Systematic analysis of life cycle assessment tools in supply chain management

Abstract

The operational integration of Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) within Sustainable Supply Chain Management (SCM) is critical for driving global decarbonisation, yet its academic literature remains methodologically fragmented. This study conducts a systematic literature review and bibliometric analysis of 96 peer-reviewed articles to map the current state, structural boundaries, and systemic gaps within the LCA-SCM discipline. The empirical findings reveal a highly uneven sectoral landscape, with agri-food systems emerging as the dominant frontier representing 31.2% of the surveyed corpus, followed by manufacturing and waste management, whilst carbon-intensive sectors like logistics remain underexplored. Methodologically, the field is governed by powerful regional path dependencies, with SimaPro and Ecoinvent serving as the primary technical platforms characterising over three-quarters of the analysed literature. Furthermore, this review exposes a widespread crisis of methodological rigour and transparency across global value chains: 55% of the examined studies truncate their system boundaries to a cradle-to-gate scope, functional units are frequently conflated with simple mass-based declared units, and 47% completely omit both sensitivity and uncertainty analyses. This lack of statistical validation severely undermines the auditable reliability of environmental disclosures. To transition LCA from a retrospective diagnostic tool into a proactive sourcing enabler, this study provides a cross-sectoral decision guide for practitioners and outlines a strategic future research agenda. This framework prioritises the standardisation of allocation metrics, the expansion of Social LCA, the institutionalisation of dynamic inventory modelling, and the deployment of Industry 4.0 digital technologies like blockchain and artificial intelligence.