The Empirical Research Of Life Cycle Sustainability Assessment On Products

Since Norway's first woman prime minister Gro Harlem Brundtland put forward the concept of sustainable development in 1987, it has experienced remarkable development, not only in the agenda of governments and enterprises, but also in the existence of all over the world. To date, life cycle sustainability assessment(LCSA) has become a valuable product measuring tools and can be applied to product design, manufacturing, marketing, recycling and other fields. However, there are few papers on LCSA in domestic study. Therefore, the road to LCSA is still full of challenges.This paper mainly includes three parts: theoretical, application and empirical part. In theoretical part, framework of LCSA and its constituent elements were mainly introduced. In application part, the steps of LCSA and technical models were mainly elaborated. Then, the application cases of LCSA were illustrated to explain how to use LCSA in actual circumstances. In empirical part, different kinds of biological ethanol, conventional gasoline and electric car were took as an example to provide an idea for sustainable policy makers.The LCSA method was taken on cassava, corn and the wheat-based ethanol, the conventional gasoline car and electric car. The results show that the corn-based ethanol is better than cassava in the environmental dimension, but worse than cassava ethanol in economic dimension. And the wheat-based ethanol got the lowest score. In terms of social dimension, three kinds of biological ethanol got same score. In the second empirical research, the results show that electric car is slightly better than conventional gasoline cars both in the environmental and economic dimension, but in the social dimension, electric car is not competitive.Besides, LCSA is a multidimensional, systematic and complex phenomenon. A simple combination of framework cannot evaluate a product or system from a sustainable level. Therefore, establishing and perfecting LCSA database, developing the weight and quantitative methods of LCSA, the construction of integrated framework and its application are still the key problem to solve in the future.