Page 7 - Materials Chemistry, Second Edition

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Introduction. Life cycle thinking

Anna Mazzi
Department of Industrial Engineering, University of Padova, Padova, Italy

1.1 From the environmental concerns to a life cycle perspective

The issue of environmental sustainability is of great interest today (UNEP, 2011). The in-
ternational community encourages companies to adopt cleaner production systems and tech-
nologies. The market seems to reward environmentally responsible organizations, and many
companies around the world are increasingly becoming interested in environmental issues,
introducing them as strategic variables in their businesses.
However, over the years, many environmental management tools have shown an impor-
tant limit, that is the reduction of environmental impacts of an organization or a process by
allocating them at other times, upstream or downstream of the supply chain, thus increasing
the environmental loads of other subjects, such as suppliers, distributors, customers
(O’Rourke, 2014). This is because many environmental management tools observe the envi-
ronmental problem from a single point of view, the one of the single organization, while en-
vironmental problems are generated by different subjects that, together, contribute in a
closely interconnected way to the overall environmental impact. With a physical point of
view, the footprint of a product is the sum of the footprints of processes along the product
supply chain in different times and geographical areas (Hoekstra and Wiedmann, 2014).
There are many examples of problem shifting, where solutions adopted to improve or
solve a targeted problem unintentionally end up creating other problems of environmental,
economic, or social nature elsewhere for other stakeholders. To solve this loop, a life cycle
approach must be adopted.
Emerging interest in market concerns the green supply chain management, which explores
various types of supply chain relationships and governance, encouraging a sustainable man-
agement of suppliers and distributors (Tseng et al., 2019). With a life cycle perspective, we
consider the totality of the system in our analysis, including the evaluation of the product’s
entire life cycle, with a long-term time horizon and a multidimensional view. Life cycle

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Life Cycle Sustainability Assessment for Decision-Making Copyright # 2020 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
https://doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-12-818355-7.00001-4