Life cycle thinking

The life cycle thinking approach

Life cycle thinking is a comprehensive concept aimed at evaluating the complete environmental, economic, and social ramifications associated with a specific product throughout its entire life cycle, from raw material extraction to end-of-life. The fundamental objective is to recognise and prioritise interventions that offer enhanced practicality and utility, promoting a more efficient and beneficial decision-making process. Moreover, life cycle thinking seeks to identify potential enhancements in the life cycle of goods and services, with a focus on enhancing socioeconomic benefits and reducing resource consumption and emissions and avoiding negative social impacts. It actively discourages the practice of burden shifting, where environmental impacts may be reduced at one stage of the life cycle but inadvertently transferred and heightened elsewhere (European Commission, 2010).

Valdivia et al. (2021) suggest 10 principles for conducting a life cycle thinking exercise. These can be simplified to the following:

1. Understand the cause-effect mechanisms connecting actions to consequences.

2. Life cycle thinking shall encompass four stages of goal and scope definition, inventory analysis, impact assessment, and interpretation. This is covered in the next section in more detail.

3. To put life cycle thinking into practice, various methodologies are needed. These include Life Cycle Assessment (LCA), Life Cycle Costing (LCC), Social Life Cycle Assessment (sLCA), and other techniques tailored for a supply chain perspective, such as Material Flow Accounting (as found in the EC Toolbox). These assessments complement each other within the life cycle thinking framework. It is also important not to judge a product or process on a single output such as climate change.

4. Consider the perspectives of key stakeholders and not exclude specific societal groups.

5. Consider the co-benefits of a product, sometimes beyond its primary purpose. This could relate to valuable by-products of a process (heat or materials), or indirect benefits such as the infrastructure developed to serve a manufacturing plant that could also be used by the public (e.g. roads).

6. A life cycle thinking exercise must have appropriately defined boundaries, including all relevant activities and material flows, and not purposely excluding certain groups or high impact actions.

7. Consistency to ensure correct system boundaries, methods, impact categories, models, data, and assumptions. This permits valid comparisons.

8. Transparency to ensure an open and understandable presentation of methods, results and limitations.

9. It is inevitable that any action will involve trade-offs between impact categories. Decisions based on life cycle thinking must be balanced, fair and respectful.

10. Negative and positive impacts shall be separated to avoid misinterpretation or misuse of results.

To appreciate how certain actions influence different outcomes, the complementary systems thinking concept can be applied (Constable, 2021). Systems thinking is the principle that to fully understand (and control) a process, all the related systems and their underlying principles must be understood. Systems thinking is often associated with sustainability because of the many interdependent systems that effect one another (Mahaffy et al., 2019). 

Methodology

Within life cycle thinking, LCA is the most advanced, internationally standardised methodology used to assess the potential environmental impacts of product systems (ISO, 2006). LCA quantifies potential environmental impacts associated with emissions and resource use along the product life cycle, from extraction of raw materials to end-of-life, often referred to as a 'cradle-to-grave' perspective (de Haes, 2001; Bruijn et al., 2002; Mata et al., 2012). By taking into consideration the product's entire life cycle, possible shifts in environmental impact to a different life cycle stage or impact category can be monitored (European Commission, 2010).

Policymakers, companies and business associations are using LCA as a decision-supporting tool for design guidelines and production optimisation (Jiménez-González and Overcash, 2014; Gheewala and Silalertruksa, 2021). Within the pharmaceutical industry, LCA is crucial to understanding varied environmental impacts, from manufacturing energy use to the consequences of active pharmaceutical ingredients (APIs) in the environment. The state-of-the-art is slowly developing from more simple energy balances and climate change indicators to more elaborate assessments (Sabour et al., 2023; Satta et al., 2024). Next we shall investigate the stages of an LCA before applying it to pharmaceuticals.