Methodology of Life Cycle Sustainability Assessment

Abstract

Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) represents the most widely adopted tool for calculation and evaluation of the environmentally relevant inputs and outputs and the potential environmental impacts of the life cycle of a product, material or service. But, LCA methodology has its own disadvantages: it assesses environmental sustainability impacts and neglects the social and economic aspect of sustainability. Over the past decade, LCA has improved to include life cycle costing (LCC) and social LCA (SLCA), drawing on the ‘triple bottom line’ model of sustainability. With these developments, LCA has broadened from merely environmental assessment to a more comprehensive life cycle sustainability assessment. This paper presents the concepts and methodologies for developing the sustainability method based on life cycle thinking, including a description of a new method called Life Cycle Sustainability Assessment (LCSA). It was described the concept of sustainability, with three pillars of sustainability, i.e. the environmental, economic and social dimensions, which is the basement of LCSA methodology. After that the indicators were presented, as a ways of measuring impacts which indicate changes away from an original or a wanted condition.