What is a life cycle assessment (LCA)?

A life cycle assessment (LCA) is the detailed analysis of a product’s complete life cycle concerning sustainability. Each part of a product’s life cycle is cataloged from the extraction of raw materials to production; its inputs, transport, use, and what happens to a product after use.

What are the benefits of a Life Cycle Assessment (LCA)?

An LCA provides a detailed understanding of a product’s sustainability credentials enabling companies to see the individual impacts and deliver improvements and savings. It can help shape policy, make product claims, deliver cost savings, influence design, and shape strategy.

An LCA can identify product or manufacturing aspects such as

• Carbon footprint
• Greenhouse gas emission (GHG)
• Energy and water consumption
• Emissions to land or air
• Solid waste
• Raw material impacts
• Chemistry usage (Eurofins, 2023)

Types of LCA

Many types of LCA exist. A rule of thumb is that the more detail you want, the more complete your LCA needs to be. A report for internal use (for example, a screening LCA) has fewer requirements than a report that will be used for marketing or other external communication (ISO-compliant LCA, more on this later). There are also many LCA-related assessments, such as:

• Environmental Product Declarations (EPDs, a more reader-friendly document used for comparing products)
• Studies compliant with a product- or sector-specific standards such as the Product Environmental Footprint (PEF) and Organizational Environmental Footprint (OEF)
• Single-issue analyses like the carbon- or water footprint
• Social LCA
• Organizational LCA
• Long-term monitoring studies (Golsteijn, 2022)