How Does Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) Work?
The life cycle assessment (LCA) is an important part of most organizations and a key offering for many sustainability consultancies. You may have heard it mentioned alongside sustainability initiatives. LCAs are a measurement of the environmental impact of a product or service throughout its entire lifetime, from the cultivation of raw products to manufacturing, distribution, usage, and all the way through to the disposal and waste treatment that may come with it.
LCAs are pivotal for many companies looking to achieve sustainability goals, as they provide transparency and metrics that can inform which improvements should be tackled first. In the path towards growing sustainably without destroying the planet, LCA is often a step that can be taken early on, whilst having lasting impacts over time.
What is a Life Cycle Assessment (LCA)?
At OnePointFive, we typically conduct an LCA via four key steps:
First, we collaborate with our customer to define the goal and scope of the study – what is their objective in conducting this LCA?
Next, we move to the Life Cycle Inventory (LCI), or the data collection stage, which tends to be the most time-consuming portion of the LCA.
Once we’ve compiled the LCI, we begin the Life Cycle Impact Assessment – this is the calculation stage, where we transform the collected data into environmental impacts.
Finally, we interpret the results, share findings and recommendations with the customer, and highlight pertinent assumptions and limitations.
What is an Example of a Life Cycle Assessment?
One example of an LCA that we recently completed was for a series of popular consumer-facing home goods products. Using the four steps outlined above, our LCA successfully identified GHG emissions “hotspots” in the products’ life cycles, such as raw materials and customer use.
These “hotspots” take data from all aspects of the products, including the raw materials to make the product, to glue and packaging, energy produced during manufacturing, consumer usage of the product, disposal, and anything else that was a part of the products’ journey. Once identified, hotspots are recognized as the areas that generate the most emissions within the lifecycle, and therefore should be prioritized for improvements.
Another key outcome of conducting an LCA is identifying the highest environmental impact categories overall, which could include but is not limited to GHG emissions. We weighed the emissions, chemicals, and processes that went into this company’s products against a dozen categories, including global warming potential, ozone depletion, smog, acidification, carcinogen, respiratory effects, ecotoxicity, and more. Surprisingly, we revealed that the highest impact categories were carcinogens & ecotoxicity, not necessarily global warming.
What Can a Life Cycle Assessment Do for My Business?
So after we completed this LCA, what was our key takeaway?
We uncovered that the global warming potential of these products was highly dependent on the density & thickness of the particular fabric selected, since most of the fabrics were made from virgin polyester. We also demonstrated that the customer-use phase was fairly high in its GHG emissions impact due to the energy output from washing and drying the products.
With this new knowledge in hand, what may have seemed like an impossibly vague yet daunting task at first – clean up your products & make them environmentally friendly – now became quite focused and clear. We recommended that our customer’s sustainability team work with the product design team to assess the structural need for virgin polyester material and determine if recycled or renewable alternatives could be incorporated, and to provide sustainability-focused instructions to customers on best practices for washing & drying, to reduce energy usage.
Want to learn more about how OPF can help your business grow sustainably without destroying the planet? Contact us today or reach out to Neil, Matthias, and/or Julia. We can’t wait to speak with you and see how we can help.
