Sustainability has three dimensions, namely economic, environmental and social. In the business community, the term “triple bottom-line” was coined to explain the importance of achieving sustainability practices (UNEP, 2007b).
All products have a life cycle: this entails being produced from raw material, transported to stores, purchased by consumers, and then eventually disposed of.
During the individual phases within the life cycle, products interact with the environment, economic and social systems, and this will be in the form of extraction, cost of production, and the workforce to ensure production and transportation.
Between the 1980s and 1990s, pollution prevention measures were implemented for economic benefit. These included measures such as cleaner production to reduce resource use, emissions and waste, and also environmental management systems to enhance image recognition and improve stakeholder relationship practices (UNEP, 2007b).
Businesses now embrace life-cycle approaches as they identify both opportunities for and risks of a product or technology, all the way from raw materials to disposal. To do this there is a continuum of life-cycle approaches from qualitative (life-cycle thinking) to comprehensive quantitative approaches (life-cycle assessment studies).
People, companies and governments use these various life-cycle approaches in anything from day-to-day shopping, selecting office supplies for the workplace, engineering a new product design, or developing a new government policy (UNEP, 2004).
There are a number of stages in the life cycle (UNEP, 2005), and these are listed in Figure 3 below:
a) Product design
b) Raw material extraction and processing c) Manufacturing of the product
d) Packaging and distribution to the consumer e) Product use and maintenance
f) End-of-life management: reuse, recycling and disposal
Figure 3: Stages of a products life cycle – Australian Government (Source: UNEP, 2012b)
During every stage of their life cycle, products interact with other systems, and to make a product, substances, energy, labour, technology and money are required, while other substances are emitted to the environment. Products can interact with the environmental (extraction or addition of substances, land use), economic (the cost to produce a product, implement technology, the profit to sell) and social domain (employment, worker rights). The relations between the environmental, economic and social domains are therefore quite dynamic (UNEP, 2005).
Life-cycle approaches promote:
awareness that our selections are not isolated;
making choices for the longer term;
improving entire systems; and
making the right decisions and informed selections.
Manufacturing represents a key stage in the life cycle of material use, which begins with natural resource extraction and ends with final disposal (UNEP, 2011b). The life- cycle approach militates against shifting problems from one cycle of the stage to another, as well as from one geographical area and environmental medium to another; it also facilitates the split into analysis and practice (UNEP, 2012b). These life-cycle approaches are becoming more prevalent across the globe, as the outcomes of these interventions contribute positively within the value chain.
These approaches are discussed in more detail in the section below, and include life- cycle thinking, life-cycle management, life-cycle assessment, life-cycle inventory, and life-cycle impact assessment.
2.5.1 Life-Cycle Thinking
Modern society imposes an enormous impact on the Earth. Indeed, it is often contended that if the world’s inhabitants’ total consumption equalled that of those in industrialised countries, it would require the resources of more than two earths (UNEP, 2012c). As the world population continues to grow from 7 billion today to a predicted 9 billion in 2050, so too grows the need for natural resources to meet the water, food, clothing, shelter and other basic human needs of an additional 2 billion people. In addition, all the resources that we are harnessing in the name of producing goods and servicesfor human consumption eventually end up as waste at some point and in some form, either in the air or water, or on the land.
Life-Cycle Thinking (LCT) integrates existing consumption and production strategies, and is applied to the daily decisions we make at our homes and workplaces, decisions about creating services and how we develop our communities. Citizens, businesses, and governments are finding ways to promote life-cycle thinking and balance the impacts of their choices (UNEP, 2004). Overall, life cycle thinking can
promote more sustainable rates of production and consumption and help us use our limited financial and natural resources more effectively.
Life-cycle thinking expands the established concept of cleaner production to include the complete product life cycle and its sustainability (UNEP, 2007b). The main goal of life-cycle thinking is to reduce a product’s resource use and emissions to the environment, as well as improve its socio-economic performance throughout its life cycle.
Life-cycle thinking also has the ability to affect government policy positively, as it applies when governments design policy, negotiate voluntary agreements with industry, and decide where to invest resources, commission new office buildings, or purchase paper for offices (UNEP, 2004).
Measuring potential life-cycle impacts of decisions can help governments to:
inform government programmes and help prioritise these programmes based on life cycle information;
make policies more consistent among consumers, producers, material suppliers, retailers, and waste managers and also among different policy instruments (such as harmonising regulations, voluntary agreements, taxes, and subsidies);
purchase products and services which are “environmentally preferable”, reduce the impact government operations have on the environment and support regional and global markets for “preferable” products and services;
promote pricing products and services to accurately reflect the costs of environmental degradation, health problems, erosion of social welfare, and impacts at other life-cycle stages; and
introduce take-back systems to establish recycling-based economies according to the hierarchy of reduce, reuse and recycle.
It is therefore of strategic importance for governments to integrate life-cycle methodologies into policies that will support a closed-loop approach in terms of sustainable procurement, and also boost the economy to some degree in elevating locally industry with production opportunities. The next section of life-cycle management serves as an extension phase of life-cycle thinking, and these tools are all implicit in endorsing resource-efficient and cleaner production practices and methodologies.
