Hybridizing Sustainability Metric Applications with Local Stakeholder Inputs: A life cycle assessment with a co-design demonstration

Sustainability standards have been criticized as being complex and overlapping, with unclear metrics and messy timelines—all of which have led to sustainability shortfalls. As part of the special issue on addressing sustainability metric shortcomings, we develop a hybridizing protocol for sustainability standards that elicits community stakeholder ideological predispositions, preferences, ratings, and heuristics and injects them into a prioritized, vetted metric in order to reduce immediate and longer-range life cycle impacts of corporate operations in the local ecosystem. We demonstrate our method using a quasi-field experiment, conducted by expert intermediary facilitators, in which community members co-design oil sands wetland reclamation and their choices are integrated into life cycle assessments (LCAs) of wetland designs and remediation products. Hybridizing LCA with local co-design not only generates an effective wetland-material choice, but reduces life cycle impacts and increases the likelihood of community acceptance.