The production and use of concrete are responsible for natural resource consumption and adverse environmental effects. Evaluating sustainability aspects of concrete could help the industry identify processes with higher impacts, and work on them to perform in a holistic manner. This paper explores the environmental impact of concrete, with the evaluation based on the life cycle assessment (LCA) technique, the principles of which are outlined with illustrations relevant to the production of concrete. The synthesis of the LCA literature reveals that differences in goal and scope, system boundaries, inventory data, and impact assessment methods can induce significant variations in the environmental impact results. The justification is detailed as to why the carbon footprint and the embodied energy are used as the impact indicators. Further, the impacts of the different constituents of concrete and their contributions are discussed briefly. Finally, a framework, denoted as ‘ab initio’, for the LCA methodology, is proposed to assess the environmental impact of concrete, which could be adopted in cases where data is not readily available. This framework can be extended to any other systems, including concrete system components or products, such as blocks, prefabricated elements and recycled aggregates.