Life Cycle Management and Life CycleThinking: Putting a price on sustainability

摘要

Life cycle management has been defined as the application of life cycle thinking to modern business practice, with the aim to manage the total life cycle of an organization's products and services toward more sustainable consumption and production (Jensen & Remmen 2005). Numerous tools and methodologies have been developed to promote eco-design and eco-innovation, though practitioners have argued that there is a need for more work on the 'implementation into business processes' (Hunkeler & Rebitzer 2005). Effective integration of life cycle thinking into existing business routines is considered a critical success factor for more sustainable business models. This raises two interesting questions. William McDonough calls regulation a design failure. Companies have put products on the market that have annoyed their customers or end users so much that they were willing to go out and buy more government. What is preventing normal competitive forces from driving companies to develop offerings to take market share back from government regulators? The second question relates to those environmentally responsible products that have been developed but have not achieved wide acceptance in the market place. If companies do effectively integrate life cycle thinking into their practices, will their customers actually adopt more sustainable consumption patterns?