Sustainable Development and Society - GSA

Sustainable Development and Society
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packaging. This process resulted in a
methodology that in the 1990s came to be
called environmental life cycle analysis
(LCA).
With the rise of “product policy” and
“extended product (or producer)
responsibility” during the 1990s, LCA
shifted from a little-known “cottage
industry” to become an internationally
standardized analytical tool in support of
environmental management. LCA is now
used by thousands of companies, many
governments, consumer and environmental
groups, and others to explain the “cradle-tograve”
environmental consequences of
product-related decisions.
In 2002 the government leaders and
representatives from industry and civil
society met at the World Summit on
Sustainable Development in Johannesburg.
One outcome was the “Plan of
Implementation for Changing
Unsustainable Patterns of Consumption
and Production,” whose key elements
included a call to “Improve the products and
services provided, while reducing
environmental and health impacts, using
where appropriate, science-based
approaches, such as life-cycle analysis.”
Thus LCA, originally developed to inform
environmental policies at the dawn of
modern environmentalism, was called upon
to assist the current search for sustainable
patterns of consumption and production.
Recently it has become common to refer to
the “three pillars” of sustainable
development: economic growth, ecological
balance, and social progress. 1 Traditional
LCA has addressed only the environmental
pillar. However, integrating economic
modeling and a “what-if” perspective opens
up the potential to address more of the
sustainability agenda, helping to avoid
“burden shifting” among the social,
environmental, and economic objectives,
and potentially helping to build a broader
base of support for policy proposals by
addressing the concerns of a broader group
of stakeholders.
There are several ways in which this
expansion can take place. By integrating
economic models and databases, LCA can
address impacts and performance
measures which are routinely tracked at the
economic sectors level rather than through
engineering unit processes. An example of
such an impact group is occupational
health and safety. A recent investigation
concluded that occupational health and
safety issues and incidents in product
supply chains may be in the same order of
magnitude as the expected near-term
human health consequences of supply
chain pollution releases. 2 That paper also
pointed to the clear need to develop better
reporting systems and databases on
occupational impacts in industrialized and
non-industrialized economies.
Secondly, integrating this modeling
approach allows us to acknowledge that
product supply chain activities bring
benefits as well as burdens for the agenda
of sustainable development. Sustained
increases in economic output among
developing countries are linked to major
gains in human health through the
mechanisms of income-poverty reduction,
increased investment in and access to
education, and increased public
investments in the public health
infrastructure. 3 Traditional LCA, focused
strictly on pollution impacts and blind to
development benefits, is seen by some
sustainability analysts from developing
countries as biased against their primary
concerns. By addressing the benefits of
economic development alongside the costs
of pollution and resource degradation,
extensions of LCA have the potential to
meet these concerns and to point to truly
sustainable solutions to the challenges of
consumption and production in the 21st
century.