Developing a New Way to Measure Sustainability Outcomes

By Scott Lewis

Life cycle sustainability assessments (LCSA) evaluate the environmental, economic, and social costs and benefits of products and processes, which can help businesses, governmental agencies, and other entities compare options from the viewpoint of sustainability. Illinois Institute of Technology Associate Professor Weslynne Ashton is part of a research team that is developing a new methodology aimed at broadening the scope of the resources that are considered in the assessments and quantifying the results to generate more robust and meaningful comparisons.

In “Capital-based Life Cycle Sustainability Assessment: Evaluation of Potential Industrial Symbiosis Synergies,” published in the Journal of Industrial Ecology, Ashton and co-authors Shauhrat S. Chopra and Karpagam Subramanian, both from the City University of Hong Kong, focus their sustainability assessment on capitals—that is, resources that create value. Their LCSA encompasses eight capitals: natural, social, financial, cultural, manufactured, political, human, and digital.

“Trying to quantify the contribution of these different of types of capital is a completely new perspective,” says Ashton, a sustainable systems scientist with joint appointments at Illinois Tech’s Stuart School of Business and Institute of Design. The methodology builds on groundbreaking theoretical work on the eight capitals by Ashton and ID colleagues Charles L. Owen Professor in Design Carlos Teixeira and Andre Nogueira (Ph.D. DSGN ’19) that was published in 2019.

“Reusing and recycling material capital— such as metals or industrial byproducts— puts it back into use, that is, regenerates the capital stock,” Ashton explains, and a similar process applies to non-material resources that societies rely on, such as cultures and political systems. “We are trying to elevate [society’s] perception of the value of non-material resources to sustainability,” she says.