Dear Colleagues,
Sustainability is nowadays accepted by all stakeholders as a guiding principle for both public policy making and corporate strategies. However, the biggest challenge for most organisations remains in the real and substantial implementation of the sustainabilty concept. At the core of the implementation challenge is the question, how sustainability can be measured, especially for products and processes. As long as these questions are not answered, there will be no consistent development towards sustainability and the use of the term remains arbitrary.
My hypothesis is, that the systems or life cycle approach has to be applied for all sustainability dimensions (environmental, economical, social) in order to achieve reliable and robust results. This can be put in the conceptual formula based on Klöpffer:
LCSA = LCA + LCC + SLCA
LCSA -= Life Cycle Sustainability Assessment
LCA -= Environmental Life Cycle Assessment
LCC -= LCA-type Life Cycle Costing
SLCA -= Social Life Cycle Assessment
This special issue seeks to demonstrate the important role that life cycle approaches can play for measuring sustainability. It is intended to provide a forum for scientific progress on both the overall concept of life cycle sustainability assessment as well as the individual tools supporting it.
Prof. Dr. Matthias Finkbeiner
Sustainability is nowadays accepted by all stakeholders as a guiding principle for both public policy making and corporate strategies. However, the biggest challenge for most organisations remains in the real and substantial implementation of the sustainabilty concept. At the core of the implementation challenge is the question, how sustainability can be measured, especially for products and processes. As long as these questions are not answered, there will be no consistent development towards sustainability and the use of the term remains arbitrary.
My hypothesis is, that the systems or life cycle approach has to be applied for all sustainability dimensions (environmental, economical, social) in order to achieve reliable and robust results. This can be put in the conceptual formula based on Klöpffer:
LCSA = LCA + LCC + SLCA
LCSA -= Life Cycle Sustainability Assessment
LCA -= Environmental Life Cycle Assessment
LCC -= LCA-type Life Cycle Costing
SLCA -= Social Life Cycle Assessment
This special issue seeks to demonstrate the important role that life cycle approaches can play for measuring sustainability. It is intended to provide a forum for scientific progress on both the overall concept of life cycle sustainability assessment as well as the individual tools supporting it.
Prof. Dr. Matthias Finkbeiner