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The first results of ORIENTING project were delivered last August. Our WP1 team has identified and selected promising reference methods and tools that will be used for the development of the ORIENTING LCSA methodology, in the second stage of the project (Work Package 2).

All the analysis done were part of the first work package, led by Universiteit Gent, with the contribution of BASF, Ecoinnovazione, ecoinvent, Eifer, Fraunhofer, PRé, Tecnalia, UCA and VTT.

Different methods and tools have been identified per sustainability topic: environmental, social, economic, including also material criticality, circularity and their integration. Each of these was evaluated against a set of criteria specifically developed and tailored to fit ORIENTING´S goals.

Among the methodology references, the following were pointed out to be used as a starting point for next phases:

• Product Environmental Footprint (PEF), for the environmental topic;
• UNEP Guidelines for Social Life Cycle Assessment and the Handbook for Product Social Impact Assessment, for the social topic;
• The European Union’s criticality assessment and the GeoPolRisk methods, for the material criticality topic.

A hybrid and modular approach that considers different goals and scopes according to the user needs is the methodology proposed for the economic assessment; while for the circularity and integration topics, the analysis performed has not found yet a preferred methodology and approach that fits best for ORIENTING. Further analysis will be conducted in the next steps of the project to select useful methods.

Work Package 1 results: Promising available approaches for LCSA
WP1 – Concepts and specifications