Implementation of environmental life cycle costing: Procedures, challenges, and opportunities

In order to train new professionals and researchers in the area, among other purposes, it is necessary to have knowledge about the operationalization of life cycle tools. The objective of this study is to formulate a proposal for conducting environmental life cycle costing (ELCC) from the approach of this content in the scientific literature.

To this end, we developed a review with the analysis of studies that performed the tool in various productive contexts, between 2008 and 2022, published in journals indexed in the Web of Science. The application of keywords defined for the search allowed the retrieval of 4007 documents. Non-peer-reviewed journal articles, conference papers, review articles, editorial materials, meeting abstracts, letters, and book chapters were excluded. The abstracts and methodologies were also read to further exclude articles that were not classified using the ELCC. With the application of these procedures, we obtained 133 articles, which were analyzed in detail.

A proposal for conducting the ELCC was formulated to guide the execution of the tool. This was composed of procedures, challenges, and opportunities. The main procedures identified included the delimitation of a perspective, goal, scope, internal and external cost categories, application of economic indicators, and uncertainty analysis. The main identified challenges refer to the ELCC execution reproducibility, the difficulty in standardizing cost categories, and the limited vision regarding the tool use. The opportunities mapped out encompass the exploration of the thirty-two gaps pointed out for ten research segments, emphasis on the service sector, government programs, creation of databases, and approach to ELCC concepts in educational training.

The proposal made it possible to systematize knowledge from the way ELCC has been conducted in the last decades in different segments. In the practical field, this study serves to guide researchers, professionals, or students who wish to use the tool to achieve professional goals. Future research can also refine and explore the proposed structure, as well as the identified gaps and other opportunities.