Investigating the Sustainability of Product and Product-Service Systems in the B2C Industry

Numerous companies are recently pushed to move from Products to Product-Service Systems (PSS). The final aim is to increase the value perceived by the market and provide a more flexible and personalized offer by a wide range of services connected with the product use. The research question is: how to understand the performance of new service-based solutions and easily compare to traditional products? Sustainability is nowadays accepted as a guiding principle for both public and corporate strategies. Whereas product sustainability can be validly estimated by several tools, no certified methods have been defined for PSS sustainability estimation yet. This paper proposes the combination of LifeCycle Assessment (LCA) and LifeCycle Costing (LCC) techniques to the whole lifecycle phases for both Product and PSS. Data comparison can be usefully adopted to drive the change towards PSS in industry. An industrial case study focusing on washing machines is presented as a valid example of method application to support decision-making in the B2C industry