex topic
+ Analysis of numerous sustainability data
+Support community to share sustainable development goals by performance charts - Challenges:
– limited number of (quantitative) indicators is currently considered
– Indicator ranking does not provide information about the absolute performance, e.g. a “green-coloured” option appears to be significant better than a “red-coloured” option, even though the actual difference may be very small
– Different numbers of indicators for the different dimensions can be considered an indirect weighting
– Needs careful interpretation
10 principles for conducting an LCSA study
1) Understanding of areas of protection ( AoP ) and impact pathways
– including cause effect chains and mechanisms
– otherwise indicate shortcomings!
2) Alignment with phases of ISO 14040
– goal and scope, inventory analysis, impact assessment, interpretation
3) Completeness : LCA, LCC and S LCA
– full life cycle and complete value chain justify exclusions!
4) Consideration of key stakeholders, but also do not exclude specific societal groups
5) Consideration of co benefits
– product utility beyond functional unit
– through definition of core characteristics of product
6) Materiality of system boundaries (SB)
– do not exclude significant and relevant unit processes
7) Consistency:
– selection of SB, impact categories, data, and assumptions
comparison of different results/datasets possible over time
8) Transparency:
– allowing others to understand and reproduce assessment
9) Explicit communication of trade offs
– respect local values, culture etc.
– balanced from three pillars perspective
10) Caution when compensating negative and positive impacts
– present results separately
– be transparent with weighting principles
