Life Cycle Assessment and the Eco-innovation generation

The ecological crisis is directly related to climate change, depletion of natural resources, high generation of waste and so on. A review in industrial practices is a necessary condition to confront this
crisis. New proposals to achieve sustainable development have emerged, among them is the life cycle assessment (LCA) methodology. This tool has been increasingly accepted as a way to assess the environmental impacts associated with all stages of a product's life, encompassing the entire production chain: the extraction of natural resources, transport, production process, consumption and disposal of products (waste). This methodology has the potential to reduce ecological problems, minimizing the
environmental impact of the productive activity. The LCA studies approach and measure each phase of a production chain, providing opportunities to identify critical points for environmental innovations, also known as eco-innovations. The decoupling, that proposes a reduction of material consumption in the production of the same amount of goods and services is discussed in this paper, alongside with the use of LCA and eco-innovation. The conclusion is that these three axes of the literature have to be more integrated, considering the huge potential to provide news means to tackle the ecological crisis. To summarize: (i) decoupling is a new production paradigm derived from the ecological crisis, intending to produce more with less environmental recourses; (ii) the LCA allows critical points in the production process to be found; (iii) eco-innovation enables the type of changes to be developed that replace the old one at the critical points. The co-evolution of these literatures promises many fruitful results that are still at their beginning, one possibility is to design a longer lifetime product.