Talking about sustainability means first of all questioning the environmental, social and economic impacts of human activities.In other words, it means having a far-sighted perspective that aims not to exhaust the resources we have but to preserve them for future generations.
From this perspective, the life cycle assessment – the so-called Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) – takes on a fundamental importance, also considering the fact that the advantages and potential of the life cycle approach go well beyond their application to products and services (the areas in which it was originally developed).
The recent publication of the ISO 14072 and ISO 14075 standards are concrete evidence of this.
UNI ISO 14072:2025 (“Environmental management – Life cycle assessment – Requirements and guidelines for the life cycle assessment of an organization”) equally extends the scope of application of LCA to organizations.
An organizational LCA ( OLCA – Organizational Life Cycle Assessment), in this sense, seems to be even more complex.
There is in fact more than one product life cycle to follow, as most organizations engage in several product life cycles to varying degrees, and much of the environmental impact may lie outside the scope of a single organization, both up and down the value chain.
This means that UNI ISO 14072 extends the application of the UNI EN ISO 14040 standards (“Life cycle assessment – Principles and framework”) and UNI EN ISO 14044 (“Life Cycle Assessment – Requirements and Guidelines”) to all activities of the organization , which means that the reporting unit of the system allows to cover different products and unit processes of any organization within the same LCA study.
UNI ISO 14075:2025 (“Environmental management – Principles and framework for social life cycle assessment”) provides requirements and guidance for operators in the industrial, government, university and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) sectors for the efficient and credible development and implementation of practices for the assessment of social impacts.
A Social Life Cycle Assessment (S-LCA) can in fact help to:
- assess the extent and significance of the potential social impacts of a product system ;
- analyze the potential current social impacts associated with a system or predict potential future social impacts.
The two standards therefore come to outline a more complete picture of the life cycle assessment, making it increasingly adhere to the complex realities in which organizations operate and in which products and services find application. (Source: https://www.uni.com/ )