Systems Thinking for Life Cycle Sustainability Assessment: A Review of Recent Developments, Applications, and Future Perspectives

Abstract

Abstract:Tracking the environmental impacts of production, use, and disposal of products (e.g., goods, and services) have been an important issue in the global economy. Although Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) is a widely applied method to track these environmental impacts and support policies, it has certain limitations and an isolated way of evaluating the environmental impacts with no consideration of social and economic impacts and mechanisms. To overcome the limits of current LCA, three mechanisms have been proposed in the literature: (1) broadening the indicators by including social and economic indicators in addition to the environmental impacts; (2) broadening the scope of analysis from product-level assessment to national and global levels; (3) deepening the assessment by inclusion of more mechanisms to account for interrelations among the system elements, uncertainty analysis, stakeholder involvement, etc. With these developments, LCA has been evolving into a new framework called Life Cycle Sustainability Assessment (LCSA). Practical application of LCSA requires integration of various methods, tools, and disciplines. In this study, a comprehensive literature review is conducted to investigate recent developments, current challenges, and future perspectives in the LCSA literature. According to the review, a high number (40%) of LCSA studies are from the environmental science discipline, while contributions from other disciplines such as economics (3%) and social sciences (9%) are very low. On broadening the scope of analysis, 58% of the studies are product-level works, while 37% quantified the impacts at national level and achieved an economy-wide analysis, and only 5% of the studies were able to quantify the global impacts of products using LCSA framework. Furthermore, current applications of LCSA have not considered the rebound effects, feedback mechanisms, and interrelations of the system of interest sufficiently. To address these challenges, we present a complete discussion about the overarching role of systems thinking to bring tools, methods and disciplines together, and provide practical examples from the earlier studies that have employed various system-based methods. We discuss the importance of integrated system-based methods for advancement of LCSA framework in the following directions: (1) regional and global level LCSA models using multi-region input-output analysis that is capable of quantitatively capturing macro-level social, environmental, and economic impacts; (2) dealing with uncertainties in LCSA during multi-criteria decision-making process and expert judgments in weighting of LCSA indicators; and (3) integration of system dynamics modeling to reveal complex interconnections, dependencies, and causal relationships between sustainability indicators.

Fully integrated modelling for sustainability assessment of resource recovery from waste

“…Current LCSA developments are directed mostly towards broadening the domains of value analysed rather than the level of analysis. Thus, while studies are increasingly including environmental, social and economic impacts together, many analyses are still focused upon a single product, rather than a whole industrial sector or economy (Guinée, 2016;Onat et al, 2017). This is problematic in contexts of RRfW, for obvious reasons.…”

“…Due to these difficulties in implementation, LCSA of RRfW systems remain rare (Onat et al, 2017). Of those that have been reported, notable examples include analyses of different management strategies for bottom ash in Macao (Sou et al, 2016), alternative wastewater treatment technologies (Kalbar et al, 2016), the reuse of mobile phones in China (Lu et al, 2014), disposal scenarios for PET bottles in Mauritius (Foolmaun and Ramjeawon, 2013), the management of used cooking oil (Vinyes et al, 2013), and municipal waste management in Thailand (Menikpura et al, 2012).…”

“…The operationalisation of LCSA frameworks remains an ongoing project with relatively few practical implementations (Onat et al, 2017;Sala et al, 2013aSala et al, , 2013b.…”

Bio-Inspired Sustainability Assessment for Building Product Development—Concept and Case Study

“…As the investigation of existing sustainability assessments has been extensively conducted by several recent publications, these are chosen as a basis for the assessment of the research situation [33][34][35]. Guinée has provided an extensive meta-assessment of Life Cycle Sustainability Assessment (LCSA) studies in scientific literature including a comprehensive list of general recommendations and potential improvements that are lacking for existing studies and should be tackled in the LCSA assessment development [35].…”

A Parameter Selection Framework for Sustainability Assessment

“…These frameworks, however, require significant resources and expertise to implement. The relative rarity of LCSA studies that include all three domains of sustainability suggests that the use of LCSA is too complicated to be practical in many decision making contexts [13,14].…”