THE LIFE CYCLE SUSTAINABILITY ASSESSMENT APPROACH APPLIED TO TANGIBLE CULTURAL HERITAGE CONSERVATION - Developing a support instrument for Cultural Heritage Management within a Circular Economy and Life Cycle Thinking perspective

Life Cycle Thinking (LCT) and the Circular Economy (CE) concept might delineate a convergence point between growth and sustainability, in a general context as well as in an urban environment. The CE paradigm, indeed, introduces a new perspective to look at the industrial ecosystem, where the economic growth is decoupled from resource consumption and pollutant emissions as end-of-life materials and products are conceived as resources rather than waste (Sauvé et al., 2015). LCT introduces a holistic viewpoint, which considers all the lifecycle aspects of a product system or a service, from the extraction of the raw materials to the end-of-life of the latter. Both LCT and CE are implementable using a Life Cycle Sustainability Assessment (LCSA) approach where all the three pillars of sustainability (environmental, social and economic) are taken into account in order to set the right targets and improve the efficacy and efficiency of production systems or services. However, the latter are still far from being reached at a global level, due to a lack of practical examples of LCT implementation, to an uneducated mind-set and to missing regulations. In particular, the tangible Cultural Heritage (CH) field is lacking a clear and applicable instrument to support conservation management decisions and the emission of related regulations and directives. The Cultural Heritage field recalls what can be considered another hotspot in the scientific and political agendas, in a sustainable development perspective: urban environment and cities growth management. Recovering, conservation and valorisation of Cultural Heritage - in particular built CH - are part of a transition management process for the urban environment towards more sustainable cities. Being a shared, non-replaceable, unique resource and a common good confronted with important environmental challenges and possible under-funding, looking after CH to avoid neglect and possible decay is a common responsibility. The management of cultural heritage requires continuous conservation and restoration work, involving diverse professionals mainly in technical and scientific activities. A sustainable approach to the processes of Cultural Heritage restoration and conservation involves the selection of safe materials and methods both in terms of human and environmental health but also a quantification of the benefits deriving from the conservation process. It is therefore necessary to create comprehensive models for Cultural Heritage management in order to fulfil environmental, economic and social sustainability criteria. This study aims to apply the concept of Life Cycle Sustainability Assessment and Management to Cultural Heritage restoration and conservation. Pereira Roders and van Oers (2011) pointed out that Cultural Heritage Management is a relatively young field of research can be considered as being at an earlier stage of development than other related studies, such as the architectural conservation field (Van Oers and Pereira Roders, 2012). If LCA has been extensively applied in the building sector for assessing the environmental performance and impact of construction materials and products throughout the entire life cycle of a construction (Ortiz-Rodrıguez et al., 2010; Sharma et al., 2011), the use of LCA is practically unknown in the field of cultural heritage (Settembre Blundo et al., 2014). Applying the LCSA approach to tangible Cultural Heritage Management allows creating a decision-making instrument tailor made for built CH, in order to implement the recent design process for restoration, providing quantitative outputs as well. On the one side, the LCSA approach ensures to maintain interdisciplinarity, a mandatory requirement for CH related investigations. On the other side, it fulfils the need for one single deliverable unit decipherable by all the parties involved and by non-expert decision makers.