Exploring Business Model-LCA as a Pathway to Decoupling

Other conference contribution, 2025

Reports on global environmental risks, such World Economic Forum and the Circularity Gap, highlight that current production and consumption patterns are unsustainable. Without significant change, humanity risks worsening environmental degradation and unmet basic human needs. To mitigate these risks, it is vital to shift resource consumption patterns and decouple economic growth from environmental degradation. Sustainable business models represent a critical mechanism for operationalizing this decoupling. Advancements in Life Cycle Assessment (LCA), particularly the Business Model Life Cycle Assessment (BM-LCA), support this transition. The BM-LCA methodology integrates environmental performance evaluation with economic dimensions, linking financial flows to material flows through coupling equations, thereby offering a comprehensive analytical framework. This study aims to deepen our understanding of decoupling through empirical insights gained from various applications of BM-LCA. Case study analysis reveal that environmental benefits of sustainable business models are not always guaranteed, or significant. Factors such as added infrastructure or unintended effects may offset potential gains. BM-LCA provides critical knowledge that can be utilized to refine business models designs, enhancing resource efficiency and facilitating relative decoupling. Furthermore, BM-LCA findings help illustrate the impacts of business models at both micro and macro scales, enabling the analysis of their performance across different market contexts. Such comprehensive evaluations are essential for realizing absolute decoupling, whereby environmental impacts are reduced in absolute terms irrespective of economic growth. BM-LCA also shed light on the intricate interconnections between business models and their larger systems. By identifying causal relationships, trade-offs, and unintended consequences across sustainability domains and system scales, BM-LCA advances our understanding of how specific changes in business strategies reverberate through broader environmental, economic, and social systems. This systemic perspective is crucial for pursuing absolute sustainability, ensuring that humanity operates within planetary boundaries while effectively meeting human needs.