Sustainability Constraints as System Boundaries: An Approach to Making Life-Cycle Management Strategic

Sustainable management of materials and products requires continuous evaluation of numerous complex social, ecological, and economic factors. A number of tools and methods are emerging to support this. One of the most rigorous is life‐cycle assessment (LCA). But LCAs often lack a sustainability pers...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Journal of industrial ecology 2006-01, Vol.10 (1-2), p.61-77
Main Authors: Ny, Henrik, MacDonald, Jamie P., Broman, Göran, Yamamoto, Ryoichi, Robért, Karl-Henrik
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
backcasting
Economic management
Economic strategies
Economic systems
Environment
Life cycles
life-cycle assessment (LCA)
Materials management
Product development
strategic life-cycle management
Studies
Sustainability
Sustainable development
sustainable product development
The Natural Step (TNS)
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Summary:Sustainable management of materials and products requires continuous evaluation of numerous complex social, ecological, and economic factors. A number of tools and methods are emerging to support this. One of the most rigorous is life‐cycle assessment (LCA). But LCAs often lack a sustainability perspective and bring about difficult trade‐offs between specificity and depth, on the one hand, and comprehension and applicability, on the other. This article applies a framework for strategic sustainable development (often referred to as The Natural Step (TNS) framework) based on backcasting from basic principles for sustainability. The aim is to foster a new general approach to the management of materials and products, here termed “strategic life‐cycle management”. This includes informing the overall analysis with aspects that are relevant to a basic perspective on (1) sustainability, and (2) strategy to arrive at sustainability. The resulting overview is expected to help avoid costly assessments of flows and practices that are not critical from a sustainability and/or strategic perspective and to help identify strategic gaps in knowledge or potential problems that need further assessment. Early experience indicates that the approach can complement some existing tools and concepts by informing them from a sustainability perspective‐for example, current product development and LCA tools.
ISSN:1088-1980
1530-9290
1530-9290
DOI:10.1162/108819806775545349