Sustainability Indicators: Overview, Synthesis and Future Research Directions

Abstract

Indicators form an important tool to assess product sustainability. However, an overview over this body of literature and its contents, specifically in regard to indicators for measuring product sustainability does not exist. The approach applied in this paper is exclusively literature based. In a structured and methodological literature survey, the relevant literature containing various methods for sustainability assessment as well as existing frameworks containing sustainability indicators have been collected. The results of this paper are a list of sustainability impact categories and indicators, spanning the three relevant fields of sustainability. As such, this paper represents a review of existing product-related sustainability indicators.