italiano

Abstract

Sustainable development is historically based on economic growth, social equity and environmental care for present and future generations. However, a shared consensus on the concept of sustainability is not yet reached by international research; in fact, many frameworks exist and a number of indicators has been proposed in the last decades. At the same time, the definition of circular economy is not doubtless. Different strategies exist to modify production chain from linear paths to circular ones, including prevention, eco-design, virtualisation, sharing, etc. Life cycle assessment is a tool, defined in an international standard, that permits to investigate environmental impacts from cradle to grave in processes, products, organisations, and territories. In the last years many studies have also investigated life cycle sustainability as a whole, including social and economic issues, in a more comprehensive analysis. The goal of this work is to highlight some questions related to the three concepts of sustainability, circular economy, and life cycle thinking. The purpose is not to give answers, but to leave questions open to the reader, to stimulate doubts. Is circularity always positive from an environmental point of view? May life cycle thinking be useful to assess the sustainability of circular economy policies? How environmental results of different scenarios can be fairly communicated to non-expert stakeholders, to avoid misinterpretation? Is green-washing a risk for actual green policies? In the last years, some life cycle thinking studies have suggested that the presence of environmental and social rebound effects may nullify the advantages of circular strategies. In fact, even if a scenario allows a diminution of the use of raw material at the recycling stage, the same scenario often shows an increment of another impact in the whole supply chain. In this context, the use of a single circularity indicator might be not appropriate to show the complexity of impacts involved. This approach is useful to assess the sustainability of strategies proposed in the last European circular economy action plan. In fact, waste technologies, territorial management, and treatment scenarios can be critically investigated in a life cycle perspective. Social and economic aspects can be included as well by using life cycle costing, social life cycle and life cycle sustainability tools. The monitoring process and the strategic direction can be assessed, and the true sustainability of policies can be discussed. This is particularly triggering for national and international choices that influence investments of people and states. Since policies of sustainability might be defined by politicians and evaluated by citizens, scientific results of studies need to be communicated in an easy way. The dashboards of sustainability permit to summarise data using a range of colours that change according to environmental performances of compared scenarios. Dashboards have been used for sustainable development goals, but also for life cycle sustainability data. In this work we suggest the use of dashboard to illustrate results of comparative scenarios in order to highlight pros and cons of different choices, to maintain all impacts, and to have a picture of rebound effects from an impact to another one. In our opinion this visualisation can help both citizens and politicians to critically approach sustainability policies and to move towards a sustainable degrowth of environmental impacts.