What is a Life Cycle Assessment (LCA)?
A life cycle assessment (LCA) analyzes a product or service’s environmental footprint through its five stages to consider all aspects of its impact:
1. Raw Material Extraction: Raw material extraction is the process of obtaining materials for the product, including mining for metals and minerals, deforestation for forest biomass like trees, oil drilling for fossil fuel extraction, and obtaining animal based materials like fur and leather. The extracted material determines the impact, but it often negatively affects the environment through high energy consumption, excessive water use, ecosystem damage, and transportation emissions.
2. Manufacturing and Processing: Manufacturing and processing involves turning the raw materials into products. This depends on the product the company is producing but often has a high impact on the environment through high energy consumption, waste generation, and other polluting processes.
3. Transportation: Transportation includes moving the finished product to the retailer or customer. This includes all modes of transport including, road, air, rail, maritime, and pipeline. Products may use a combination of these methods to transport products. Factors to consider include distance, mode, and energy source used.
4. Consumer Usage: Consumer usage is again, heavily dependent on the product. This stage measures the impact of the product during its use. This can include the efficiency of a product when used such as the energy efficiency or water efficiency.
5. End of Life: End of life encompasses the disposal of a product. This includes determining whether the product must be sent to the landfill, recycled, or composted, all of which impact the environment in different ways. Sending a product to the landfill increases its environmental impact because it releases emissions as it decomposes, while properly composting a product transforms it into a useful material like healthy soil that sequesters emissions and promotes growth.
What are the 4 steps of a Life Cycle Assessment?
Performing an LCA can be complicated, but it yields insights that drive actionable and measurable results to reach sustainability goals. Here are four steps to performing and LCA:
1. Goal and Scope Definition: Before conducting an LCA, it’s crucial to have clear goals and scope of the assessment. This involves specifying the impact categories, boundaries, applications of the results. Understanding how an LCA will be used helps you yield useful results and metrics that track your progress towards goals like packaging reduction or increased energy efficiency.
2. Inventory Analysis: The inventory analysis is vital for performing an LCA. It involves data collection for each stage of the assessment. This is often the most complex and time consuming part of an LCA. Data collection requires collaboration with suppliers and partners so it’s important to form positive relationships to ensure accuracy and consistency.
3. Impact Assessment: Once the data is collected, the impact assessment can be created and performed. This step will analyze and produce results for each of the five stages of an LCA to give you a comprehensive understanding of the product.
4. Interpretation: The interpretation phase involves drawing conclusions based on the data and analysis conducted. These insights allow you to identify opportunities for environmental impact reduction actions and strategies and provide necessary findings to make informed decisions.
According to ISO 14044:2006, interpretations of a Life Cycle Assessment should include:
- Identifying significant issues based on our LCI and LCIA phase
- Evaluating the study itself, how complete it is, if it’s done sensitively and consistently
- Conclusions, limitations, and recommendations
What are Life Cycle Assessment’s used for?
LCAs provide useful insights that allow you to make actionable and impactful changes for a more sustainable product and company. Here are some the ways your can capitalize on LCAs:
1. Product Design and Improvement: LCAs can guide the design and development of products to lower the environmental impact though strategies like hotpot analysis. This enables manufacturers to make informed decisions to reduce resource consumption and emissions using data. Examples include reducing packaging needs, increasing energy efficiency, and streamlining transportation routes.
2. Environmental Labelling: LCAs can increase transparency to customers, providing them with relevant and data backed environmental performance for products. This data can qualify products for third party eco-labels which further help consumers make informed decisions for their sustainability goals.
3. Policy and Regulation: LCAs can provide a scientific basis for setting standards and targets, as well as proving compliance. The environmental impact of products are variable by industry and LCAs allow companies and policymakers to create realistic reduction requirements.
4. Supply Chain Management: LCAs are valuable tools for evaluating and improving the sustainability of supply chains. However, sustainability, especially in the CPG industry, requires collaboration. Working with suppliers is vital for reducing emissions to create optimized processes and products. This collaboration can make your business a leader in the industry and contribute to the industry-wide shift towards sustainability.
Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) Software & Tools
LCAs can be very technical and difficult calculations and have historically required a lot of time and expertise to perform one for a single product or service. This high level of resources has traditionally been a barrier for many companies, not to mention changing supply chains can outdate your data quickly. However, tools and software solutions can make this process easier. That’s why we created our own product footprint tool to make LCAs accessible to businesses of all sizes and expertise of all levels.
CarbonBright empowers companies to transform their environmental data into business opportunities by providing fast and scalable Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) software that enables product companies to measure, analyze, and reduce their product impact. We believe in your potential to make a difference and specialize in developing innovative solutions that allow organizations to conduct LCAs, quantify emissions, and meet stringent regulatory requirements. By partnering with CarbonBright, organizations gain a more efficient and cost-effective alternative to traditional methods, backed by a scientifically-based approach aligned with industry standards, ensuring accurate and credible results that support their journey toward sustainability and compliance with emerging climate action standards.
Contact us to learn more about how we can help you accelerate your sustainability journey and meet the complex requirements of Life Cycle Assessments (LCAs).
