Integration of Life Cycle Assessment and Value Stream Mapping to Ensure Sustainable Development: A Literature Review

Traditional lean tools such as value stream mapping (VSM) do not account for environmental benefits. Simultaneously, life cycle assessment (LCA) does not account for improving manufacturing performance. Given the advent of the concept of sustainable development as an approach to fulfill the needs of the world's population without destroying the planet, integration of environmental benefits and manufacturing performance presents the next frontier of the industrial improvement. LCA can be integrated with VSM to ensure a sustainable development of the manufacturing industry. This paper presents a review of literature on integration of the tools-LCA and VSM. The reviews show that the main motivation factor is to enhance sustainable development. Further, a key finding is the benefit as a guide for decision making, fostering of a systematically improvement focus and increased engagement expanding the focus to include the sustainable aspect in addition to traditional lean measures. This is enabled through a systematically approach with assessing and visualization of the production process performance from a sustainable viewpoint.