FORUM Sustainability Constraints as System Boundaries An Approach to Making Life-Cycle Management Strategic

Sustainable management of materials and products requires continuous evaluation of numerous complex social, ecologi-cal, and economic factors. A number of tools and methods are emerging to support this. One of the most rigorous is life-cycle assessment (LCA). But LCAs often lack a sustain-ability perspective and bring about difficult trade-offs between specificity and depth, on the one hand, and comprehension and applicability, on the other. This article applies a frame-work for strategic sustainable development (often referred to as The Natural Step (TNS) framework) based on backcast-ing from basic principles for sustainability. The aim is to fos-ter a new general approach to the management of materials and products, here termed “strategic life-cycle management.” This includes informing the overall analysis with aspects that are relevant to a basic perspective on (1) sustainability, and (2) strategy to arrive at sustainability. The resulting overview is expected to help avoid costly assessments of flows and prac-tices that are not critical from a sustainability and/or strategic perspective and to help identify strategic gaps in knowledge or potential problems that need further assessment. Early experi-ence indicates that the approach can complement some exist-ing tools and concepts by informing them from a sustainability perspective—for example, current product development and LCA tools. Keywords backcasting life-cycle assessment (LCA) materials management The Natural Step (TNS) strategic life-cycle management sustainable product development Address correspondence to