LIFE CYCLE

ASSESSMENT
A Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) is an
analysis of the impact one object has on
the world around it
 Sustainability – Relevant For Everybody?

But LCA is a very specific analysis. It provides the

groundwork for any sustainability or CSR strategy within a
company because you can only make decisions on things
you’ve actually measured before.
Product Management / Research & Development (R&D)

There are two reasons why a Life Cycle Assessment can be interesting for product
management.

Reason 1: Comply With Regulations

Often, companies need to simply comply with regulations to continue doing

business.
In some countries, there are standardized tenders for public projects. These tenders
require companies to disclose the environmental data of their products – and you
would have to conduct a Life Cycle Assessment for that.
Reason 2: New Product Developments
New products should be as low in emissions as possible. This can be for
many reasons – corporate policy, regulations, customer demand – but
often times, it simply means being more efficient with company
resources.

One use case for an LCA might be that R&D compares two different
materials and how these different materials influence the environmental
impact of the end product.
Supply Chain Management / Procurement
In many industries, the supply chain accounts for more than 80 % of the
environmental impact.

That means that sourcing from different suppliers can have a massive
impact on your product footprint.

For Supply Chain Managers, choosing the right supplier is often a hard
decision, where far more factors than just price play a role. A Life Cycle
Assessment can give anyone working in Supply Chain Management or
Procurement actionable insights into which company they should source
from.
Marketing & Sales

Today, more than 81 % of consumers feel that companies should help

improve the environment.

For marketing and sales, this means understanding how sustainable your
products are – and how to communicate this to your customers.

A Life Cycle Assessment is the most vital step on that journey. Based on
the generated insights, you can see where you already have an edge on
your competitors – and where your company can use opportunities to
become more sustainable.
Executive Level & Strategic Management

Chief Sustainability Officers are still a relatively new position, but more
and more companies understand that sustainability isn’t a topic that can
be solved with simple greenwashing.

To make strategic decisions on how a company can have a more positive

impact on the environment, buy-in from the highest level is important.
This is why every LCA should transport actionable insights for the top
management level.
Cradle-to-gate
Cradle-to-gate only assesses a product until it leaves the factory
gates, before it is transported to the consumer.

This means cutting out the use and disposal phase. Cradle-to-
gate analysis can significantly reduce the complexity of an LCA
and thus create insights faster, especially about internal
processes. Cradle-to-gate assessments are often used for
environmental product declarations (EPD).
Cradle-to-cradle
Cradle-to-cradle is a concept often referred to within the Circular
Economy. It is a variation of cradle-to-grave, exchanging the
waste stage with a recycling process that makes it reusable for
another product, essentially “closing the loop”. This is why it is
also referred to as closed loop recycling.
In the first phase of our Life Cycle Assessment, we define what exactly we
want to analyze – and how deep we want to go with our analysis.

Defining our goal and scope serves three very important functions:

1. What will we be assessing? and will not.

Will it be a product? If so, how much of the product will we be assessing
(functional unit)?

2. What system will we be assessing in?

This defines our product life cycle, as well as the implications we will be analyzing.
Also, we have to decide which Impact Categories we want to focus our assessment
on.
The goal and scope of the analysis of a T-Shirt could be summed up
like this:

The goal is to make the T-Shirt more sustainable by reducing its

emissions during the lifecycle. Another goal is to manufacture it more
efficiently by streamlining processes.
We will look at the T-Shirt as a whole, analyzing the environmental
impact from cradle to grave. We will look at the CO2 emissions caused
by one T-Shirt.
Phase 2: Life Cycle Inventory
The Life Cycle Inventory Analysis (LCI) looks at the environmental inputs and outputs
of a product or service. It is essentially the data collection phase of our LCA.

Look at it as buckets:

In phase 1, we defined the buckets we want to put our data in, in phase 2 we fill the
buckets.

The goal is to quantify the environmental inputs and outputs – this means we
measure everything that flows in and out of the system we defined in phase 1.
What could these inputs and outputs be?
Raw materials or resources
Different types of energy
Water
Emissions to air, land or water by substance
Now, this analysis can be extremely complex – because
production processes and the supply chain can be extremely
complex constructs.
This is why the Life Cycle Inventory phase of the Life Cycle
Assessment can take not only a large amount of time but also
often be the most work within an LCA.
How is the data for the Life Cycle Inventory collected?
Life Cycle Assessments today are conducted by professionals who are
extensively trained in the norms and standards that define how an LCA should
look like. We will look deeper into these standards later in this guide. However,
with software solutions like our Environmental Intelligence platform,
everybody can perform an LCA.
A lot of the data for the LCA is already available – for example in your
electricity or water bills. But that’s of course not all the data we need.
This is why, at this stage, the data gets collected through data collection
sheets. These sheets gather quantitative data on a company level, process
level and product level. If qualitative data is needed, questionnaires might
be used. The data sheets get filled out by the stakeholders in the company
who have access to the data. Sometimes, industry averages have to be
used.
Life Cycle Assessment Example: T-Shirt
A T-Shirt consists of fabric that is sewed together for the
end product. The fabric itself also goes through different
treatment processes. This is how the above flow model
looks like in Mobius (you can access the full model for free
by signing up for Mobius, our LCA software).
Until now, we have defined what we want to measure and collect in
phase 1. Then we collected and structured the data in phase 2.

In phase 3, we are evaluating how significant the impacts are. This is

based on our Life Cycle Inventory flows from phase 2.

