Business model (BM) innovation for sustainability is hampered by a lack of tools for environmental assessment and guidance at the BM level. Conventional life cycle assessment (LCA) neglects the economic and socio-technical mechanisms within a BM, and tools based on the BM canvas (BMC) cannot provide recommendations substantiated by environmental data. Here, a new method, BM-LCA, is applied to a case comparing the selling and renting of jackets, using profit as basis of comparison.Results identify how business parameters influence environmental performance, permitting analysis for decoupling within a business practice. This is made possible by the unique way the method links physical life cycle and the monetary flows of a BM. Usefulness of BM-LCA is discussed relative to BM innovation, business strategy and similar tools. BM-LCA provides insights into a broad range of BM elements and emerges as useful for business strategy. By measuring BM environmental performance, it helps determine what BM to compete with and support critical analysis of business against greenwashing. BM-LCA also enables identification of BM elements in greatest need of environmental innovation. BM-LCA appears as a promising tool for guiding business companies towards sustainability, filling a space between LCA and BMC. The method offers a practical way for business and LCA experts to merge their respective knowledge.

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Energy transitions require strategic plans that minimize inefficiencies and maximize energy production in a sustainable way. This aspect is fundamental in the case of innovative technologies based on marine renewable energies. Marine renewable energies involve problems and advantages which imply a reconceptualization of marine space and its management. Through an holistic SWOT analysis the main strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats are highlighted in this paper, considering social, economic, legal, technological, and environmental dimensions. We disaggregate the SWOT analysis for marine renewable energy technologies in order to create an overview of pros and cons for every dimension and better identify specific hotspots and possible solutions in different fields.

An Input-State-Output (I-S-O) framework has been recently introduced to investigate the multidimensional aspects of sustainability (namely environmental, social and economic ones) of economic systems through a thermodynamically and logically ordered scheme. This approach provides an overall view of sustainability (the three dimensions together) facilitating the convergence of information from sets of indicators without aggregating results into single numbers and, consequently, losing information. In this paper we present the application of the I-S-O framework for the 20 regions of Italy. The emergy flow, the Gini Index of income distribution, and the regional Gross Domestic Product are used as systemic indicators for input, state, and output of the systems, respectively. We observe diversity among regions in the light of very different values of the three indicators. The per capita use of resources in the North of Italy is generally 2 to 4 times larger than in the South (excluding Puglia and Sardegna); the regional GDP per capita in the North doubles that of the Southern regions. The distribution of income, that is slightly better in two regions of the north (Trentino AA and Friuli VG), some of Center Italy, and Puglia in the South, only partially reflects that North-South discrepancy. Using the same measures, the 20 Regions are included in a global overview recently produced for 99 world countries. Regional values cover a wide range of countries; nevertheless, our values tend to be more similar to those of developed countries. Based on indicator values, Regions are also categorized, which enables interpretation of this overview at both sub-national and supra-national level.

Recent years have seen much interest in business models as vehicles towards sustainability, cf. [1]. Conventional LCA, however, fails to properly capture the environmental impacts of a business model. Here, we introduce the background and the principles of Business Model LCA, a new LCA methodology for the assessment of environmental performance of business models. Methodological innovations are based on an understanding of the difference and relatedness between product and business. The key innovation is that BM-LCA centres its analysis on the ’business model’ instead of the ’product function’ as in conventional LCA. This requires the functional unit to represent the business (e.g., as ‘profit per time unit’) and the need to couple the monetary flows of the business to the material and energy flows of the product system via a set of ’coupling’ equations. BM-LCA contributes to environmental business analysis and could open up a new avenue of research where LCA and business analysts collaborate on business model innovation for sustainability.