Page 68 - Materials Chemistry, Second Edition

5 LCA and Sustainability 51

5.5 A Note on Life Cycle Sustainability Assessment

It has been proposed to expand LCA into life cycle sustainability assessment
(LCSA) to also encompass socialand economic aspects, in addition to environ-
mental aspects of sustainability when analysing product life cycles (Kloepffer 2008;
Zamagni 2012). The idea of LCSA builds on the so-called “three pillars” (or three
dimensions) interpretation of sustainability, according to which sustainability is
composed of an environmental, social and economic pillar. This interpretation
gained momentum with the concept of the “Triple bottom line” by Elkington
(1997), who proposed that businesses should manage environmental, social and
economic aspects of sustainability in the same quantitative way that financial
aspects are typically managed inaccounting. Accordingly, Kloepffer (2008) pro-
posed the following scheme for LCSA:

LCSA ¼ LCA þ LCC þ SLCA ð5:2Þ

LCC is an abbreviation for life cycle costingwhich aims to quantify all costs
associated with the life cycle of a product that is directly covered by one or more of
the actors in that life cycle. S-LCA is an abbreviation for social life cycle assess-
ment, which has the goal of assessing the social impacts of a product over its life
cycle. LCC and S-LCA are detailed in Chaps. 15 and 16 of this book. An important
requirement of LCSA is that the three pillars of sustainability must be assessed
using the same system boundaries, i.e. that the same elements of a product life cycle
are considered in all three assessments (Kloepffer 2008) (see Chap. 8, for an
elaboration on system boundaries).
While LCSA is much less mature than LCA and there is a little agreement of
how to actually perform it, two fundamental aspects of LCSA deserve highlighting
in this chapter:
1. LCSA seems to be based on the assumption that sustainability is something that
can be balanced between an environmental, social and economic dimension.
This is hinted by the scheme proposed by Kloepffer (2008), according to which
a decrease in one sustainability dimension (e.g. environmental) can be com-
pensated by an increase in another dimension (e.g. social). This conflicts with
the concept of carrying capacity, according to which the meeting of human
needs depends on a minimum level of environmental protection, as mentioned
in Sect. 5.2. In our view it would therefore be misleading to assess a product
that has a relatively good performance in an LCC and an S-LCA, but a relatively
poor performance in an LCA, to be overall sustainable, because the bad per-
formance in an LCA may be contributing to the exceedances of carrying
capacities, which in the long term threatens the meeting of human needs and
thus social (and economic) sustainability. This perspective is reflected by a
popular quote, attributed to Dr. Guy McPherson: “If you really think that the
environment is less important than the economy, try holding your breath while
you count your money” (McPherson 2009).