The Concepts of Environmental Integration, Life Cycle Assessment and Life Cycle Costing in the Light of Sustainable Enterprises

Abstract

Enterprises play a key role in process of strengthening and promoting sustainable development. At the core of this idea stands life cycle management. In practice, this means the integration of techniques based on life-cycle perspectives, like Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) and Life Cycle Costing (LCC). The aim of this paper is to summarize the approaches for integrating life-cycle based methods that appear in the literature. The article presents the main assumptions of integration concepts and examines their usefulness from a sustainable enterprise's point of view. Finally, the application of life-cycle based techniques was evaluated, especially in the context of environmental accounting. Based on a literature review it was concluded that there are, internationally, many approaches in the integration of life cycle techniques that support sustainable enterprises. The possibility of their use depends on the decision context. Sustainable enterprises should be particularly interested in extending the typical profitability calculation in the environmental performance of a product. This objective can be achieved through the parallel integration of LCA and LCC in the framework of life cycle sustainability assessments.