The ORIENTING project develops a robust, operational methodology for product Life Cycle Sustainability Assessment (LCSA). The main value of the project relates to a holistic life-cycle approach that adopts an integrated approach to environmental, social and economic impacts.
The methodology is applicable for evaluating both linear and circular product systems, allowing practitioners to understand and manage possible trade-offs and supporting a societal shift towards a more sustainable and circular economy.
Sustainable development and the circular economy require a balance between environmental, economic and social benefits, while also decoupling economic growth from resource use. The European Green New Deal highlights the need for reliable, comparable and verifiable sustainability information. Existing sustainability assessment approaches suffer from a lack of comprehensiveness, consistency and practical tools for implementation. This results in fragmented and scarcely comparable information on product sustainability performance.
The ORIENTING project strives for the development of a future Product Sustainability Footprint at the European level, evolving the existing Product Environmental Footprint (PEF) and designing new indicators for the evaluation of material criticality and product circularity. New tools will be developed to support and simplify methodological application in business and policy development. Tools include guidance and training materials, data and software specifications, and a hands-on Life Cycle Sustainability Assessment (LCSA) IT tool. The LCSA methodology and its enabling tools are demonstrated in five industrial case studies. The consortium works in close cooperation with various stakeholders (industry associations and clusters, SMEs, consumer organisations, as well as governmental and standardisation bodies).
The project outcomes will enable informed business decisions and contribute to the development of a level playing field – a single market – for products based on robust (i.e. transparent and verifiable) sustainability information.
ORIENTING is funded under the CE-NMBP-42-2020 call of the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Framework Programme, one of the biggest EU Research and Innovation programmes to date.
The consortium of organisations working on the project includes,
Tecnalia (project coordinator), Gent University, VTT, Fraunhofer Gesllschaft (Institut für Bauphysik), Ecoinnovazione, PRé Sustainability, EIFER (European Institute for Energy Research), University for the Creative Arts (UK), ecoinvent Association, Lavola / Anthesis, ecopreneur.eu, aclima, BASF, Ternua Group, Stora Enso, Solana S.P.A.
The ORIENTING EU project is structured around different work packages, approaching different aspects of work towards the development of a Life Cycle Sustainability Assessment (LCSA) methodology. Using its expertise in life cycle inventories, in the data needs of life cycle-based sustainability assessments, and in data and database management, the ecoinvent association assists or participates in most of the work packages.
Further, the association leads the task of creating an exhaustive ontology to facilitate interoperability between information resources, databases and simulation software within the LCSA domain.