What is a Life Cycle Sustainability Assessment (LCSA)?

Sustainable development must include a holistic perspective considering three basic pillars: environment, economics and society.

Contactica evaluates and finds opportunities of sustainble development, using Life Cycle Sustainbility Assessment (LCSA), a combination of methods to evaluate environmental, economic and social impacts  across the whole life cycle of products.

How is an LCSA peformed?

An LCSA is the result of combining three independent methodologies:

• Life Cycle Assessment (LCA): it assesses the environmnental performance
• Life Cycle Costing (LCC) analysis: it addresses the economical impacts of products
• Social Life Cycle Assessment: it includes the social perspective in the assessment. It is a young methodology still in development, although it has been validated in real case scenarios

Only by considering the three pillars of sustainbility, the sustainable development of products and activities can be ensured.

The three assessments are based on ISO 14040, the international standard for LCA, although it is adapted to assess the economic and social impacts, as recommended by United Nations (reference a towards LCSA)

Why to perform an LCSA?

Actual committment with sustainble development requires accounting environment, economics and society impacts and develop strategies to avoid burden shifting among the three pillars of sustainability.

Do you want to really be fully committed to sustainbale development? Then, you should engange in the development of an LCSA. Performing LCA, LCC and S-LCA with common goals and scope allows the design of solid sustainbility strategies. LCSA has similar applications as LCA.

Tailor – made LCSA

Contactiva offers different services according to your needs:

• Independent analysis:
  • LCA
  • LCC: evaluate economic aspects of your product/process
  • S-LCA: evaluate the social risks and hotspots of your products’ life cycle
• DigiSPro: This tool allows the multi-objective optimization of (pre)-industrial processes and value chains, optimizing also the potential scaling-up. Objectives can be based on technical, Environmental, economic and social parameters