The Life Cycle Sustainability Assessment framework through the lens of the systemic approach

Promoting more sustainable societies, companies and customer behaviors are crucial challenges for the flourishing of societies and the well-being of citizens. Investigating and assessing the sustainability is therefore fundamental in order to enable governments, companies and customers to orient their policies, decisions and habits, respectively, towards more sustainable practices. However, so far, sustainability assessment methods show many gaps due to the complexity of this concept and the multitude of factors to include in the assessment that concur to advance or hamper more sustainable transitions. One promising framework for the assessment of sustainability is the Life Cycle Sustainability Assessment. In this dissertation, the systemic approach is presented as fundamental to identify interconnections, enabling practitioners in the Life Cycle Thinking field to advance the LCSA. Thus, three different studies are presented here to show how the adoption of the systemic approach allowed to identify relevant interconnections. In the first study, monetary and physical flows were connected in an integrated way in order to assess the environmental performance of two different business models with the same economic performance. To evaluate the two business models, the Life Cycle Assessment was performed using the profit as functional unit. In the second study, the systemic approach is used to estimate, with a theoretical approach, the level of circularity of a territorial system (at meso-macro level) through the creation of a circularity index based on the structure of the Life Cycle Assessment. The third research reports a preliminary literature review of the concept of well-being in the social sciences. The study highlights how the absence of a systemic approach in the assessment of social performance within the Social Life Cycle Assessment can lead to underestimate the relationships that take place within a system, preventing the social performance of a company from being scientifically assessed in terms of improving or maintaining the level of well-being of its stakeholders. As results, the three studies reveal important interconnections to keep in mind, and possible approaches or methods to apply in sustainability research.