There are 3 key tasks in this step.

Task 1: Selection of indicators and models

Why are some impact categories measured in “equivalents”?
Example
1kg CO2 = 1kg CO2-equivalent

1kg Methane (CH4) = 25kg CO2-equivalent

1kg Nitrous oxide (N2O) = 298kg CO2-equivalent

By assigning an equivalent, we can compare all these inputs to each other –
much like if you want to compare different currencies to each other.

However, the calculation of the equivalents doesn’t happen until step 3 in

our impact assessment. First, we have to choose from the impact
categories that are relevant to our overall assessment.

Common Impact Categories

Human toxicity
Global Warming Potential
Ecotoxicity
Acidification
Eutrophication
Task 2: Classification
In this step of our Life Cycle Impact Assessment, we are sorting
our Life Cycle Inventory and assigning it to our defined impact
categories.

Task 3: Impact Measurement

In the last step of our impact assessment, we are finally
calculating all our equivalents. We are summing them up in overall
impact category totals.
Category Totals can look like this:

Environmental Cost Indicator (ECI) in EUR (or other currencies)

Global Warming Potential (CO2-equivalent in kg)
Depletion potential of the stratospheric ozone layer (CFC-11-equivalent in kg)
Acidification potential of land and water (SO2-equivalent in kg)
Eutrophication potential (PO4-3-equivalent in kg)
Formation potential of tropospheric ozone photochemical oxidants (ethene-equivalent
in kg)
Abiotic depletion potential for non-fossil resources (Sb-equivalent in kg)
Human toxicity potential (1,4-DB-equivalent in kg)
Freshwater aquatic ecotoxicity potential (1,4-DB-equivalent in kg)
Marine aquatic ecotoxicity potential (1,4-DB-equivalent in kg)
Terrestrial ecotoxicity potential (1,4-DB-equivalent in kg)
Life Cycle Assessment Example: T-Shirt
In this example we’ve decided to measure the footprint of our T-Shirt in CO2-equivalent, which is also
called “Global Warming Potential”, short GWP.  You can see that a lot of the impact of the T-Shirt comes
from electricity.
So now we can see that almost 50% of the carbon footprint of our T-Shirt actually
comes from the electricity we use to manufacture it. Only about 18% come from the
cotton fibers.
Phase 4: Interpretation of our Life Cycle Assessment
According to ISO 14044:2006, this is what the interpretation 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

So, what does that mean exactly?

It means that we have to make sure we collected accurate data and took care of
measuring and analyzing it correctly. Only then we can make recommendations –
otherwise, we would literally be “jumping to conclusions”!
Which conclusions can we draw from our assessment?
This is the juicy part of our assessment.

We started the entire task by defining our goals upfront.

Now, after we have gained a lot of insights into our product or service, we
can draw conclusions from it, such as:

How high are the emissions of the product or service?

How does it compare to other products in our portfolio?
What are the biggest leverages to reduce the impact of our product?
Can we be more efficient in manufacturing it?
Remember our T-Shirt example?

Mobius has showed us that the biggest impact, almost 50%,

comes from the electricity used in the production. Based on this,
we can now make better decisions. We could for example try to
reduce the amount of electricity needed in the production, or
switch to a source of green energy. This is potentially much
easier than, for example, exchanging the cotton we’re using.
4. LCA Standards and the legal situation

ISO 14000: Environmental Management Standards

ISO 14001: Environmental Management System
ISO 14001 defines the criteria Environmental Management Systems have to comply
with. It ensures that environmental impacts are being measured and improved.
ISO 14021: Environmental Claims and Labels
ISO 14021 defines how specific environmental claims have to be and how they have
to be formulated and documented.
ISO 14040:2006: Life Cycle Assessment Framework
ISO 14040:2006 defined the principles and framework of a Life Cycle Assessment.
Many parts of this article are based on ISO 14040:2006.
ISO 50001: Efficient Energy Management
ISO 50001 defines Energy Management Systems.

EN 15804: European standard for Environmental Product Declarations (EPD) in the

construction industry
EN 15804 defines the setup of Environmental Product Declarations in the construction
industry.

PAS 2050 & GHG Protocol – Carbon Footprinting

PAS 2050 and the GHG Protocol are standards to define and measure emissions.

Life Cycle Accounting and Reporting Standard

This standard defines how the Life Cycle can be accounted for and reported on.

GRI data framework environment

The Global Reporting Initiative provides a framework to assess the environmental
impact of companies and their supply chain.
PEF (Product Environmental Footprint) and OEF (Organisation
Environmental Footprint)
PEF and OEF are currently under development. With PEF and OEF, the
European Commission aims to harmonize methodology for the calculation
of the environmental footprint of products and organisations. The system
has been under development for several years now, and will in the end
provide a standardized impact assessment method, a database with
background LCA-data and calculation rules for different industrial sectors
(PEFCRs).

PEF and OEF will build on many of the standards and norms mentioned
above.
 System Thinking and limited boundaries
LCAs are looking for improvements in existing products. On a bigger scale, these
improvements are often only small – one company might for example choose a more
sustainable raw material for one product, when in reality the supply chain of a
completely different product makes the biggest impact.

Activity-based foot printing: One LCA for your entire company

Activity-based foot printing is a new approach to Life Cycle Assessments. Instead of
calculating a single LCA at a time, this approach enables companies to calculate the
entire footprint of their company – down to product level.

This means that instead of one product per LCA study, Activity-based foot printing can
generate hundreds of LCAs at a time.