Widely accepted concept of "sustainable development" was originated from the report, "Our Common Future", by World Commission on Environment and Development. Responding to the requirement for developing "sustainable indicators" by Agenda 21 of the World Summit in Rio de Janeiro, many organisations all over the world have been developing and proposing the sustainable development indicators for mineral industries. Transparency of the indicators is their basic common factor and it must be supported by their stakeholders.
LCA is also an accepted tool to evaluate many environmental indicators obtained through the lifecycle of products and systems. The application of LCA is expanding to social and economic fields. Methodologies for the integration of environmental impacts are actively discussed and several kinds of single index are actually adopted.
The document named "Implementation of Agenda 21" by the World Summit in Johannesburg requests lifecycle thinking for mineral industries and their commodities. There are many possibilities to apply LCA methodologies and its fundamental theories for the development of the indicators for the mineral industries. The application is supposed to bring the practical spread of them in short time among the stakeholders.
