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Sustainability Constraints as System Boundaries: An Approach to Making Life‐Cycle Management Strategic
Author(s) -
Ny Henrik,
MacDonald Jamie P.,
Broman Göran,
Yamamoto Ryoichi,
Robért KarlHenrik
Publication year - 2006
Publication title -
journal of industrial ecology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 2.377
H-Index - 102
eISSN - 1530-9290
pISSN - 1088-1980
DOI - 10.1162/108819806775545349
Subject(s) - sustainability , backcasting , process management , life cycle assessment , industrial ecology , sustainability organizations , management science , business , social sustainability , sustainability science , strategic management , sustainable development , product lifecycle , environmental resource management , risk analysis (engineering) , new product development , production (economics) , economics , marketing , ecology , macroeconomics , biology
Sustainable management of materials and products requires continuous evaluation of numerous complex social, ecological, and economic factors. A number of tools and methods are emerging to support this. One of the most rigorous is life‐cycle assessment (LCA). But LCAs often lack a sustainability perspective and bring about difficult trade‐offs between specificity and depth, on the one hand, and comprehension and applicability, on the other. This article applies a framework for strategic sustainable development (often referred to as The Natural Step (TNS) framework) based on backcasting from basic principles for sustainability. The aim is to foster a new general approach to the management of materials and products, here termed “strategic life‐cycle management”. This includes informing the overall analysis with aspects that are relevant to a basic perspective on (1) sustainability, and (2) strategy to arrive at sustainability. The resulting overview is expected to help avoid costly assessments of flows and practices that are not critical from a sustainability and/or strategic perspective and to help identify strategic gaps in knowledge or potential problems that need further assessment. Early experience indicates that the approach can complement some existing tools and concepts by informing them from a sustainability perspective‐for example, current product development and LCA tools.