The failure of eco-efficiency to guarantee sustainability: Future challenges for industrial ecology

Weighting with Life Cycle Assessment and Cradle to Cradle: A Methodology for Global Sustainability Design

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.

Revisiting the application and methodological extensions of the planetary boundaries for sustainability assessment

The planetary boundaries (PBs) delineating the safe operating space for human activities have been broadly recognized as a well-grounded framework for global sustainability assessment. This paper provides a comprehensive review of the application and methodological extensions of the PBs by linking with multiscale environmental sustainability assessments. We find that the targeted scales, sharing principles and sustainability perspectives jointly determine the downscaling of the PBs-a complex process that needs to take into account the biophysical, socioeconomic, ethical and cultural dimensions. Despite the varying sharing principles, in general both top-down and bottom-up approaches have been employed to define the environmental boundaries at sub-global scales on which the various PBs highly differ in their threshold behaviors. To clarify the responsibility of different stakeholders for sustainable development, the PB-informed sustainability assessment should refer to a specific perspective (i.e., production-, consumption-, or life cycle-based). Furthermore, the methodological extensions of PBs have the potential to monitor the progress and gaps of the globally consensus-based Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). To achieve the SDGs within the PBs, there is a great need for a thorough transition of socioeconomic systems towards a prosperous, just and sustainable future.