Organisation :
European Commission
The many products we buy and use every day contribute to our comfort and well-being. However, awareness of the unsustainable levels of resource consumption and the significant impacts of these products on the environment is growing among consumers, policy makers, and business. Until recently, actions for environmental improvement focused on minimising pollution from single sources such as discharges into rivers and emissions from factories.
Life Cycle Thinking (LCT) seeks to identify possible improvements to goods and services in the form of lower environmental impacts and reduced use of resources across all life cycle stages. This begins with raw material extraction and conversion, then manufacture and distribution, through to use and/or consumption. It ends with re-use, recycling of materials, energy recovery, and ultimate disposal. The key aim of Life Cycle Thinking is to avoid burden shifting. This means minimising impacts at one stage of the life cycle, or in a geographic region or particular impact category, while helping to avoid increases elsewhere.
This guide shows how a lifecycle approach can be used to identify and reduce the environmental and health impacts of the products consumers use. It underlines the importance of considering these issues across the entire lifecycle of a product and sets them within the context of policy development, business strategy, innovation, and better customer choice. The case studies highlighted offer an ideal starting point in understanding the full environmental implications of products.