Teacher: Prof.

Roberta Salomone
Room: 090 771548 - 090 6764321
e-mail: [Link]@[Link]
Student talk: Department of Economics – Piazza S. Pugliatti 1
Thursday 11:00 - 13:00 a.m.
What is a Life Cycle Thinking
What is a Life Cycle Thinking
What is a Life Cycle Thinking
The goal of LCT is to avoid burden shifting by assessing a
product’s use of natural resources and its impact on the
environment, the economy and society throughout its
entire life cycle.
The life cycle of a given product involves a number of stages
Cradle-to-cradle
from the extraction of raw materials through processing,
manufacturing, distribution, use, recycling, reuse or final
disposal. LCT enables to consider the environmental, social
and economic impacts associated with the production or
consumption of the product by taking into account all the
stages of the product life cycle.
It provides a means of ensuring that improvements in one
stage are not creating a greater cumulative impact by
simply shifting the burden to another stage of the life
cycle.

Therefore, it allows companies to see the influence of their choices with

regard to sustainability and help them take decisions, so trade-offs can be
balanced positively to impact the economy, the environment and society.
What is a Life Cycle Thinking
What is a Life Cycle Thinking
 Related terms: value chain
A product value chain covers one product while a corporate value chain covers the
product portfolio of a whole company.
A value chain can be made more sustainable if, at each step of the chain, the
environmental and social drivers, impacts and benefits are considered and optimized at
the same level as the economic dimension.
When a product passes from one part of a product chain or life cycle stage to the next, it
gains value.

So, when for instance a mobile phone is being

produced:
Ø The product is first designed and then
developed
Ø Raw materials are selected, procured and
supplied
Ø The mobile phone is then manufactured,
marketed, packaged and distributed
Ø It is then retailed, purchased, used and
serviced
Ø Finally, it is recycled or disposed of.
An example
Life Cycle Management
LCM is a business management approach that can be used by all types of
organizations to improve their products and thus the sustainability performance of
the companies and associated value chains.

It is a method that can be used equally by both large and small firms, its purpose is to
ensure more sustainable value chain management.

It can be used to target, organize, analyze and manage product-related information

and activities towards continuous improvement along the life cycle.

LCM is about making life cycle thinking and product sustainability operational for
businesses that are aiming for continuous improvement. Companies that are ambitious
and are committed to reduce their environmental and socio-economic burden, while
maximizing economic and social values.
These are businesses that are striving towards reducing their footprints and minimizing
their environmental and socio-economic burdens while maximizing economic and social
values.
When a product passes from one part of a product chain or life cycle stage to the next, it
gains value. At all stages of this process, value is added as it passes through each part of
the value chain.
Life Cycle Management
Production can place significant environmental and socio-economic burdens on the
world.
How goods are manufactured and distributed is complex: designers, producers, their
suppliers and consumers, retailers, etc. all use interlinked processes that both affect
each other and the global environment.
LCM is an approach that can be used to address and manage these interlinkages and
networks.
Partnering with customers and suppliers to achieve the minimum impact within the
complete value chain creates value and benefits society at large.
If managed effectively and by taking direct as well as indirect effects into account,
LCM helps not only to provide this overall benefit, but also delivers positive bottom-
line consequences for each company involved.

Cooperation means that important systemic approaches are being generated.

Adopting a sustainable value chain approach will allow businesses to meet
challenges ranging from poverty, climate change, resource depletion, water
scarcity, globalization and demographic shifts, etc., and to reshape the world and
the way business is done.
Business leaders have a central part to play in ensuring sustainable development.
Life Cycle Management
A key characteristic of LCM = companies should move away from just looking at their
own operations and to look at what is happening in their value chain (upstream and
downstream operations that are outside the company’s direct control).

Traditionally, the focus on improving production conditions has been at a local level.
Today, as more products (goods and services) are traded regionally and globally, we
need international initiatives that incorporate LCM thinking and approaches to help
businesses respond to the challenges posed by today’s global marketplace.

local regional national global

Life Cycle Management
Sustainability is a growing concept and any company that is serious about its affairs
needs to be in the business of incorporating the concepts of the future today.
LCM is mainly a business management concept for sustainable products that can be
applied in the industrial and service sectors with the aim of improving specific goods
and services and enhancing the overall sustainability performance of the business and
its value chains in general.

LCM is used beyond the short-term business

success; it aims at taking businesses forward towards
long-term achievements and sustainable value
creation.
So LCM requires a holistic view and a full
understanding of interdependency of businesses in
order to support relevant decisions and actions so as
to improve sustainability performance that takes into
account both environmental and social benefits and
at the same time offer a number of value creation
opportunities.
LCM seems to be a
concept with a broad
variety of approaches
and methodological
tools.

