The ABC-LCA method for the integration of activity-based costing and life cycle assessment

This article presents an approach to integrating life cycle assessment (LCA) into an activity-based costing (ABC) model to develop a steering system that takes into account both financial costs and associated environmental impacts. By combining the formalism of LCA and ABC matrix calculations, we show how impact assessment results can be affiliated with costs to jointly and simultaneously compute the costs and environmental impacts of products and activities. The conditions of integration are developed following the four-step structure of LCA. The proposal is applied to a simplified case study of the ‘Classic Pen Company.’ The developed ABC-LCA approach paves the way for further test applications, which are considered useful in the context of environmental indicators for strategic steering, communication with customers and forecasting or simulation.