Life cycle sustainability assessment:
Beyond Environmental Metrics

2-0 LCA - Life cycle assessment consultancy ready to help with LCA solutions and SimaPro

See the whole picture. Make decisions that truly matter.

Your sustainability story is more complex than a carbon number. Every decision ripples across environmental, social, and economic systems in ways that carbon accounting alone cannot capture. That supplier with impressive emissions data might be masking exploitative labour practices. Your material switch that cuts carbon might be creating new social risks. The cost savings you're celebrating could be shifting burdens onto vulnerable communities.

These hidden connections determine whether your sustainability efforts create genuine positive change or simply move problems around.

Life cycle sustainability assessment cuts through the complexity. It reveals the full reality of your impact across planet, people, and prosperity, from raw materials to end-of-life. No cherry-picking. No blind spots. Just clear insight into the trade-offs you're making and the opportunities you're missing.

This is decision-making with your eyes open. Where you can see the connections others miss. Where you move beyond compliance theatre to create meaningful change. Where every strategic choice is grounded in comprehensive understanding of what actually matters.

One framework, three dimensions: life cycle sustainability assessment

So how does it work in practice?

Imagine having a single lens that brings your entire sustainability picture into focus. Life cycle sustainability assessment (LCSA) does exactly that, combining life cycle costing, environmental assessment, and social impact analysis into one powerful framework.

What makes LCSA transformative is its ability to speak a common language across different types of impact. Through impact valuation, you can compare environmental pressures, social consequences, and economic effects side by side—revealing the true cost and benefit of your decisions to society and the environment.

The framework connects 76 distinct impact categories to all 169 targets of the UN Sustainable Development Goals. This isn't just data—it's the foundation for understanding what truly matters, where your organisation's influence is greatest, and how your actions align with global sustainability ambitions.

The three pillars of life cycle sustainability assessment

To understand how LCSA creates this comprehensive view, you need to see how its three pillars work together.

Sustainability rests on three interconnected pillars: environmental, social, and economic. Neglecting any one of these creates risk and undermines long-term viability.

Environmental sustainability

Environmental sustainability examines how your activities affect natural systems. This includes climate change, resource depletion, water use, biodiversity loss, and pollution. Life cycle assessment (LCA) provides the methodological foundation for measuring these impacts across your value chain, revealing where your greatest environmental pressures lie and where interventions will be most effective.

Social sustainability

Social sustainability examines how your activities affect people and communities throughout your value chain. This includes working conditions, health and safety, fair wages, human rights, community impacts, and access to essential services. Social life cycle assessment (S-LCA) provides a structured approach to identifying social risks and opportunities, from raw material extraction through manufacturing, distribution, use, and end-of-life.

Economic sustainability

Economic sustainability examines the long-term viability and value creation of your activities. This goes beyond simple profit to include life cycle costs, resource efficiency, economic resilience, and the distribution of economic value throughout the supply chain. Life cycle costing (LCC) reveals the full economic implications of your decisions, including hidden costs and long-term financial risks that don't appear in traditional accounting.

How you benefit

When you bring these three pillars together through life cycle sustainability assessment, three powerful capabilities emerge.
2-0 LCA solution steps - Building solutions for life cycle assessment challenges with SimaPro expertise

Life cycle sustainability assessment

What matters most? Life cycle sustainability assessment gives you a single score that reflects the full impact — environmental, social, and economic — of your business decisions.

2-0 LCA - Life cycle assessment consultancy ready to help with LCA solutions and SimaPro

Materiality assessment

Don't know where to start? Life cycle sustainability assessment links 76 impact categories to the 169 sustainability targets of the UN SDGs — giving you the data needed for a meaningful materiality assessment.

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Impact valuation

Impact valuation is a method of translating sustainability impacts into monetary values - revealing the cost and benefit to society and the environment. Expressing different impacts in monetary terms provides transparency: what is the net societal impact of my actions?

Ready to explore what's possible?

Every organisation faces unique sustainability challenges. Whether you're just starting to think beyond carbon or looking to deepen your existing approach, life cycle sustainability assessment provides the comprehensive view your decisions deserve.
Denise Almeida
contact our specialist
Denise Almeida
Life Cycle Specialist 
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Frequently asked questions

We understand that life cycle assessments can raise many questions, whether you're new to sustainability reporting or looking to refine your approach. If you can't find the answer you're looking for, you're always welcome to contact us at info@2-0-LCA.com. 

