Life Cycle Assessment
Companies of every sector are becoming to meet the increasing environmental consciousness that customers and clients are claiming more and more. Traditionally main criterion when choosing a product are related to intrinsic parameters of the product, like price, quality and personal preferences. But nowadays environmental insights are being more and more demanded. By one hand, this is great news for sustainability, since resource consumption and final emissions to the environment are being considered by consumers, and companies are making efforts on this field. But on the other hand, this effect is also opening the door to greenwashing and other non-transparent declarations.
In order to tackle green claims and give companies and customers trustable environmental information, Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) is arising and gaining importance as tool for calculating and evaluating environmental impacts of products, technologies and services in a reproducible, consistent and representative way. Trustiness of this methodology is based on international standards, in this case, ISO standards 14040:2006 (principles and framework) and ISO 14044:2006 (requirements and guidelines). Furthermore, different additional standards are available, referred to application (ISO 14047:2003), data documentation (ISO 14048:2002) and examples of applications (ISO 14049:2000).
LCA methodology started mainly as a comparative assessment back in the 1960s and 1970s motivated by the willing of determining the environmental differences between different products. These studies, that now could be understood as “partial” LCA, were focused mainly on energy assessments, but gradually introduced resource requirements, emissions to the environment, and waste generation. During 1980s, the implementation of the methodology started to grow, reaching the first impact assessment methods, with a clear lack of standarisation, scientific consensus and theoretical framework. Despite that, different companies started to adopt it to support their market claims. During 1990s, its implementation started to grow with the increase of workshops and forums, which led to an increasing number of guides and handbooks released, in which SETAC (Society of Environmental Toxicology and Chemistry) played an important role on development and harmonisation of methods. Furthermore, ISO (International Organization for Standardization) worked on the standardization of methods. In this period, different calculation methods were developed, such CML. During the period of 2005-2010 the demand of LCA increases, and new approaches started to raise (dynamic LCA, consequential LCA, implementation of economic units (Life Cycle Costing, LCC), and implementing social impacts (Social Life Cycle Assessment, SLCA), among others).
Regarding the application of LCA, it remains on four steps: goal and scope definition, Life Cycle Inventory (LCI), Life Cycle Impact Assessment (LCIA) and results and conclusions. In the first one, the basis of the study is set, and the intended application, objectives, calculation basis and limits of the study are determined, acting as the structure of the study. LCI is an intensive compilation of data of the system, considering all the inputs and outputs of the system considered in the goal and scope chapter, and referred to the calculation basis. LCIA on its behalf, crosses the information from LCI against the environmental data related to the elements within LCI, having as a result a battery of quantitative environmental potential impacts based on the basis of the study set on goal and scope chapter. Finally, results and conclusion chapter allow to analyse the obtained numerical results to extract the main ideas from them.
The application of this methodology can be performed in two main ways: by one hand, it can be used as informative manner, in order to determine the environmental insights of a product, technology or services, and find the steps or components with highest significance; this is called “hotspot analysis”. On the other hand, the methodology can be also applied in a comparative scheme, which is very useful to compare different products, technologies or services. This comparative assessment can be also applied to different situations or variations of the system under study (called scenarios), which gives light about the environmental performance when different changes are applied.
Since different information shall be included in the calculations, EU has considered the use of “default values”. These default values are entitled to fill information gaps. During the transition period, there is no quantitative limitation on its use. Nevertheless, during the whole reporting period a limitation of 20% maximum of the total embedded emissions can be included. During this definitive period, default values will cover different country or region-specific information.
In this regard, LCA is a powerful tool when it comes to identification of environmental performance, but it can give an added value to the companies that implement it. First of all, identifying the main impacts usually leads to energy or other inputs consumption, that in case of being optimized, can certainly lead to increase the efficiency of the processes. This increased efficiency also contributes to cost savings. Apart of that, marketing possibilities are increased, since calculating and communicating the environmental performance of the products made by a company can give a big added value to them, helping to differentiate from their competitors in market with an increasing environmental concern: one the main mechanisms to that is ecolabels. Furthermore, the application of LCA methodology can help to tackle possible risks for the company, like identifying possible critical raw material depletion.
The LCA methodology is also the base for another methodologies which are starting to be highly appreciated on the market. One of these examples is Environmental Product Declaration (EPD): These are specific guidelines for stating environmental performance of products per type. In this line, for some productive sectors and product types, EPD specifies the considerations, life cycle stages and impact categories to work with in order to standardize the assessments and deliver transparent claims.
Another relevant application in which LCA plays an important role is ecodesing: it relies on an approach in which the environmental aspects given by LCA outputs are taken into account on the design process of a product, tackling environmental insights of production, use and end of life stages.
One of the latest applications is the Environmental Footprint methodology, promoted by the European Commission, in which a reviewed version of LCA is foreseen, and applied to different specific sectors stating new inventory datasets, calculation methods and interpretation is being developed.
In conclusion, LCA methodology has been in the market during the last years, and according to its increasing implementation, is far to be outdated. Furthermore, new methodologies that are arising from it, leave no doubt about the potential and feasibility of the methodology.
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