An Integrated Life Cycle Sustainability Assessment Framework for Product Life Cycle-Oriented Decision-Making

Requests for environmental assessments and reports are becoming more frequent, prompting companies to include sustainability-related declarations in their strategy. Similarly, claims about circular economy performance are of growing interest to limit waste output and resource use. For the practical implementation of sustainability and circularity approaches, measuring the environmental and circularity performances of products and companies has been widely acknowledged as a key prerequisite. A life cycle sustainability assessment (LCSA) covering social, economic and environmental dimensions and circularity analysis uses a combination of several methodologies, as there is no universally recognized method for the execution of LCSA, making the interpretation and use of the results difficult for decision-making. In this context, the chapter is meant to derive and provide integrated LCSA (iLCSA)’s best practices. An analysis of state-of-the-art practices and standards in product-level sustainability areas is presented, together with the methodologies available for sustainability assessments integration, followed by phases of identification, classification and selection of environmental, economic and social indicators. Those phases are carried out in the context of electrical and electronic equipment, referring to circular use cases, with the aim to identify information flows for the calculation process and the actors involved. Finally, addressing iLCSA for individual actors of product life cycle and linking it to labelling allow a wide adoption by end users.