Target-driven Life Cycle Engineering: Staying within the Planetary Boundaries

The definition of Life Cycle Engineering has evolved from a bottom up - to an integrated approach in order to steer the LCE activities towards achieving the goals of sustainability in absolute terms. The Lyngby Framework [9] was recently proposed in order to position Life Cycle Engineering in an absolute sustainability context and bring together the top-down and bottom-up approaches so that the technological solutions developed at the product and company level become target driven as determined by the planetary boundaries. Building further on the Lyngby Framework, this paper analyses means of operationalising the concept of absolute boundaries for environmental sustainability within a company's LCE activities and discusses a number of new tools and techniques for the LCE practitioner.