Companies apply it in a
number of different
ways in order to achieve
the desired outcomes, as
far as it relates to their
sustainability
performance.

The theoretical
background for LCM has
been developed by a
SETAC Working Group
but yet there is no
universal definition of
LCM.
Life Cycle Management
In summary, LCM:
Ø is an extremely powerful concept and process and can enable businesses and
other organizations to make sustainability part of “business as usual” and
deliver real-world improvements for them and their customers
Ø if developed and implemented appropriately for a given organization, has the
power to move sustainability management from a cost of doing business to a
driver of profitability affecting all three elements of the triple bottom line
Ø in the long term, can help to transform the market by making sustainability a
differentiator just as quality is today. Only if sustainability is a factor of
competition on the market, can market forces kick in to drive performance.
Life Cycle Management
Approaches to sustainable consumption can be grouped into three broad
categories:
• Innovation – business processes for the development of new and improved
goods and services; businesses are shifting to incorporate provisions for
maximizing societal value and minimizing environmental impacts.
• Choice influencing – the use of marketing and awareness-raising campaigns to
enable and encourage customers and consumers to choose and use goods and
services more efficiently and sustainable.
• Choice editing – the removal of “unsustainable” goods and services from the
marketplace in partnership with other actors (e.g., retailers) in society or plainly
via market mechanisms.

To this end, a variety of sustainability tools can be used – ranging from life cycle
assessment (LCA) to life cycle costing (LCC), and (eco-) design methods or green
procurement, to factoring in the consumption patterns of consumers and how to
make them sustainable, etc.
Life Cycle Management: an example
Life Cycle Management: an example
Which tools?
Which tools?
In most cases, large, multinational companies
have environmental, social responsibility and
sustainability departments that could
coordinate the implementation of LCM. These
departments are typically responsible for
reporting developments within environmental
and sustainable policy and they can provide
valuable inputs through training of employees
in the other departments. It is crucial that the
whole company is motivated and ‘speaks the
same language’.

However, most small and medium-sized

enterprises (SMEs) do not usually have such
departments. Therefore, the coordination of
LCM activities could also be managed by
forming a cross-organizational or cross-
functional team with a representative from
each relevant function, where a motivated
employee can act as coordinator and at the
same time make sure that everybody has the
necessary tools and materials to inspire and
carry out the activities.
Life Cycle Management: how to implement.
LCM can be applied in all organizations from a very small-scale local vendor to large and
multinational companies. However, the application procedure and its organization may
vary in each company. This is mainly due the fact that the relevance of different aspects
of sustainability varies from company to company, and it depends on factors such as the
type of product system involved in the company, specific social and environmental
issues they would like to address, their geographic scope and supply chain complexity
and so on.

LCM is a dynamic process in which companies may begin applying it with specific goals
and objectives depending on the resource they have:
• they may begin with implementing an Environmental Management System (EMS) in
order to focus on the continual improvement of the environmental system
performances;
• then it may include Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) as a tool to evaluate the
environmental performance of a single product and find an alternative solution to
reduce the environmental burden from this product;
• through time they can adjust their goal and move forward step-by-step from one
project to a more advanced and sophisticated LCM practice, with a process in place
for multiple products, which require advanced tools and data-intensive programs.
Life Cycle Management: how to implement.

Excercise: 1. form working groups 2. each group chooses a type of company and
sector and identifies with its top management
Life Cycle Management: how to implement.

Excercise: set policy, set goals and define ambition level

Life Cycle Management: how to implement.

Excercise: get engagement and participation (responsibilities in function involved,

crossfunctionality, building expertise, ecc.
Life Cycle Management: how to implement.

Excercise: select a product and start the review by answering each of these
questions
Life Cycle Management: how to implement.

Excercise: select an area where efforts should be directed, set objectives and
define an action plan
Life Cycle Management: how to implement.

Excercise: try to immagine what would require to put in practices your plan (e.g. a
chang of existing practices? Which changes?)
Life Cycle Management: how to implement.

Excercise: how would you use the data/information/improvement obtained? Are you
communicating intrnally and/or externally? Why? How?
Life Cycle Management: how to implement.

Excercise: evaluate the experience and revise policy and objectives. Use the above
questions
Life Cycle Management: how to implement.
Life Cycle Thinking and SDGs.
LIFE CYCLE APPROACHES CONCEPTS,
METHODS AND TOOLS