The environmental bill of material and technology routing: an integrated LCA approach

This paper deals with the environmental bill of material and technology routing: evaluating components and process impacts on the environmental strategy map through an integrated LCA approach. It introduces these two new elements in the definition of new approaches to complement environmental and financial considerations into a single sustainability indicator. The basic idea presented is that each component of a specific product has a certain environmental burden and consequently contributes to the environmental footprints. Those contributions are identified as environmental performance points (EPP). When an item is routed through different technology processes to build the final product, it keeps contributing to the overall environmental burden. These contributions are again identified as EPP. The sum of all EPPs, categorized by footprints, provides the basis for creation of the characteristic environmental performance strategy map, previously developed by the authors of this paper. This new approach allows wide flexibility: the impact of changing a component, material or a production process will be reflected immediately on the map.