LCSA Applied to Systems Integrating Services and Products: Study of a Day-Care Service and Day-Care Building System

The Life Cycle Sustainability Assessment (LCSA) methodology has been increasingly applied, particularly in product systems, to evaluate environmental, economic and social aspects of sustainability from a life cycle perspective. Given that most production and consumption activities are based on systems integrating products and services, research to broaden the LCSA framework is needed. In this work, products and services are treated as parts of larger systems, designated as P+S systems, in which a set of links between them can be established. Sustainability in these systems can be evaluated by taking into account that specific aspects must be included in each phase of the LCSA methodology. In particular, identifying the links between the life cycle stages of the involved systems, defining the suitable functional unit to evaluate and interpret final sustainability indicators and analysing the relative incidence of each system are issues that are comprehensively addressed. The case of a day-care service provided in a rural region is studied, including the day-care building in which the service is developed. The strong correlation between the life cycle stages of these two systems is identified and the functional unit, which comprises the number of users, operating period and built area, is defined. A detailed life cycle inventory is performed for each system, operative metrics are obtained to characterize its performance and quantitative indicators of the P+S system are finally evaluated for each sustainability dimension. It is observed that the incidence of the day-care service system is very dominant in the economic and social dimensions, since highly elevated working times and labour costs are required and the incidence of the day-care building system is more relevant in the environmental dimension, which is mainly due to the relative high amount of materials used in its creation.