Sustainability Constraints as System Boundaries: An Approach to Making Life‐Cycle Management Strategic

Abstract

SummarySustainable management of materials and products requires continuous evaluation of numerous complex social, ecological, and economic factors. A number of tools and methods are emerging to support this. One of the most rigorous is life-cycle assessment (LCA). But LCAs often lack a sustainability perspective and bring about difficult trade-offs between specificity and depth, on the one hand, and comprehension and applicability, on the other. This article applies a framework for strategic sustainable development (often referred to as The Natural Step (TNS) framework) based on backcasting from basic principles for sustainability. The aim is to foster a new general approach to the management of materials and products, here termed "strategic life-cycle management. " This includes informing the overall analysis with aspects that are relevant to a basic perspective on (1) sustainability, and (2) strategy to arrive at sustainability. The resulting overview is expected to help avoid costly assessments of flows and practices that are not critical from a sustainability and/or strategic perspective and to help identify strategic gaps in knowledge or potential problems that need further assessment. Early experience indicates that the approach can complement some existing tools and concepts by informing them from a sustainability perspective-for example, current product development and LCA tools.

Integrating Sustainability in Product Requirements

“…The challenge is to operationalize the sustainability principles and develop commercialized decision support tools. Therefore, previous research suggests informing other tools or integrate other tools that product developers use with SPs, e.g., Robèrt et al (2002); Ny et al (2006); Byggeth et al (2007); Waage (2007); Thompson et al (2012). More recent efforts involve both conceptual frameworks for strategic integration of sustainability into company decision making and the product development process, such as the Method for Integrated Product Development oriented to Sustainability (Fernandes et al, 2017).…”

“…Ad hoc here refers to how sustainability requirements and indicators are chosen without support from an assessment that defines sustainability criteria with high relevance for the actual product or solution (Mitchell, 1996). An ad hoc approach can thus involve designer preferences or apply the same criteria as in previous research, without a strategic perspective (Ny et al, 2006). Zhang et al (1999) made improvements to the Green QFD (GFD) (Cristofari et al, 1996) by incorporating life-cycle costing in the GQFDII.…”

Sustainability Balanced Scorecards and their Architectures: Irrelevant or Misunderstood?

“…The holistic integration of sustainability with its representation in SBSC performance perspectives, with internal processes at the core, is hence nothing other than what Hahn and Figge call an ''integrative view of corporate sustainability'' (2016) with a goal of ''inclusive profits'' (2011). An internal process (and related customer) perspective from a comprehensive product life-cycle (Ny et al 2006) and supply chain management perspective (Harms et al 2013;Beske et al 2015) leads to a much more integral understanding of the SBSC than in its original form (Figge et al 2002) and provides significant sustainability potential even in the case of profitoriented architectures. Consequently, the sustainability of products and related internal (value creation) processes have to be analysed in detail in order to determine whether a company pursues inclusive profitability or bounded instrumentality, and what additional role the SBSC hierarchy plays in driving sustainability.…”

Large UK retailers' initiatives to reduce consumers' emissions: a systematic assessment

“…It has also been used as a unifying framework to complement other methods, tools and concepts for sustainable development, either for addressing sustainability from a full sustainability perspective, or to assess whether this has been the case, see Hallsted et al (2010) for references, and, in broader contexts, in Lifecycle Analysis (Ny et al, 2006) and analysis of Planetary Boundaries approaches (Robèrt et al, 2013). …”