A New Approach to Improve Sustainability: The Role of Organizational Life Cycle Assessment (O-LCA)

When preparing an emissions assessment report, life cycle assessment, originally defined for products, can be extended to organizations under the name O-LCA. This is a methodology for identifying the environmental impacts of activities associated with an organization using a life cycle approach, and compared to LCA, which is generally seen as an isolated assessment at the product level, it has greater transferability to the company because it considers the company’s entire production range rather than just one product. However, assessing the impact of organizations can be complex because it considers a network of relationships with partners and suppliers related to the organization whose data are not always avail-able. Thus, a detailed understanding of GHG-emitting activities is essential for the development of an effective corporate sustainable strategy, as value chain emissions can be used to guide overall policy, implement sectoral allocation, or initiate engagement with companies. Therefore, O-LCA could be a useful tool for investigating emissions at the organizational level and thus aid in the pursuit of corporate objectives. In light of this, this paper aims to present an overview of O-LCA and how it could serve as a sustainability tool to meet different interests between companies and stakeholders