Contribution of LCA to the Sustainable Society

Abstract

There are so many kinds of definitions of “sustainable society” or “sustainable development”. By taking insightful consideration of physical steady state of any system, Herman Daly defined sustainability in 1972 as competition between human activities and resilience of ecological system on the Earth.

  In this article the author expanded the definition of Daly’s sustainability, and concluded disturbance of human activity on the Earth would be the core concept to measure the sustainability. In other word, it is necessary as a first step to find out indices of disturbance of human activities which will have to include the resilience of the Earth. Then it is inevitable to invent a methodology to define the indices numerically.

  Several indices with possibilities are proposed as examples including（1）dissipation of mineral resources,（2）emission of waste heat,（3）irreversibility of processes,（4）virgin resource usage, and（5）irreversible change in land use. It was also pointed out that researchers have to seriously consider the importance of the concept of self-multiplication of disturbance.

  On the other hand, it is quite impossible to perform any human activities with no disturbance on the ecosystem of the Earth. What is the outcome of your activity? This is a question to be answered if anybody tries to evaluate the properness of any kind of human activity.

  The author proposes if the outcome is highly evaluated as a kind of innovation from the view point of the history of humankind, everybody has to willingly consent to disturbance as far as its adverse effects are predictable and recoverable.

  If this kind of concept for evaluation is to be included in LCA, a new methodology to convert any values into numerical form must be developed. Unfortunately LCA has not succeeded in the appreciation of any values so far, and this could be one of important target to be challenged by researchers in younger generations.