Life cycle analysis and life cycle assessment are the same thing, the latter is the term more widely adopted in the US whereas the former is used more often within the UK
So what is a life cycle analysis (LCA), what do they tell us and why are they so important? In short, a life cycle analysis is the act of measuring the environmental impact of a product or service throughout its life cycle, from the resources used to create the product or service, across its use by the user, to it's final end of life destination. An LCA measures the environmental impacts of each distinctpartinvolved in creating and using products and services, such as energy used in production, fuel used in transport, and end-of-life ecological costs. This helps uscompare between products, materials, and methods used, providing useful information by which to make decisions that could help the environment.
There's quite a lot involved in an LCA and they can be quite costly and time consuming to implement, but they help us understand how different products and services, when designed differently, can reduce the impact we have on our planet.
What Is An Environmental Life Cycle Assessment?
What’s The Purpose Of A Life Cycle Assessment?
What Can An LCA Be Used For?
Who Conducts an LCA?
A word on International Standards
What are the 4 stages of an LCA?
Are there different types of LCA?
What does an LCA actually look at?
Limitations of LCAs
What Is An Environmental Life Cycle Assessment?
There’s more than one type of LCA as it happens, but they all do the same thing: measure environmental impacts of a product, service ormaterial. They are as close to the gold standard of understanding the environmental consequences of a product as researchers can currently get. An LCA is a standardised method to quantitatively assess environmental impacts.
Ultimately, an LCA is interested in what we have to take from the environment, in terms of raw materials and energy, and what impact the product then has on the environment during its use (or the service, or the material). It’s called “life cycle” because it usually takes the entire existence of the product into account: from the raw material stage of putting the product together, through the use phase where the service, material or product serves its’ purpose, to the “end-of-life” stage where the product is broken down in whatever fashion occurs.
There have been LCAs on all manner of things from diapers to jet engines, on entire systems like recycling, and on comparing materials like glass versus plastic.
What’s The Purpose Of A Life Cycle Assessment?
The stated purpose of an LCA is to find the environmental impacts of a product, service or material, typically so some decision can be made in the design of that item or in the formulation of some policy. It might be that different alternative ways of creating a product or providing a service are being compared to see which has a lower environmental impact.
It is very hard for individuals to assess the actual environmental impacts of a product or service without quantifying the inputs and outputs as is done in an LCA. LCAs thus permit us to quantify environmental impacts and make better environmental decisions. By quantifying the environmental impacts at the different stages of producing the product or service, stakeholders may understand what changes to make at the distinct stages to improve environmental outcomes overall.
What Can An LCA Be Used For?
An LCA can be used by different people for different things. But it’s all about environmental impact and performance.
Design: what changes can we make to the product to lessen its environmental impact?
Purchasing: which product has the least environmental impact?
Marketing: is this product “greener” than a competitors?
Benchmarking: how’s our company doing next to all the others in our industry?
Tracking: how’s our environmental performance doing this year compared with last years?
Policy: what initiatives will help improve overall environmental outcomes?
Who Conducts an LCA?
An LCA is no small feat. When they were first developed they could take years and millions of pounds to complete, however a lot of knowledge has accumulated over the years meaning they’re a little easier to do now. They can still take tens of thousands of pounds and can be done in months. It does vary a lot depending on the scope however!
Most LCAs require outside experts. Consultants who have a special set of skills understanding areas like industrial processes, transport modelling, human and ecological toxicity, and have knowledge of existing data sources.
Typically, a team is assembled who will rely on the outside experts to conduct the LCA, but will need to give the experts access to staff across their organisation who are involved with different aspects of the product or service.
The quality of the LCA depends very much on how well this wider network of individuals can work together.
Stakeholders outside of the organisation may also be involved, such as customers, competitors, NGOs and academics. If the decision has been made to do consult with stakeholders, it’s a good idea to consult with these stakeholders at the beginning stages of the study, while it is being designed. This gives opportunity to ensure all the right questions are being asked and the correct data is being collected.
Many people are involved and play different roles such as:
Environmental expert: typically managing the project, serving as technical resource, and conducting the project.
