
Life Cycle Assessment (LCA)
Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) examines the environmental impacts of a product or service throughout its entire life cycle. Depending on the defined goals and scope, the assessment may cover various impact categories, such as climate change, ozone depletion, and eutrophication.
LCA is based on mass and energy balance calculations and scientific evidence on how different emissions affect the environment. For example, carbon dioxide emissions are linked to global warming, while sulfur dioxide emissions contribute to acidification.
LCA is a standardised method, following ISO 14040 and ISO 14044. Depending on the specific information needs, additional standards may be used, such as ISO 14067 (carbon footprint of products) or ISO 14046 (water footprint of products).
LCA Reveals the Full Environmental Impact of a Product
LCA provides a flexible framework for assessing environmental impacts, adapting to different information needs across industries.
The goal is often to assess the full life cycle impacts of a product (cradle-to-grave), but the scope can also be limited to narrower stages, such as raw material acquisition and manufacturing (cradle-to-gate). Similarly, the set of environmental impact categories to include can vary based on the purpose.
Determining the information needs and the intended use of the results is essential. These determine the required level of detail, the selection of applicable calculation methods, and any necessary reporting standards.
What Does LCA Include?
The LCA process is standardised and includes the following steps:
- Goal and scope definition
- Life Cycle Inventory (LCI)
- Life Cycle Impact Assessment (LCIA)
- Interpretation of results
The process begins by defining the study’s goal and how the results will be used. This sets the direction for all following phases.
Inventory and Impact Assessment
IIn the inventory phase, mass and energy balance data are collected for all life cycle stages included in the study. This data is then used to build a life cycle model using LCA software.
The same software is used to calculate the environmental impacts based on the selected impact categories.
All relevant information and calculated results are compiled into a transparent report. The results are assessed in light of the initial goals, and conclusions are drawn regarding how the data can be used.
LCA Creates a Credible Foundation for Communication
Credibility and transparency are essential when communicating the environmental performance of products and services. LCA provides a solid and science-based foundation for this.
Environmental communication typically falls into two categories depending on the audience: business-to-business (B2B) and business-to-customer (B2C).
An Environmental Product Declaration (EPD) is a B2B-focused document summarising the key LCA results in a standardised and compact format. You can read more about this on our EPD page.
A comparative environmental claim is that a product performs better or equally well than another with the same function. When LCA results are used to support such claims in consumer-facing communication (B2C), the requirements for methodological accuracy are stricter. In these cases, a third-party critical review is mandatory.
An external and independent expert must conduct the critical review. The purpose is to verify that the LCA complies with methodological, data quality, interpretation, and reporting requirements.
Ecobio’s LCA Services
Ecobio’s experts support companies throughout all stages of LCA:
- We help identify stakeholder requirements related to LCA and determine suitable actions to meet them.
- We assist in understanding the requirements for publishing LCA results and guide you in choosing the most appropriate communication format.
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