Advancing Sustainable Development Through Environmental Performance Monitoring: The Organisational Life Cycle Assessment

Abstract

The growing importance of sustainability poses significant challenges to companies, particularly micro, small, and medium enterprises (MSMEs). Product life cycle assessment focuses on individual products, often leaving MSMEs without a complete picture of their overall environmental impact, especially within complex and long value chains. Organisational Life Cycle Assessment (OLCA) appears to be a valid approach to address these challenges by assessing all activities within an organisation. OLCA offers a comprehensive view of an organisation’s sustainability performance, overcoming the challenges often faced by MSMEs, such as resource constraints and challenges within the value chain when adopting product LCA. By integrating OLCA with product LCA, companies can gain a more holistic understanding of their environmental impacts, improving both environmental assessments and ethical business conduct. The findings of this research assess OLCA’s presence in literature and industry, exploring its content and practical applications demonstrated through case studies. It emerges that the adoption and use of the methodology have great potential especially for small and medium enterprises, as they are often left outside the comprehensive view of the life cycle of a single product, making it difficult for these companies to approach environmental performance monitoring. Therefore, the OLCA could address this gap, becoming a reference approach for companies that need to disclose about environmental impact. Due to its relatively recent nature, companies still struggle with its adoption. Scientific research on this, therefore, becomes crucial in its spread and adoption, stressing the benefits and limitations, as well as providing evidence of case studies. This paper aims to address this gap and pone itself as a cornerstone for future researchers to pursue on this path and for companies to foster a broader, offering a dual perspective with product LCA.