Life Cycle Assessment: Your guide to best practice LCA

Every decision you make about your products can be an opportunity to reduce your climate impact. EcoAct Managing Consultant, Niki Inglis, shares best practice LCA approaches to get the most value out of product Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) and demonstrates how it can help accelerate you on your path to net-zero.

Many of our clients have already completed or are in the process of conducting one or more product carbon footprints using the Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) methodology. This process provides an overview of emissions hotspots across the full value chain of a product which in turn helps to drive more sustainable choices. LCA can therefore be a powerful tool for making better procurement decisions, communicating sustainability achievements, achieving compliance and setting realistic and measurable emissions reductions targets.

This is the power of one product footprint but assessing a portfolio of products enables you to take full advantage of the LCA methodology and accelerate your organisation on its path to net-zero.

Life Cycle Assessments are often viewed as a single-standing project. At EcoAct, we help our clients gain more value from an LCA with the following best practice approaches:

Product Improvements

To gain the best understanding and achieve the most meaningful impact, we have to deep dive into the data. If done correctly, a Life Cycle Assessment will provide a high level of detail on sources of emissions and the most significant elements that influence resource and energy use – the emissions hotspots. With more in-depth information, you can better understand how emissions can be reduced or avoided entirely.

This can include activities such as:

• Understanding and improving the quality of underlying inventory data
• Gathering data from your specific suppliers rather than relying on secondary data
• Engaging with your suppliers to identify ways for them to reduce emissions
• Seeking out alternative materials such as recycled or bio-based materials
• Determining optimal choices of production technology where alternatives exist

With richer information, you can gain a more accurate emissions footprint and a more robust view of how you can make changes, engage with suppliers or redesign in order to proactively reduce a product’s impact. Then you could also look to offset any residual emissions with LCA+ services to create a carbon neutral or net-zero product which can contribute to your overall company-wide objectives.

Once you have gained a thorough understanding of the typical hotspots and opportunities for improvement, it is time to expand beyond individual products.

Streamlined LCA

Streamlined LCA means assessing not just one product in your portfolio but expanding this to cover multiple, if not all, products. While detailed LCAs can be time consuming, requiring a significant amount of primary data, the advantage of Streamlined LCAs is that they can use a mix of industry and supplier data to generate faster results. This can for example be done with Organisational Life Cycle Assessment (OLCA) that extrapolates data across similar products to gain a picture of portfolio emissions or other Streamlined LCA approaches which make scaling LCA to the product portfolio much easier. Companies like BASF and Unilever are already assessing many if not all of their products.

These approaches develop a comprehensive overview of the portfolio of products,  enabling you to understand hotspots across the entire organisation and make  strategic decisions that can shift product ranges or brands. At the same time, as the analysis also provides details on each product, R&D and product design teams can identify ways to improve the environmental impacts of products and make them part of your net-zero strategy.  Product portfolio footprints can also be used as a way of reducing transition risk. A key element of future corporate costs associated with climate change is increasing carbon taxes enforced by governments. Incorporating a product’s profit margin in your Streamlined LCA will quickly show which products may no longer be profitable if exposed to an increased carbon tax.

Embedding LCA

Life Cycle Assessment should be an ongoing process, an exercise that allows you to continually minimise your products’ environmental impact and also revisit your emissions reduction targets and efficiency practices. To meet the ambition set in the Paris Agreement we must halve our emissions every decade and achieve net-zero by 2050. The products that we sell must align to this target not only as part of a company’s net-zero strategy but also to respond to the growing demand for sustainable products from consumers.

Once you have assessed your products, we recommend establishing governance to oversee and review your assessments periodically. This will enable tracking of emissions over time and ensure you are aware of contextual factors that might be impacting your emissions (such as changing the electricity grid mix).  Tools like EcoAct’s Carbon Reduction and Feasibility Tool (CRaFT) can help provide an ongoing picture of your emissions from products as well as the wider organisation. It is an easy and visual way to forecast emissions, set a science-based target or a net-zero target with confidence, gain buy-in for climate initiatives and support decision-making, as well as track your progress.

Conducting impact assessments at regular intervals ensures information stays front of mind. It enables both innovation and continuous improvement, as well as strategic shifts in the way companies do business. Additionally, committing to a calculation schedule over time will help you identify the residual emissions that need to be sequestered to achieve net-zero across your company’s entire scope of activity. Advances in software and data analytics such as Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) are easing the transition to LCA Automation and making it easier to robustly assess the impact of the entire product portfolio on a regular basis. Increased regulation in many sectors which requires considerations of products across the entire life cycle is likely to drive more companies down this route.

LCA can undoubtedly be a challenging process but done effectively can add real value to your business by showing how to proactively reduce the environmental impact of products, become more resilient to changing regulations, and meet the growing demand for more sustainable products. If we are to meet the targets of the Paris Agreement and reach net-zero by 2050, significant changes must be made across all aspects of business operations. Working with many clients across a variety of sectors, we have shown that LCA can have real impact and is a robust way to get more value out of the process making it an important part of your net-zero strategy.