Making sustainable consumption and production a reality : a guide for business and policy makers to life cycle thinking and assessment

This guide was developed to help address issues regarding resource consumption and environmental conservation, efficiency and competitiveness in enterprise management, and sustainable consumption and production. The case studies highlighted offer an ideal starting point in understanding the full environmental implications of products. This guide shows how a life cycle approach can be used to identify and reduce the environmental and health impacts of the products we use. It underlines the importance of considering these issues across the entire life cycle of a product and sets them within the context of policy development, business design and innovation. The information in this brochure is aimed at helping both the public and private sectors make more informed decisions to achieve better environmental outcomes. This in turn contributes to delivering our common environmental objectives through better policies, business strategies, product design and better customer choice.