Evaluating the challenges to Life Cycle Assessment using Best-Worst Method and Decision-Making Trial and Evaluation Laboratory

Purpose Over the past few decades, the industrial sectors have been widely criticized for their adverse environmental impacts and uncontrolled resources consumption. Further, stringent environmental norms and growing environmental awareness has pushed industrial sectors to adopt sustainable industrial practice. Life Cycle Assessment (LCA), an industrial performance assessment tool, has several limitations and hence, it is difficult to measure the performance of industrial sectors in terms of sustainability. The present study aims to identify and evaluate the challenges to LCA. Methods Combining literature review and industrial interactions has identified 20 challenges to LCA under five-category comparability, data, resource requirements, organizational structure, and uncertainty communication. An integrated Multi-Criteria Decision Making (MCDM) technique comprising of Best-Worst Method (BWM) and Decision-Making Trial and Evaluation of Laboratory (DEMATEL) is used to evaluate the challenges to LCA. BWM is used to prioritize the challenges to LCA, and DEMATEL is used to reveal interrelationships among the challenges. Results Outcomes of BWM indicates problems with the quality of data, lack of inventory data, difficulty in comparison, absence of dedicated LCA method, and scale-up issues as the top five critical challenges to LCA adoption. According to DEMATEL result, seven challenges come under cause category and the remaining 13 challenges come under effect category. Conclusions Challenges to LCA have been evaluated using an integrated approach comprising of BWM-DEMATEL. Outcome of the integrated approach helps in prioritizing the challenges and also in exposing the interrelationships among the challenges. The study's outcome would assist industrial management and practitioners in identifying the critical challenges to LCA. In addition, the findings may help the research community in developing a robust and reliable LCA tools.