LCA 101: Beginner’s guide
A Life Cycle Assessment
(LCA) is an analysis of the impact one object has on the world around it. But
how does it work exactly? In this guide you get a
non-technical overview of:
What we're covering today:
🔍What really is a Life Cycle Assessment
🔄The Product Life Cycle in LCA
1.
What is a Life Cycle Assessment (LCA)?
You probably asked
yourself that question many times (sometimes without even knowing it). For
example, in the supermarket: “How environmentally friendly were the products
I just bought? Should I have bought the tomatoes from The Netherlands or from
Spain? “
This, in a nutshell, is
the question that a Life Cycle Assessment tries to answer. An LCA measures the
environmental impact of a product through every phase of its life – from
production to waste (or recycling, etc.)
But LCA isn’t simple –
there are countless factors involved:
·
Which raw materials were involved in the
production process, and where do they come from? What about soil, seeds, and
fertilizer?
·
How do my goods get produced? What about
heating, water, and ventilation?
·
How did the goods get transported? Via truck,
rail, or airplane?
2. The Product
Life Cycle in LCA
If we want to assess the life cycle of a product, we
must first define what that lifecycle actually consists of.
Five Steps of a product life cycle:
From Cradle To Grave
We will talk about
different concepts of the product life cycle in just a moment, but generally,
the product life cycle consists of five phases:
The 5 Steps of a
Product Life Cycle (Cradle to Grave)
2. Manufacturing & Processing 🏭
3. Transportation 🚚
4. Usage & Retail 🛒
5. Waste Disposal ♻️
Different Life cycle models
Based on the stages
you’re interested in or have data available on, you can choose to leave in or take
out phases. There are usually 4 product life cycle models you can choose for
your LCA.
Cradle-to-grave
When you analyze a
product’s impact along the 5 product lifecycle steps – this is called
cradle-to-grave. Cradle being the inception of the product with the sourcing of
the raw materials, grave being the disposal of the product. Transportation is
mentioned as step 3, but can, in reality, occur in between all steps.
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).
Environmental Product
Declarations (EPD)
Environmental Product
Declarations are standardized certifications of a life cycle assessment, used
mostly to verify impact data from business to business.
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.
Gate-to-gate
Gate-to-gate is
sometimes used in product life cycles with many value-adding processes in the
middle.
To reduce complexity in
the assessment, only one value-added process in the production chain is
assessed. These assessments can later be linked together to complete a larger
level Life Cycle Assessment.
There are three
other LCA concepts that are used for special requirements.
Well-To-Wheel
Well-to-wheel is used
for the Life Cycle Assessment of transport fuels and vehicles. Because there
are a lot of steps in between – the “Well-to-tank” and “Tank-to-wheels”, this
approach is more precise in calculating and assigning greenhouse gas emissions
and energy usage for the different stages.
Economic
Input-Output Life Cycle Assessment
The EIOLCA aggregates
industry data with the goal to create impact data for specific sectors within
the economy. These averages are sometimes used when no exact data is available.
They don’t provide an exact picture of the impact but help to fill blanks.
However, an EIOLCA is not precise enough to make decisions on a product level.
Environmental Impact
Assessment
Environmental Impact
Assessment is an analysis that is often conducted in the public sector, to look
at the potential impact of a new construction project.
In future blogs, we will continue to go deeper into
other aspects of LCA along with a success story of Skullcandy's daring steps to
lower their impact using LCA.
"More Information on: LCA Wikipedia "
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