An approach to assessing sustainable product-service systems

• Socio-economic issues should be incorporated into the evaluation of sustainable PSS.
• Value perceptions and sustainability impacts determine the PSS performance.
• The concept of sustainable product-service efficiency is applied to assess the PSS.
• The proposed metric is aimed to facilitate empirical research on the sustainable PSS.

Academic interests in the product-service system have shifted from the area of environmental sustainability to the socio-economic issues. In this context, life cycle assessment is no longer the only approach to interpreting the performances of product-service systems. Multiple criteria reflecting product-service quality, customer satisfaction, and the full sustainability concerns would be needed to evaluate the system solutions. In this paper, a concept of sustainable product-service efficiency is proposed to explore the relationship between product-service value and the sustainability impact. Additionally, the authors discuss how this concept can be applied to assess sustainable product-service systems.