Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) is an important tool of Circular Economy (CE), which performs the analysis in a closed loop (“cradle-to-cradle”) of any product, process or technology. LCA assesses the environmental threats (climate change, ozone layer depletion, eutrophication, biodiversity loss, etc.), searches for solutions to minimize environmental burdens and together with CE contributes to reducing greenhouse gas emission, counteracts global climate crisis. The CE is a strategy for creating value for the economy, society and business while minimizing resource use and environmental impacts through reducing, re-using and recycling. In contrast, life cycle assessment is a robust and science-based tool to measure the environmental impacts of products, services and business models. Combining both the robustness of the LCA methodology and the principles of circular economy one will get a holistic approach for innovation. After a presentation of the LCA framework and methods used, 27 examples of case studies of comparative LCA analysis for replacement materials to reduce environmental load and their challenges as assessment methods for CE strategies are presented. It was concluded that there is a need for improvement of existing solutions, developing the intersection between the CE and LCA. Suggestions for developing a sustainable future were also made.

The aim study is the development of the classification of agricultural enterprises, based on the properties of the distribution of enterprises depending on the size of the land bank. To achieve this aim, open databases of agricultural enterprises were used, from which data for the Dnipropetrovsk district were selected. The data is not official. They are collected according to the data provided by the agricultural enterprises themselves. Since the official statistics group of small enterprises with up to 200 ha of land includes a fairly large number of enterprises that exist only formally, and since actively functioning enterprises are voluntarily registered in the databases used for the study, the developed classification reflects the real situation with agricultural enterprises in the Dnipropetrovsk district. The proposed scheme of a grouping of agricultural enterprises is regular, logarithmically uniform and based on the exponential increase of the land bank of agricultural enterprises. Its parameters are chosen in such a way as to take into account the classification of farms used in the Tax Code of Ukraine. The developed grouping of agricultural enterprises was used to analyze such characteristics of enterprises as types of production and organizational and legal forms of management. The analysis of the distribution showed that with the decrease of the land bank the number of farms increases and the number of enterprises, whose forms of management are joint-stock companies of different types, decreases.