LCA application in telecommunication service industries: a literature review

This paper is focusing on digital services, that in general frame, have an aim to transform the digital scenarios of organizations and advance the user experiences. As stated by the European Commission, Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) provides the best framework for assessing the potential environmental impacts of products and services currently available. The paper will reflect to the intangible industrial product, observed as services, and the environmental impacts it brings in practices. The aim is to understand and reason how services are observed as a dematerialized process and fragmented while calculating LCA (considering its strengths and weaknesses). An overview of case studies emerged from the literature review is presented, in order to achieve a discussion about the methodological issues. With the aim of arriving to concrete methodological steps, case studies will focus on one specific topic field, which is the telecommunication and media industries.