How Lifecycle Assessment is Interrelated with Environmental or Sustainable Value Stream Mapping

Abstract

The current globalization faces environmental and social challenges in lean manufacturing processes while simultaneously ensuring a sustainable evolution, even though there is a high margin in the lean approach. To deal with this challenge, this research aims to investigate some of the main extended versions of lean techniques such as sustainable (Sus-VSM) and environmental value stream mapping (E-VSM) simultaneously integrating them with lifecycle assessment (LCA) principles for better comparative analysis of environmental performance due to an indefinite number of approaches to evaluate sustainability. Moreover, the research tries to identify tradeoff methods of environmental, economic, and social indicators in the lean E/Sus-VSM tool for better decision-making, whereas there is no common suggested method. For this purpose, the method for the project initiates a search and a literature review of scientific sources to find which features of LCA are integrated with different E/Sus-VSMs and what tools are used in balanced decision-making by using the matrix table. The results are that many elements or similar steps of LCA are used in E/Sus-VSMs and the tradeoff tools to make decisions are various or new approaches are emerging. Finally, a conclusion is made for identifying and suggesting further research and limitations.