Modern factory planning requires a holistic perspective taking economic as well as environmental sustainability over the entire factory life cycle into account. As a complex socio-technical system, the factory life cycle consists of multiple life cycles of the inherent factory elements. A holistic understanding of the individual life cycles and their interdependencies is missing for both planning and operation of a factory. Therefore, the goal is to develop a system understanding about life cycle-oriented factory planning and to analyze the contribution of relevant factory elements to the sustainability of a factory. As a result, a knowledge base for life cycle costing and assessment of the entire factory is established using an impact path model. The qualitative model supports factory planners in deriving planning measures for the sustainable design of a factory and in determining data requirements for the quantitative evaluation of the economic and environmental sustainability of a factory. It shows that the production and logistics concepts essentially define the sustainability potential during planning, while the resulting life cycle behavior of the process facilities and workers is responsible for the majority of costs and environmental impacts of a factory. Factory planners must therefore become aware of the implications of planning decisions on factory operation when developing concepts in the future.