Life Cycle Thinking to promote Sustainable Production and Consumption strategies in SME's

The promotion of sustainable production and consumption patterns is identified as a priority for sustainable development policies by the Integrated Product Policy and other European Strategies. Moreover, during the World Summit for Sustainable Development held in Johannesburg in 2002, emerged the necessity of using Life Cycle approaches for this field of research. In this context, the analysis of existing supply chains helps to identify applicable solutions and to develop practical guidelines for transferring scientific results to companies, especially SME’s. The present study focuses on the furniture industry, presenting a methodology to promote life cycle thinking ant to disseminate scientific results among SME’s. The presented case history regards a consortium of enterprises that includes entrepreneurs of the whole supply chain, from designers to manufacturers to retailers. The study was performed for identifying how to involve SME’s and how to disseminate life cycle thinking starting from the identification of the most important impacts trough a qualitative LCA of the entire supply chain (from cradle to grave) and a quantitative LCA of a specific piece of furniture. Guidelines were provided to SME’s to ensure better approaches for finding solutions inspired by ecodesign principles; for producing reducing environmental impacts; for communicating effectively environmental performance to retails and to consumers.