Reinterpreting the LCA standard procedure for PSS

Product-Service Systems (PSS) are unveiling innovative business models by proposing profitable and eco-friendly solutions to address customer needs. In promoting PSS alternatives companies are shifting from a product-sale business model towards the delivering of a result to the end user, given by an integrated combination of tangible products and intangible services. Researches claim that such growing business paradigm has the potential to dematerialise the economy by reducing material flows in production and consumption, thus minimising the environmental impacts. However, several studies have demonstrated that sustainability is not an intrinsic element of PSS. As a matter of fact, Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) is the most renowned methodology to perform environmental assessments both of products and services. Nevertheless, the current LCA researches focus on the evaluation of physical products and lack in providing guidelines and frameworks for practitioners to perform the environmental assessment of PSS, which also consists of intangible elements. To address this gap, the paper aims at developing some guidelines in the form of a conceptual framework supporting LCA for PSS. The research is pursued following a systematic literature review on environmental assessment methods applied in the PSS domain along with the advice of several active researchers and experts in the field. Such conceptual framework has the intention to guide practitioners in overcoming the main challenges that have to be faced while developing an LCA for PSS and provides a solid contribution to the current literature. (C) 2017 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V.