What is a life cycle assessment (LCA)?
Life cycle assessment (LCA) is the factual analysis of a product’s entire life
cycle in terms of sustainability. Every part of a product’s life cycle –
extraction of materials from the environment, the production of the product,
the use phase and what happens to the product after it is no longer used –
can have an impact on the environment in many ways. With LCA, you can
evaluate the environmental impacts of your product or service from the very
first to the very last or from cradle to grave.
There are many benefits to LCA. Your LCA results can help you improve
your product development, marketing, strategic planning and even
policymaking. Consumers can learn how sustainable a product is. A
purchasing department of a company can learn which suppliers have the
most sustainable products and methods. And product designers can explore
how their design choices affect the sustainability of the products.
Many types of LCA exist. Rule of thumb is that the more detail you want, the
more complete your LCA needs to be. A report for internal use has fewer
requirements than a report that will be used for marketing or other external
communication. There are also many LCA-related assessments, such as
Environmental Product Declarations (EPDs), studies compliant with a
product- or sector-specific standards, single-issues analyses like the carbon
or water footprint, social LCA and long-term monitoring studies. The
interesting thing about a life cycle model is that you can use it to perform a
variety of assessments; whatever matches best matches your business
needs right now.
Four steps of life cycle assessment
LCA is a standardized methodology, which gives it its reliability and
transparency. The standards are provided by the International Organisation
for Standardisation (ISO) in ISO 14040 and 14044, and describe the four
main phases of an LCA:
1. Goal and scope definition
2. Inventory analysis
3. Impact assessment
4. Interpretation
LCA is an iterative methodology, where you refine things as you go along.
For instance, the first round of analysis may tell you that you need more
data. Or the results of the assessment or your interpretation may nudge you
to revise your goal and scope. In this sense, every LCA you do not only
gives you valuable advice to make changes in your business, it also tells
you how to best plan your next LCA to learn even more.
Step 1. LCA goal & scope definition
The goal & scope definition step ensures that your LCA is
performed consistently.
An LCA models a product, service, or system life cycle. A model is a
simplification of a complex reality and as with all simplifications, this means
that the reality will be distorted in some way. The challenge for an LCA
practitioner is to make sure the simplification and distortions do not
influence the results too much. The best way to do this is to carefully define
the goal and scope of the LCA study.
The goal and scope describe the most important choices, which are often
subjective. For instance, the reason for executing the LCA, a precise
definition of the product and its life cycle and a description of the system
boundaries.
Read how defining the right goal & scope helped The European Space
Agency to drive value >
Step 2. Inventory analysis of extractions and
emissions
In the inventory analysis, you look at all the environmental inputs and
outputs associated with a product or service. An example of an
environmental input – something you take out of the environment to put into
the product’s life cycle – is the use of raw materials and energy.
Environmental outputs – which your product’s life cycle puts out into the
environment – include the emission of pollutants and the waste streams.
Together, this gives you the complete picture.
Read how the inventory analysis helped Lucite understand the
environmental impacts of plastic products >
Step 3. Life cycle impact assessment (LCIA)
In the life cycle impact assessment (LCIA), you draw the conclusions that
allow you to make better business decisions. You classify the
environmental impacts, evaluate them by what is most important to your
company, and translate them into environmental themes such as global
warming or human health.
The most important choice you have to make is how integrated you want the
results to be. Would you like a single score to show how sustainable your
product is? Or to be able to see whether your new design improves on
CO2 emissions and keeps land use change at least the same? This usually
depends on how you would like to address your audience and the ability of
your audience to understand detailed results.
Read how the LCIA step helped AISE determine the hotspots in the life
cycle and define advanced sustainability profiles of their products >
Step 4. Interpretation
During the interpretation phase, you check that your conclusions are well-
substantiated. The ISO 14044 standard describes a number of checks to
test whether conclusions are adequately supported by the data and by the
procedures you used. This way, you can share your results and
improvement decisions with the world without any surprises.
Read how the CAP’EM project applied interpretation to develop an
online tool for decision making on building materials >
Life cycle assessment vs other methods
Life cycle studies can be performed for various scopes: cradle to gate (raw
materials until factory gate), gate to gate (only focusing on the
manufacturing processes) or cradle to grave (raw materials until disposal).
What makes it different from other models is mainly its data-driven
methodology. The two main other methods, cradle-to-cradle and the circular
economy, are designed to capture the hearts of audiences. LCA is designed
to capture the mind as well.
Cradle to cradle
The cradle-to-cradle certification system is about qualitative visions and
storytelling, using qualitative criteria to judge whether a product can be
certified. Criteria include material health, material reuse, renewable energy
and carbon management, water stewardship and social fairness. The lowest
score on these criteria becomes the product’s overall mark. In contrast to
LCA, cradle to cradle does not measure whether a certified product actually
has a lower overall environmental impact, so a cradle to cradle-certified
product may end up having a shifted or even increased burden.
Circular economy
The circular economy is an inspirational 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 with a
sort of accountancy approach. Combine both the robustness of the LCA
methodology and the inspirational principles of circular economy and you
have a holistic approach for innovation .
LCA software
Searching for LCA software solutions? Our flagship product, SimaPro, has
been the world’s leading LCA and sustainability software for 30 years. It
is trusted by industry and academics in more than 80 countries.
With SimaPro, you can:
Determine KPI’s to measure sustainability
Analyse your sustainability performance with life cycle assessment
Identify the hotspots in every link of your supply chain, from extraction of
raw materials to manufacturing, distribution, use, and disposal
Communicate clearly through fact-based sustainability reports
Generate compliant environmental product declarations
And much more
