Deliverable D5.1 – Methodological Guidelines for WP5 provides the common analytical foundation for assessing the environmental and social impacts of Circular and Sharing Economy (CSE) initiatives within the TransScale project. The deliverable presents a coherent methodological framework that integrates Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) with Social Practice Theory (SPT) to capture both quantitative environmental impacts and qualitative changes in everyday practices related to reuse, repair, sharing, and waste prevention. It is designed as a practical guide for project partners, ensuring that data collection across the four national hubs (Denmark, Latvia, Norway, and Poland) is consistent, comparable, and aligned with the project’s scaling objectives.
The document explains how WP5 is implemented through three sequential assessment stages—baseline, midterm, and final—allowing the project to track changes in material flows, emissions, and social practices over time. LCA is used to identify where environmental impacts occur along product and material life cycles, while SPT focuses on how materials, competencies, and meanings are configured in everyday practices and how these configurations evolve through participation in CSE initiatives. This combined approach makes it possible not only to measure environmental performance, but also to understand why certain impacts change, and under what institutional and infrastructural conditions scaling up or scaling out is likely to be effective.
Finally, D5.1 positions environmental assessment within a broader sustainable transition perspective, linking empirical findings to questions of policy, governance, and long-term system change. The guidelines support partners in collecting robust qualitative and quantitative data without requiring extensive resources, and they lay the groundwork for a transferable assessment guide to be developed later in WP5. As such, the deliverable is a key building block for TransScale’s ambition to generate evidence-based insights on how local CSE initiatives can contribute to urban transformation when scaled responsibly and context-sensitively