Integrating life cycle costing and life cycle assessment using extended material flow cost accounting

There is the undisputed need for the coupling of Life Cycle Costing (LCC) and Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) – the most common methods for the evaluation of the life cycle-wide economic and ecological effects of products and production systems in the context of sustainable decision making. However, in published studies both methods are often used in parallel or with little integration. This causes double work in data acquisition and a lack of consistency of the underlying analyses' scopes and, therefore, limits the significance of the analyses results. Further on, no mature theoretical approach for the integration of LCA and LCC exists. To overcome this problem, the paper presents a procedure model for the integrated use of the methods. More specifically, Material Flow Cost Accounting is suggested as a tie between both methods and is extended according to the requirements of life cycle-wide analyses.