Purpose Substituting fossil-based products with bio-based alternatives is crucial for a sustainable bioeconomy. Comparative Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) studies can provide valuable guidance on when and how the substitution is environmentally sound. However, careful consideration of technical, regulatory, and economic conditions is needed when performing such LCA studies. The present work aims to identify the best practices for...

Purpose Life cycle assessment (LCA) studies that attempt to anticipate the future impact of product systems are increasingly widespread. However, a lack of clarity remains on what is the accurate terminology to be used in studies with strong focus on the temporal dimension; what are the specific definitions, and what are the underlying computational approaches. This work sets specifically to clarify the differences between “pr...

Purpose Improving the life-cycle assessment (LCA) of forestry products is important for accounting for the environmental impacts of the transition to a sustainable bioeconomy. Performing accurate biogenic carbon accounting, building time-dependent inventories, and using dynamic impact assessment methods is increasingly required from LCA practitioners. This work documents the development and validation of a managed forest datab...

Purpose Even if several methods exist in consequential LCA to identify marginal suppliers, specific limitations remain, such as extensive data and processing requirements, a weak linkage with existing economic concepts, and limited fit to the case of emerging products. To address these limitations, this study instead investigates use of competitiveness, an established economic concept, to identify marginal suppliers. It propos...

Companies are pivotal in transitioning from a linear economy to a sufficiency-based circular economy. However, circular research lacks the necessary tools and processes to engage companies, customers, and downstream suppliers in preserving the value of their products post-launch. Effective value preservation requires close collaboration among producing companies and their ecosystem stakeholders to identify when value is decrea...

Purpose Fisheries represent a globally significant commercial sector whilst rising demand for fish products has intensified environmental emissions. Despite increasing fish consumption, fisheries have stagnated over the past three decades due to their reliance on wild fish stocks, limiting the potential for increased production. In Life Cycle Assessment, these constraints are often overlooked, not capturing the complexities un...

Purpose The building sector is responsible for substantial adverse environmental impact and vast material consumption. Eco-design of buildings is a potential mitigation strategy; however, quantitative evidence of the mitigation potential is lacking. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to quantify the environmental consequences of applying multiple combinations of various eco-design strategies to a building, thereby providi...

The application of eco‐design principles in the building sector is considered a promising way to mitigate its substantial environmental impacts. However, quantitative evidence for this mitigation potential is lacking. The objective of this study was to quantify the environmental performance of diverse eco‐design strategies when applied to the building sector. A macroscale model capable of simulating the future demand for housi...

Purpose Demand for Environmental Product Declarations (EPDs) is already high and increasing in the construction and building sectors. The overall purpose of EPDs is comparability of product environmental performance, and they are thus developed in accordance with product category rules (PCRs): requirements and guidelines for how to make EPDs for one or more product groups. Since several organisations publish PCRs, there is a r...

Results from life cycle assessment (LCA) studies are sensitive to modeling choices and data used in building the underlying model. This is also relevant for the case of fisheries and LCAs of fish products. Fisheries' product systems show both multifunctionality because of the simultaneous co‐catch of multiple species and potential constraints to supply due to natural stock limits or socially established limits such as quota sy...

Seaweed is increasingly considered a promising resource to produce high‐value products such as bioplastics due to potential environmental benefits such as carbon uptake and no land‐use change. However, the environmental assessment of emerging technologies for producing bioplastic from seaweed remains challenging due to the difficulties in modeling future seaweed supply and demand. Within the consequential approach to life cycl...

Purpose Mortality and suboptimal biological performance are a widespread problem in finfish farming. The associated losses constitute an environmental opportunity cost that needs to be thoroughly assessed to prioritize actions aiming at reducing the environmental impacts of finfish aquaculture. We here propose and demonstrate the use of a new parameterized and consequential LCA model of sea-trout production designed to assess...

Life cycle interpretation is the fourth and last phase of life cycle assessment (LCA). Being a “pivot” phase linking all other phases and the conclusions and recommendations from an LCA study, it represents a challenging task for practitioners, who miss harmonized guidelines that are sufficiently complete, detailed, and practical to conduct its different steps effectively. Here, we aim to bridge this gap. We review available l...