Life Cycle Assessment tool for environmental characterization of manufacturing companies: a methodological guidance.

The Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) is a well-acknowledged methodology to analyse the environmental impacts of products and processes along their entire lifecycle. However, in most cases the application of the LCA is highly time and resource consuming, needing the support of experts, not always available in companies, both in the phase of the study preparation and during results interpretation. For this reason, a web-based Spring-boot application, the Sustainability Platform (SP), has been developed to alleviate the LCA assessment, by exploiting the use of well-founded background data, but, at the same time, giving users the possibility to personalize their operation information to model manufacturing processes as close as possible to the real ones. In this paper, architecture, and functionalities of the developed LCA tool are described, providing a methodological guidance for manufacturers, prior trained or supported by Sustainability Platform masters, to approach an LCA-based environmental analysis in its practical aspects. Results from the validation of the tool in the furniture sector will be discussed.