Engineer: expert on the engineering management systems, accessing engineering data, etc.
Manufacturing/operations: provide operational information
Purchasing: ensure data format can support purchasing decisions, support the team in choosing a practitioner, etc.
Others such as the marketing team and outside stakeholders.
A word on LCA International Standards
There are now international standards (ISO 14040 and others) that place strict limits on what qualifies as an LCA, and what you can and can’t do.
What are the 4 stages of an LCA?
Generally LCA has four stages or components:
1.Goal and scope
2.Inventory
3.Impact assessment
4.Improvement assessment
1. Goal and scope of an LCA
What are we looking at? The point at which all decisions are made about what to include in the study, why it’s being carried out, the “functional unit” that is being focused on, the different systems that need to be investigated, as well as the boundaries – it’s often not practical (or possible) to measure every single input and output and in the cases where there is good reason to think they are small or where they are deemed to be beyond the scope of what you are interested in, they are left out. Every LCA has boundaries. This is also the point where you ask what data do you need, what are your data quality requirements, what methods will you use to assess impact, to interpret, and how you will report it.
Another task at this point involves “screening”, which is the preliminary execution of the LCA and any adjustment in the plan.
2. Inventory
Every LCA has an inventory. This is the data that you are collecting. The inventory includes things like emissions, energy requirements and material flows for each process involved. These are the flows into and out of the system you are studying. The data of these are adjusted depending on the functional unit you’re looking at.
This is known as a Life Cycle Inventory (LCI)
This can be extremely complex because it can involve dozens of separate processes, as well as hundreds of tracked substances. This is where most of the complexity of an LCA is involved.
3. Impact Assessment
The Life Cycle Impact Assessment (LCIA) is where the impacts on the environment are calculated. The categories of impacts are chosen and the impacts on them based on the flow of emissions, energy and material from the inventory, are assessed.
There are lots of different types of impacts (depletion of abiotic resources, global warming, ozone layer depletion, acidification, etc) so this stage accounts for all the different impacts that have been chosen.
4. Improvement Assessment
Finally, the results are analysed in the context of the goal and scope of the study set out at the beginning. What have we learned about the system from this LCA? This is where recommendations are typically included.
Are there different types of LCA?
In short, yes. As per the ISO standards however, not all of these will meet them.
Conceptual LCA: very basic level looking at qualitative inventory, to create flow diagrams and understand, for example, which components have the highest relative environmental impact.
Simplified LCA: Basically a proper LCA but using more generic data and standard modules for energy production. A simplified assessment that focuses on the most important environmental aspects, and thoroughly assesses the reliability of the results.
Detailed LCA: The full process of in-depth data collection, highly specific to the product in question.
What does an LCA actually look at?
At the life cycle inventory stage is where you’re breaking product system and getting data on all the elements. You’re interested in:
The materials and energy that go into these five processes:
Raw material extraction
Manufacture
Distribution and transport
Use and maintenance
Disposal and recycling
These are then looked into their impacts in terms of:
Global warming potential
Air, water and soil pollution
Ecotoxicity
Resource depletion
When you put it like that, it seems quite straightforward. But when you get into it, it becomes a lot less black and white. Drawing the boundaries of these boxes, which bits to include and which to leave out, often ends up in lots of careful decisions as to what’s relevant.
Limitations of LCAs
As with every scientific method, there are always some limitations that we should be aware of. In the case of LCAs, they do not detract from the depth of understanding that is available only through the comprehensive LCA route. These limitations include:
Studies relate to normal operations, rather than where incidents occur, which must be understoodthrough separate risk assessments
The quality of the available data: obviously this is what determines the validity of the whole LCA
Reliability of the environmental scores is dependent on the skill of the LCA practitioners employed
Investment decisions are delayed as a consequence of how long LCAs take
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Are You Interested in Learning More About Plastic Packaging?
The BPF has created short e-learning courses that cover plastic packaging. If you're interested in learning more, you can access our CPD approved e-learning courses on sustainable plastic packaging here.
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