Project

Operational Life Cycle Sustainability Assessment Methodology Supporting Decisions Towards a Circular Economy

Acronym
ORIENTING
Code
41W07820
Duration
01 November 2020 → 30 April 2024
Funding
European funding: framework programme
Promotor
Research disciplines
  • Engineering and technology
    • Sustainable and environmental engineering not elsewhere classified
Keywords
duurzaamheid
Other information
 
Project description

Sustainable development and circular economy require balancing between environmental, economic and social benefits and de-coupling the economic growth from resource use. The European New Green Deal highlights the need for reliable, comparable and verifiable sustainability information. Existing sustainability assessment approaches suffer from lack of comprehensiveness, consistency and practical tools for implementation. This results in fragmented and hardly comparable information on product sustainability performance. The ORIENTING project takes up this challenge and develops a robust and operational methodology for the life cycle sustainability assessment (LCSA) of products and services. The novelty value of the project relates to an approach that considers environmental, social and economic impacts in an integrated way. The ambition is to develop a methodology that can assess goods produced under linear as well as circular business models, allowing practitioners to understand and manage possible trade-offs. ORIENTING contributes to the development of a future Product Sustainability Footprint at European level, evolving existing PEF and designing new indicators for the evaluation of material criticality and product circularity. New tools will be developed to support and simplify the methodology application in business and policy development. Tools include guidance and training materials, data and software specifications and a hands-on 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 levelled playing field – a single market – for products based on robust (i.e. transparent and verifiable) sustainability information.

 
Role of Ghent University
Ghent University is involved in several tasks and Work Packages, mainly working on the development of new methods and/or operationalization of already available methods into a LCSA framework. Ghent University leads Work Package 1 (Concept and specifications), on top of leadership in two tasks in Work packages 1, i.e., Task 1.1 (Criteria selection) and Task 1.6 (Sustainability integration framework approach). Furthermore, it also leads Task 2.5 (Materials and Circular Economy in LCSA), from WP2 (LCSA Methodology).