2.5.2 Life-Cycle Management (LCM)
The journey towards sustainable development requires that businesses, governments and individuals take action, that is, change consumption and production behaviours, set policies and change practices (UNEP, 2007b). Businesses have to find innovative ways to be profitable and at the same time improve the environmental performance of production processes and products.
Life-cycle management (LCM) has been developed as an integrated concept for managing the total life cycle of products and services towards more sustainable consumption and production patterns. The Life-Cycle Management Programme (LCMP) also creates awareness and improves skills of decision makers by producing information materials, establishing forums for sharing best practice, and implementing training programmes.
Life-cycle management is described as a system/framework for improving organisations and their respective goods and services. Decisions taken at all levels of an organisation will influence the overall impact a product has throughout its life cycle (UNEP, 2007b). Key drivers for implementing a life-cycle approach are business strategy, market requirements and requirements from the finance sector, national legislation, regional regulations, and international agreements.
The framework of life-cycle management therefore is integrated at all levels of the organisation: in marketing, purchasing, research and development, product design, strategic planning, corporate reporting, and management (UNEP, 2005). To reach these levels, life-cycle management will have to remain flexible, and in terms of implementing it, concepts, programmes and techniques (tools) are all required. A life- cycle framework addresses improvements to technological, economic, and environmental organisation, and occasionally to the social aspects of an organisation and the goods and services it provides.
2.5.3 Life-Cycle Assessments
Life-Cycle Assessments (LCAs) have been designed as tools for systematic evaluation of the environmental aspects of a product or service system through all the stages of its life cycle (ISO, 2006). The purpose of life-cycle assessments is to
specify the environmental consequences of products or services from cradle to grave (UNEP, 2005). The effort to use a life-cycle perspective, that is, to examine the environmental impacts of products, processes, facilities or services, from resource extraction, through manufacture to consumption, and finally to waste management, is reflected in the use of formal methods such as life-cycle assessment (Ayres & Ayres, 2002).
Life-cycle assessment is defined as the “compilation and evaluation of the inputs, outputs, and potential environmental impacts of a product system throughout its life cycle” (UNEP, 2005: page 22). However, life-cycle assessment is also important for technology choices, and setting technologies into a product-related chain perspective. Life-cycle assessment is increasingly used at a strategic level for business development, policy development, and education (ISO, 2006), and it contains four methodological phases, as seen in Figure 4:
1. Goal and scope definition
2. Life-Cycle Inventory Analysis (LCI) 3. Life-Cycle Impact Assessment (LCIA) 4. Life-Cycle Interpretation
Figure 4: The four phases of LCA (Source: UNEP, 2005)
2.5.4 Life-Cycle Inventory
The purpose of the Life-Cycle Inventory (LCI) programme is to improve global access to transparent, high-quality life-cycle data by hosting and facilitating expert groups whose work results in web-based information systems. This is the stage where all data is collected for the unit processes, and mathematical relations are used to relate the data to the functional unit of the study (McGlade, 2012). This is a process referred to as “normalisation”.
In the case of qualitative water assessments, input-output balances, based on the hydrology and water use by the different economic stakeholders, are set up during the inventory analysis phase, which are similar to the ones used in water registers and water accounting approaches.
2.5.5 The Life-Cycle Impact Assessment
The Life-Cycle Impact Assessment (LCIA) Programme is to increase the quality and global reach of life-cycle indicators by promoting the exchange of views amongst experts whose work results in a set of widely accepted recommendations (UNEP, 2005).
The life-cycle impact assessment aims to evaluate the life-cycle inventory table with regard to environmental impacts. Categories of environmental impacts are selected, for example climate change, human and eco-toxicity, and acidification (McGlade, 2012). The inventory analysis results must then be assigned to the different impact categories—a process called classification.
The life cycle of products takes into consideration process flows of energy, water, materials and waste. It evaluates processes within the value chain in terms of the potential environmental impacts, and establishes means to reduce these impacts and lessen the impact on society, businesses and the environment (McGlade, 2012).
Resource efficiency and cleaner production methodologies have the ability to ensure the reduction of resources such as energy, water, materials and waste, but applying life-cycle techniques achieves a more technical outcome in terms of the costing and associated values.
Even though resource efficiency and cleaner production interventions aim at optimising resources and reducing waste, life-cycle methodologies have an integrated approach to creating the link along the value chain. South Africa has during 2015 participated in a life cycle management pilot project initiated by the United Nations Environmental Programme, and this is focused specifically on utilising a tool called the Capability Maturity Model (CMM). This tool broadly assesses businesses using environment, social and economic criteria, and basically proposes strategic interventions that could potentially provide guidance in terms of strengthening in the area of sustainability.
The next section covers eco-labelling, which is another sustainable consumption and production tool; it describes in detail how this instrument, through a life-cycle assessment approach, is able to guide products in becoming more environmentally friendly.