A life cycle thinking (LCT) approach to sustainability considers the impact of a product or process throughout its whole life cycle – from mining the raw materials through production, use and finally end-of-life waste treatment. However, existing methods are generally geared toward a linear economy and are not designed to compare the sustainability of different reuse or recycling strategies. In addition, most studies focus only on the environmental dimension of sustainability and tend to consider only few indicators (mainly greenhouse gas emissions).

This work package goes beyond current methods by combining environmental life cycle assessment (LCA), social LCA (SLCA) and life cycle costing (LCC) to include all three pillars of sustainability. This enables users to compare the environmental, social and economic benefits of different reuse strategies and solutions.