What Is Life Cycle Analysis And How Can You Use Them To Make Companies Deliver Sustainable Products?

"How can you tell which products are really good for the environment? It's easy to know that wasting water is bad. But what about the harder questions? Is buying a new washing machine better than keeping your old one, which uses a lot of water? When does a hybrid car's better gas mileage make up for the pollution from making it? How do companies even know what their products do to the environment?"

"An LCA is a way to learn how products affect the environment before, during, and after you use them. These reports look at everything from the extraction of the raw materials to throwing the product away. Often, the various impacts of an LCA are converted into carbon dioxide equivalents (CO2-eq) for ease of comparison. The International Organisation for Standardisation (ISO) describes the of an LCA: 1.) the goal and scope definition, 2.) an inventory analysis, 3.) an impact assessment, and 4.) interpretation."

"An LCA counts all the energy and materials used to make, ship, use, and get rid of a product. It also tracks all the pollution and waste created at each step. Because climate change is such a significant problem, many LCAs focus on a product's carbon footprint, or the amount of greenhouse gas pollution it creates. LCAs Are Growing Fast At the beginning of 2023, approximately 17,000 EPDs had been published globally , which represents massive growth in recent years."

Life Cycle Analysis (LCA) measures environmental impacts across a product's entire life cycle: raw material extraction, manufacturing, transport, use, and disposal. LCAs tally energy, materials, pollution, and waste at each stage and commonly express impacts as carbon dioxide equivalents (CO2-eq) to allow comparisons. The ISO defines standardized LCA phases: goal and scope, inventory analysis, impact assessment, and interpretation, which support reliable and comparable results. Environmental Product Declarations (EPDs) summarize LCA findings in accessible formats. Rapid growth in LCAs and EPDs increases available data for assessing product sustainability and guiding purchasing decisions.

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