Quantitative environmental assessments are crucial in working effectively towards sustainable production and consumption patterns. Over the last decades, life cycle assessments (LCA) have been established as a viable means of measuring the environmental impacts of products along the supply chain. In regard to user and consumption patterns, however, methodological weaknesses have been reported and, several attempts have been made to improve LCA accordingly, for example, by including higher order effects and behavioural science support. In a discussion of such approaches, we show that there has been no explicit attention to the concepts of consumption, often leading to product-centred assessments. We introduce social practice theories in order to make consumption patterns accessible to LCA. Social practices are routinised actions comprising interconnected elements (materials, competences, and meanings), which make them conceivable as one entity (e.g. cooking). Because most social practices include some sort of consumption (materials, energy, air), we were able to develop a framework which links social practices to the life cycle inventory of LCA. The proposed framework provides a new perspective of quantitative environmental assessments by switching the focus from products or users to social practices. Accordingly, we see the opportunity in overcoming the reductionist view that people are just users of products, and instead we see them as practitioners in social practises. This change could enable new methods of interdisciplinary research on consumption, integrating intend-oriented social sciences and impact-oriented assessments. However, the framework requires further revision and, especially, empirical validation.

定量的环境评估对于有效地实现可持续的生产和消费模式至关重要。在过去的几十年中，生命周期评估（LCA）已被确立为衡量产品在整个供应链中对环境的影响的可行方法。然而，关于用户和消费模式，已经报告了方法上的弱点，并且已经进行了一些尝试来相应地改善LCA，例如，通过包括更高阶效应和行为科学支持。在对这种方法的讨论中，我们显示出人们对消费的概念没有明确的关注，通常导致以产品为中心的评估。我们引入社会实践理论，以使LCA可以使用消费模式。社会实践是常规行动，包括相互联系的要素（材料，能力和含义），使它们可以作为一个整体而被想象（例如烹饪）。因为大多数社会实践都包含某种消费（材料，能源，空气），所以我们能够开发一个框架，将社会实践与LCA的生命周期清单联系起来。拟议的框架通过将重点从产品或用户转移到社会实践，提供了定量环境评估的新视角。因此，我们看到了克服人们只不过是产品使用者的还原论观点的机会，相反，我们将他们视为社会实践的实践者。这种变化可能会为消费的跨学科研究提供新方法，整合针对意向的社会科学和针对影响的评估。