Life cycle sustainability assessment is an approach that examines environmental, social, and economic performance across the entire value chain of a product, service, or organisation. Unlike approaches that focus on a single dimension (such as carbon footprinting), life cycle sustainability assessment provides an integrated view that reveals how these three dimensions interact and where trade-offs exist.

The approach builds on established methodologies: environmental life cycle assessment (LCA), social life cycle assessment (S-LCA), and life cycle costing (LCC). By applying these methods in an integrated way, organisations gain insights into their full sustainability performance and can make decisions that genuinely advance environmental protection, social equity, and economic viability simultaneously—or at minimum, understand and manage the trade-offs when win-win solutions aren't available.

ESG (Environmental, Social, and Governance) reporting frameworks require organisations to disclose performance across multiple dimensions of sustainability. Life cycle sustainability assessment provides the analytical foundation for robust ESG reporting by quantifying environmental, social, and economic impacts across your value chain.

Whilst ESG reporting frameworks define what to report, life cycle sustainability assessment methodologies provide how to measure it. This includes quantifying Scope 1, 2, and 3 emissions for the Environmental pillar, assessing social risks and impacts for the Social pillar, and evaluating economic performance and resilience for the economic dimension that underlies good Governance. An integrated life cycle approach ensures your ESG reporting is grounded in rigorous, science-based analysis rather than partial data or estimation.

Most organisations begin with environmental assessment and then expand to include social and economic dimensions as their sustainability management matures. If you already conduct life cycle assessments or carbon accounting, adding social and economic dimensions builds on this foundation.

If you're starting from scratch, we recommend beginning with a scoping exercise to understand which dimensions and impacts matter most in your context. This might involve a workshop to explore sustainability challenges, stakeholder expectations, and strategic priorities. From there, we can design an approach that delivers the insights you need without unnecessary complexity.

Whether you're taking your first steps or deepening existing practices, we guide you through the process with the rigour and attention to detail your decisions deserve.

Our clients say

CONCITO
“2-0 LCA has been a key partner on CONCITO’s publications and projects on consumption-based emissions and other LCA-related activities. When we had the opportunity to develop the Big Climate Database, showing the climate impact of more than 500 food products, it was only natural to choose 2-0 as our LCA data partner. We are very satisfied with the result and the widespread use of the database in the Danish food service sector, and excited to see that 2-0 LCA is expanding the tool to other countries.”
Michael Minter
Michael Minter
Program director, Concito
Maersk
"Our fruitful collaboration with 2-0 LCA allows Maersk to make the most informed transition towards lower-impact fuels. The LCA tool that 2-0 LCA has delivered has been instrumental in showing some of the trade-offs of biofuels – for example, the impacts on land-use changes and biodiversity – and will enable a more sustainable energy transition in the future. This way, we have the right information at hand to minimise unintended consequences and avoid carbon tunnel vision."
Ingrid Marie Andersen
Ingrid Marie Andersen
Head of Energy Transition Sustainability, Maersk
Arla Foods
“To realise Arla Foods' very ambitious sustainability strategy, we need solid data, detailed and transparent reporting, and collaborations with talented partners. We've been partnering with 2-0 LCA for more than 10 years and in that time, with 2-0 LCA's expertise in life cycle assessment, we have developed our tool for calculating the carbon footprint from dairy farming — evolving from an Excel-based solution covering a few hundred farms to a fully integrated LCA tool covering almost 8,000 farms across seven different countries.”
Hanne Bang Bligaard
Hanne Bang Bligaard
Director of Agri Sustainability, Arla Foods
Proctor & Gamble
“LCA data is complex, with LCA studies often limited by data availability. 2-0 LCA has really helped us close the gap on end-of-life data for chemicals used in cleaning products, providing information that can be trusted for corporate GHG emissions reporting and more. Collaboration with 2-0 on this topic was truly a joy, with their experts speaking up and applying their scientific know-how to educate us, while also listening with respect for our company’s unique context and requirements.”
Joost Dewaele
Joost Dewaele
Senior Scientist, Procter & Gamble

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