Work performed in the SAMT project included:
- A review of the existing sustainability assessment methods and tools (with resource and energy efficiency perspective), including interactive visualisations illustrating existing methods and tools and their key elements;
- Interviews with industrial sustainability experts concerning current practices and challenges related to sustainability assessment;
- Development of an evaluation criteria and assessment of the suitability and applicability of the methods and tools to support decision making (using adapted RACER method);
- Industrial case studies applying selected sustainability assessment methods and tools in a cross-sectorial context. Methods tested within the case studies included: Life Cycle Assessment (LCA), Material Input per Service (MIPS – Material Footprint), Life Cycle Costing (LCC) , Eco-Efficiency Analysis (EEA), Green Productivity (GP), Social Life Cycle Assessment (S-LCA), Water Footprint (WF), Carbon Footprint (CF), Exegetic Life Cycle Assessment (E-LCA) and Life Cycle Activity Analysis (LCAA).
- Preparation of a roadmap and implementation plan including recommendations for future actions and proposals for future standardisation activities;
- Organisation of three open workshops to discuss current best practices and challenges related to sustainability assessment methods and practice; learnings and outcome from the industrial case studies; results and conclusions of the three SPIRE-4 projects to support creation of harmonised recommendations.
Practical bottlenecks that would need to be solved in order to increase the use of the methods within industries include several aspects ranging from incompatibility of existing software tools and data formats, to variety of methodological choices and assumptions, and data scarcity. As the development of the LCA based methods is moving from environmental assessments towards multidimensional assessments including economic and social aspects and extend from product level to sector level, requirements related to successful implementation and interpretation of the results increase. From the evaluated life cycle based methods, all are capable of providing useful information to decision-making, but only few of the methods are regularly applied by the companies who participated in the study. To enable more efficient implementation for industrial purposes, the LCA based methods would benefit for further development related to credibility, robustness and easiness to use. Cross-sectorial sustainability assessment using hybrid methods is considered interesting and useful for examples for evaluating the impacts of circular use of resources and recycling, but available hybrid LCA methods currently lack concrete tool implementations. New development needs seem to arise, as the understanding of different aspects of sustainability increases, and as the demands from stakeholders become more frequent. The methods increase understanding of the evaluated phenomena, help avoiding burden shifting and provide sound, science based background for decision-making.
