Page 13 - Materials Chemistry, Second Edition

1.3 LCT and sustainability 7

FIG. 1.2 Timeline of LCT milestones.

1.3 LCT and sustainability

The link between LCT and sustainable development is tight. On the one hand, sustainabil-
ity presupposes giving an overriding priority to the essential needs coherently with environ-
mental limits, available technologies, and socio-cultural context (UN, 1987). On the other
hand, LCT aims to consider all the impacts associated to a product life cycle in order to in-
dicate priority of interventions that are more convenient and useful (EC, 2003).
Sustainable development should ideally improve the quality of life for every individual
without expending the Earth’s resources beyond its capacity. Without a functioning environ-
ment we will not be able to give future generations the same possibilities for achieving the
levels of welfare that current generations are experiencing. Researchers have attempted to
quantify carrying capacities of the ecosystem that must not be exceeded to maintain functions,
as well as other ecosystem aspects of interest. Planetary boundaries can be interpreted as car-
rying capacities for the entire Earth system towards various anthropogenic pressures, such as
greenhouse gases and interference with nutrient cycles (Rockstr€ om et al., 2009). According to
estimates, this exceedance has already happened for four of the nine proposed planetary
boundaries (Steffen et al., 2015).
Acting to reduce the impact on the ecosystem is, therefore, necessary and urgent, but needs
a collective effort. The journey towards sustainable development requires that businesses,
governments, and individuals take action, changing consumption and production behaviors,
setting policies, and changing practices. Human needs should be met by products and ser-
vices that are provided through optimized consumption and production systems that do
not exceed the capacity of the ecosystem.