Definition and application of activity portfolio and control/influence approaches in organizational life cycle assessment

Recently, following an increasing demand from companies to understand and monitor the potential environmental impacts of their activities, from a life cycle perspective, organizational life cycle assessment has been introduced. Only a few instances of its application have been published in the literature, and they mainly focus on one single environmental aspect. The application of organizational life cycle assessment in the case of a special purpose entity, created to build a tourist village in Italy, is presented and discussed in this paper. Requirements of ISO/TS 14072 and the guidelines published by the UNEP were considered. To overcome the limits related to the goal and scope Definition that have emerged from the literature, the activity portfolio concept was introduced along with the control and influence approach, according to ISO 14001. Sensitivity analysis was performed in order to discuss different energy use profiles of the village and the application of control and influence approach to the special purpose entity. The environmental impacts were concentrated in the first two years because of the importance of executive design activities; this included the impacts of the use stage that are mostly influenced by the decisions of the organization. The construction activities also contributed significantly in most of the impact categories. Results of the study proved the applicability of the introduced methodological proposals to special purpose entities in the construction sector and that results of organizational life cycle assessment can be consistent with results of product-based life cycle assessment. The activity portfolio concept and the representation of control and influence were useful for understanding the environmental hotspots and the activities of the organization that needed improvement in order to minimize environmental impacts.