| Project Detail |
A balance between environmental, economic and social benefits
The European Green Deal for the EU and its citizens resets the European Commission’s commitment to tackling climate and environmental-related challenges. As a new growth strategy, it aims to transform the EU into a resource-efficient economy where there are no net emissions of greenhouse gases by 2050. With this in mind, the EU-funded ORIENTING project will work to strike a balance between environmental, economic and social benefits. It will develop a methodology for a comprehensive life cycle sustainability assessment of products and services in a way that considers all the variables (economic, environmental and social). This will allow practitioners to implement possible trade-offs. New tools to simplify the methodology application will be developed and tested in five industrial case studies.
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. |
