The Role of Life Cycle Costing in Supporting Circular Economy Strategies: Evidence from Manufacturing Firms

Life Cycle Costing (LCC) has attracted growing attention as a decision-support tool for circular economy (CE) transitions in manufacturing, but how researchers and firms actually apply it varies considerably, and integration with CE frameworks has remained uneven. This article reports a systematic review and thematic synthesis of 57 peer-reviewed publications from 2020 to 2026, examining how LCC has been used, adapted, and misapplied in CE-oriented manufacturing contexts. Four questions structure the analysis: how LCC’s conceptual and methodological foundations have shifted under CE pressures; how LCC interacts with Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) and Building Information Modeling (BIM) in practice; which sectors have driven adoption and which have lagged; and what institutional and technical conditions tend to block or enable uptake. The review finds that LCC does capture circular value retention and resource efficiency in ways that conventional costing approaches cannot. Data scarcity, inconsistent methodological conventions, and weak institutional embedding prevent that potential from being realised consistently. These are not peripheral problems: they recur across sectors and study designs, which points to barriers that are structural rather than incidental. The article closes by proposing a conceptual integration model that positions LCC alongside LCA and BIM within a common decision architecture, and identifies three underexplored research directions that follow directly from the gaps documented here.