What is a
Life Cycle Assessment?

 

A Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) is a method used to evaluate the environmental impacts of a product during all stages of its life cycle, from cradle to grave — including natural resources extraction through materials processing in the supply chain, manufacture, distribution, product use, maintenance and disposal.

 

Why conduct an LCA?

+

 

An LCA can be extremely advantageous to your business. Your LCA results can help you improve your product development, marketing, strategic planning and even policymaking.

 

For example, product designers can explore how their design choices affect the sustainability of the products. Policy-makers can make decisions by comparing all major environmental impacts.

 

Sustainability managers can assess the portfolio and see what’s needed to achieve carbon footprint goals. Marketing teams can get factual data for sustainability communications.
A purchasing department can learn which suppliers have the most sustainable products and methods.

 

What are the four steps of an LCA?

+

 

LCA is a standardized methodology, which makes it reliable and transparent. The International Organization for Standardization (ISO) provides standards for LCA in ISO 14040 and 14044.
These standards describe the four main phases of an LCA:

 
 

  • The first step; defining your goal and scope is extremely important as it ensures that your LCA is performed consistently. Defining the purpose of the study, the system boundaries and the functional unit being analysed the key elements in this first step.

  • In the inventory analysis, you look at all the environmental inputs and outputs associated with a product or service. To do so, we collect data of the system being analysed, including energy and material follows, emissions and waste.

  • The Impact Assessment is the step where you can start to draw conclusions that allow you to make better business decisions. This is done by evaluating the potential environmental impacts associated with the inputs and outputs identified in the inventory analysis.

  • The interpretation phase is the final stage where you can draw conclusions from the results of the inventory analysis and impact assessment and make recommendations for improvement.

    The ISO 14044 standard describes several checks to test whether the data and the procedures you used to support your conclusions. This way, you can feel confident in your design or business decisions.

 

What’s next?

+

 

There are a few different pathways for certification. A report for internal use has far less requirements than a public report that will be used for marketing or other external communication.

 

There are also many LCA-related assessments, such as:

  • Environmental Product Declarations (EPDs, a more reader-friendly document used for comparing products)

  • Studies compliant with a product- or sector-specific standard such as the Environmental Product Declaration (EPD)

 

  • Single-issues analyses like the carbon- or water footprint

  • Social LCA

  • Organisational LCA

The life cycle model can be used to perform a range of assessments suited to whatever your business needs right now.