Life Cycle Sustainability

The development of sustainable products requires the consistent modelling of ecological, economic, and social aspects along the Life Cycle of the product A Life Cycle Sustainability methodology and database has been developed. It integrates the new Life Cycle Working Time approach for the most important work-related social issues like qualified working time, accidents, child work, working environment conditions, woman work etc. into the established Life Cycle Engineering methodology of IKP and the respective Software System GaBi. Focus of the approach is to provide reliable decision support while at the same time securing its applicability in practice through caring for data availability, international comparability, process-relatedness and other criteria. The methodology is presently applied in practice in an ongoing international project developing sustainable, biosource based foam products.