Sustainability

摘要

As the packaging industry incteasingly engages in discussions of metrics and scorecards to assess environmental performance, it is important to distinguish between two terms: Life Cycle Thinking and Life Cycle Assessment. Life Cycle Thinking is a qualitative framework used to understand and assess systems. It has historically been applied to natural systems through fields like ecology, where we study the relationships between species and their habitats. More recently, in the field of industrial ecology, we have applied these complex systems and their interrelationships. Life Cycle Assessment is rather a quantitative tool used to develop partial answers to the questions posed by Life Cycle Thinking. We use Life Cycle Aassessment to measure the known burdens our industrial processes impose on various environmental impacts like greenhouse gas emissions, water consumption, etc. But Life Cycle Assessment has significant limitations.