Weighting with Life Cycle Assessment and Cradle to Cradle: a methodology for global sustainability design

Abstract

Sustainable product design uses methodologies focused on eco-effectiveness and eco-efficiency for the proposal of innovative technological solutions and for the control of environmental impacts during the product life cycle. One of the main drawbacks of such techniques is their qualitative nature, associated with a decision-making process that is sometimes arbitrary, or with unverifiable data; this means that several complementary tools are currently being used to reduce the error in the results obtained. This situation makes the unification of procedures necessary. In this context, this research develops a methodology for the sustainable design of industrial products that integrates life cycle assessment (in its environmental, economic and social application) and cradle-to-cradle techniques. For this purpose, a new assessment process is proposed, based on damage, developing LCA+C2C endpoint indicators. The methodology is subsequently verified in a case study of products for sustainable mobility (city trike electric). The results show that an integrated LCA+C2C assessment can help to propose more balanced sustainable strategies and would be a suitable method to measure tradeoffs between economic, social and environmental results, for practical purposes and future redesigns. The unified method provides a procedure to design a solution with a trade-off between eco-efficient and eco-effective criteria; it also simplifies the design phases, facilitates the interpretation of the results and provides a quantitative scope to the cradle-to-cradle framework.