Consumers can play a crucial role in achieving a sustainable society, and changes in their consciousness and behavior are essential. Towards that end, various initiatives, including green-consumerism, green purchasing, and environmental education, have been ongoing. These initiatives increased the provision of information on the environment and contributed to the enhancement of consumer knowledge and consciousness. For example, carbon footprint measurements have been recently utilized to visualize environmental burdens [1]. Private initiatives visualize environmental impacts of whole supply chains, from manufacturers to consumers. Indeed, it is being discussed at the United Nations environment programme (UNEP) how life cycle thinking can be used to change the behaviors of the governments, private sectors and consumers. The relevant initiative is called “Life Cycle Initiatives” [2,3].

While these cases are important in disseminating life cycle concepts and knowledge among general consumers, potential major challenges still exist. First, knowledge and consciousness alone tend not to lead to behavioral changes, but various factors, including tangible effects or economic incentives, shall also be associated with the changes [4,5]. While knowledge about LCA/LCT and research networks have grown [6,7], the influence and recognition of life cycle assessment (LCA) and life cycle thinking (LCT) is insufficient to facilitate environmentally conscious consumer behavior, in part because of the movement’s inability to disclose its know-how and collected data to the public in an effective manner. Furthermore, the credibility and availability of data necessary for calculation of LCA impact differs substantially across regions and cases. These elements hinder the usability and applicability of LCA and its concepts.

In the meantime, factors that affect environmental conscious behavior have been studied in various fields of literature such as marketing and environmental engineering. One factor is referred to as perceived effectiveness; people make environmentally conscious actions when they know such an action actually reduces environmental burdens [8,9,10,11]. Some studies provide evidence that people who have more social responsibility tend to engage in environmentally conscious behavior [12,13,14,15,16]. Hondo et al. [17,18] argue that much effort has been made for raising awareness and knowledge whereas educational initiatives addressing change in attitude, skills and participation is insufficient. However, few studies have explored how we effectively foster environmentally conscious behavior.

These observations indicate that issues exist in different stages and occasions in the process within which information is created, transformed, and perceived by people. Specifically, this study first overviews and analyzes initiatives related to LCA and identifies the challenges and research needs, aiming to facilitate and encourage use of LCA/LCT in the consumers’ daily activities as a guideline for pursuing sustainability. Specifically, we identified technical and system issues in the establishment of visualization systems and tools, and pursued the standardization of an LCA database. We looked into existing practices of various media, including web applications, and relevant papers and documents, to examine the transparency, usability and accessibility of LCA related databases, and identified research agendas to foster disseminating LCT towards promoting environmentally conscious behaviors.

This section reviews initiatives and practices related to LCT. To derive meaningful implications from the review, we define the process of behavioral change by three stages; (1) information visualization; (2) awareness and learning; and (3) behavioral change (Figure 1). We argue that the definition is one of the ways for theorizing behavioral changes, while there are some frameworks about how to discuss the process of behavioral change [19,20,21,22,23]. In the real world, LCA/LCT-based information is first created in various forms and conveyed consumers through different media. The type of information and visualization affect the extent to which consumers receive information. We have to notice that these two stages further influence consumers’ behavior.

Following this process as a framework for analysis, we searched for various initiatives and practices through different information sources in order to discuss the current status and challenges regarding LCT and ended up selecting more than 30 initiatives that shall be the most relevant references to fulfill the purpose. These initiatives are taking various media including the Internet (Web), labeling, data book, TV, magazine, animation and video. Table 1 reports the medium and contents summary of selected initiatives. We categorized them into three types based on which stage in the entire process of behavioral change in consumers they address. The first type of approach or method can be thought of as a first stage toward behavioral change, focusing on visualization of information. The second type more directly addresses learning in order to enhance consumers’ consciousness. The third type of initiative focuses more on the change in consumers’ behavior, many of which address the role of information design and evaluation of the information. The rest of this section introduces and explains specific examples of them in greater detail.

As discussed above, LCA/LCT-based information has been provided to consumers in various forms in various places at various times. Nevertheless, a number of issues must still be addressed before seeing consumers will be able to use such information as guidelines for pro-environmental behaviors in their everyday life. The following shows some critical issues that should be addressed.

We examined the existing practices of various media to ascertain the usability of information based on LCT which can be one of the keys for changing consciousness and behavior of consumers towards pursuing a sustainable society. Such information has been provided to consumers in various forms in various places at various times. Our review showed a number of issues, such as understandability, selectability, reliability, transparency, and costs etc., must still be addressed before seeing consumers will be able to use such information as guidelines for pro-environmental behaviors in their everyday life. Most practicess and initiative currently taking place have only had a short history and lack thorough evaluation. Therefore, it is necessary to accumulate empirical studies that investigate to what extent each of the revealed issues is critical for achieving environmental conscious behavior and delve into similarities and differences among the practices. Finally, it is of critical importance that the consumers increasingly culture LCT by encouraging themselves actively engaged in the design and evaluation processes of the upstream of productions and in the entire product life cycle. A crucial challenge is perhaps finding ways to connect LCT with, not just product selection or designing and manufacturing, but lifestyle transformation. Of course, we need to encourage ourselves and others to think about what a sustainable life really means.