The life cycle assessment (LCA) is a technique to assess the environmental aspects and potential impacts associated with a product, process or service, by:
Life cycle assessments involve cradle-to-grave analyses of production systems and provide comprehensive evaluations of all upstream and downstream energy inputs and multimedia environmental emissions. For a typical product, LCA takes into account the supply of raw materials needed to produce the product, the manufacturing of intermediates and finally the product itself, including packaging, transportation of raw materials, intermediates and the product, use of the product and disposal of the product after use.
LCAs have been done on a huge variety of products and processes, including jet engines, drinking cups, computers and waste disposal, however they can be costly and time-consuming, thus their use is often limited as analysis techniques in both the public and private sectors. Streamlined techniques for conducting LCAs are needed to lower the cost and time involved with an LCA and to encourage a broader audience to begin using the LCA.
The benefits of a LCA are:
Ultimately, the purpose is to allow for accurate and expedient comparison of a product’s environmental performance – enabling significant reductions in the environmental impact of all products.
An LCA can also be used to assess the end-to-end environmental impacts of a business decision on overall value creation. The International Standards Organization (ISO) created ISO 14040 and 14044 standards for conducting LCA studies.
Such studies involve four steps:
The first step for any life cycle study is to establish the sustainability goals. The most common goals are:
These will be discussed in more detail using a case study on Levi Strauss next.
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