286
The community will also need to collaborate more closely with decision makers
in industry and government to co-develop life cycle management solutions that
respond to their needs, as will be demonstrated in Sect. 3.2 .
3.2 Effective Communication with a Wider Set of Stakeholders
Widespread take up of life cycle management is impossible without a widespread
understanding of what life cycle approaches are and why they are important. The
audiences for this communication can be grouped into two broad categories.
3.2.1 Anyone Looking for Information on How to Operationalize
Sustainability
Decision-makers in industry and government are key to applying life cycle thinking
to operationalize sustainability in the real world. While the community develops
and works directly with life cycle based tools, decision-makers in industry and
government interact with life cycle based information on a different, yet from a
societal perspective arguably more important level.
This audience fi rst needs to make the step-change towards systemic, life cycle
thinking in how they understand sustainability issues (including notions of arbitrage
between different impact areas, and over different stages of the life cycle). They
then need to have enough knowledge and understanding of what life cycle management is and how life cycle based information can be used to facilitate decisionmaking processes, to integrate it into their core activities.
3.2.2 General Public
As clearly demonstrated throughout the past decades, change is often only achieved
if a strong push from the demand side has been established (Baron et al. 2009 ). To
achieve this, the general public needs to understand that sustainability decisions
need to be based on a systemic framework that takes into account impacts from a
life cycle perspective. In return, the demand for and availability of life cycle based
information will increase, once companies can communicate on their efforts
without being burdened by the need to explain the concepts fi rst.
While a growing number of consumers already consider sustainability aspects
during their purchase decisions, they are increasingly confused by the vast amount
of different standards, labels and other information tools (Atkinson 2014 ). Here it
will be important to collaborate with existing programmes and initiatives which
work on these issues, such as the Consumer Information Programme under the
UN’s 10 Years Framework on Sustainable Consumption and Production and others
(CIP 2015 ).
P. Strothmann et al.
The community will also need to collaborate more closely with decision makers
in industry and government to co-develop life cycle management solutions that
respond to their needs, as will be demonstrated in Sect. 3.2 .
3.2 Effective Communication with a Wider Set of Stakeholders
Widespread take up of life cycle management is impossible without a widespread
understanding of what life cycle approaches are and why they are important. The
audiences for this communication can be grouped into two broad categories.
3.2.1 Anyone Looking for Information on How to Operationalize
Sustainability
Decision-makers in industry and government are key to applying life cycle thinking
to operationalize sustainability in the real world. While the community develops
and works directly with life cycle based tools, decision-makers in industry and
government interact with life cycle based information on a different, yet from a
societal perspective arguably more important level.
This audience fi rst needs to make the step-change towards systemic, life cycle
thinking in how they understand sustainability issues (including notions of arbitrage
between different impact areas, and over different stages of the life cycle). They
then need to have enough knowledge and understanding of what life cycle management is and how life cycle based information can be used to facilitate decisionmaking processes, to integrate it into their core activities.
3.2.2 General Public
As clearly demonstrated throughout the past decades, change is often only achieved
if a strong push from the demand side has been established (Baron et al. 2009 ). To
achieve this, the general public needs to understand that sustainability decisions
need to be based on a systemic framework that takes into account impacts from a
life cycle perspective. In return, the demand for and availability of life cycle based
information will increase, once companies can communicate on their efforts
without being burdened by the need to explain the concepts fi rst.
While a growing number of consumers already consider sustainability aspects
during their purchase decisions, they are increasingly confused by the vast amount
of different standards, labels and other information tools (Atkinson 2014 ). Here it
will be important to collaborate with existing programmes and initiatives which
work on these issues, such as the Consumer Information Programme under the
UN’s 10 Years Framework on Sustainable Consumption and Production and others
(CIP 2015 ).
P. Strothmann et al.