Economic and environmental evaluation via an integrated method based on LCA and MCDA

The progress of business is moving fast and the key to maintain advantage and competitiveness is research and continuous improvement. Besides economic, environment is always more object of evaluation analysis. There are numerous ways to assess individually both economic and environmental aspects, but in order to guarantee a high quality of improvement, an integration of different methods and theories is required. Thus, this research provides an integration of two different approaches: The Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) and Multi Criteria Decision Analysis (MCDA). The first allows the analyst to understand the environmental issue. The second is useful in order to select the best solution for improvement. The main purpose of this study is to develop a systematic method, easy to use and giving useful results. In the present work existing methods are reviewed and integrated in a new approach proposed to support continuous improvement. A real case in an Italian bearing plant is presented.