Life Cycle Assessment: The single most important step in sustainability analysis

Life Cycle Assessment in a sustainable business

There are many ways to understanding and analysing the impact of your business’s activities on sustainability issues. 

The several reporting frameworks and tools that are being widely accepted and used are broad enough to induce analysis of much of the issues. However, they are more about presenting the sustainability information, especially if they are financially material, to the stakeholders. Analysis, or gaining a deeper understanding of your sustainability performance is not necessarily the goal with them.

For that, you need to deploy other methods. Methods and processes that allow us to gather a deeper and clearer understanding of what impacts your business’s products have on sustainability issues. 

Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) is one such method of understanding your sustainability impact. 

For any business that wishes to gather an understanding of their sustainability issues beyond the surface or the superficial, an LCA is a useful and necessary method. If you wish to take actions in your business that genuinely have an impact, and fast, an LCA is likely to be the best bet, especially if you have a physical product. 

The origins of using LCA for sustainability analysis

LCA existed as early as the 1960s, where a study reported resource and emission profiles as part of its results. As further studies and implementation of LCA happened, it was standardised by the ISO under its frameworks. 

It has since undergone many improvements, with inputs from several businesses and studies from around the world. Now, there are standards that provide guidelines and requirements for conducting an LCA such as the ISO 14040 and 14044. 

What is an LCA and how does it drive a sustainable business?

It’s defined as “the systematic analysis of the potential environmental impacts of products or services during their entire life cycle”. It goes beyond the details that are normally reported to the stakeholders. 

The analysis here is not just on the details that are financially significant, but on those that cause environmental impact. It focuses more on the environmental aspect of sustainability.

It is a long and resource-intensive process, that begins from your suppliers (of raw materials and such) and goes on throughout the production cycle and beyond, to as far as waste management and distribution efforts. 

It is a process that is more suited to larger organisations with significant environmental impact, due to the efforts and resources required to conduct a successful assessment. 

An LCA brings in input data from all relevant environmental points, such as emissions resulting from burning fuel, water use, land use, as well as other emissions into soil or water. However, you do have the option of focusing on a specific issue among these, such as the carbon footprint.

If the goal of conducting an LCA for your business is to understand any one of these issues, you can choose to only use inputs that are relevant to that issue. Of course, the standards do advise a more comprehensive process, but the focus with an LCA should be on bringing you the results you need, and not on following a framework for the sake of it.

One of the primary benefits of an LCA that comes after understanding your environmental issues is the possibility of comparison. An LCA that follows the standards and guidelines allows you to compare specific products of your business with others, or even with competing products of competitors if the information is available. 

The steps involved in Life Cycle Assessment

There are primarily four stages involved in an LCA according to the ISO 14040 guidelines.

Goal and Scope Definition

It is in this first stage that you define which product or service it is that you wish to conduct the LCA on. You also define the level of detail that is required for the assessment, along with a basis for comparison. 

Also, the goal should allow you to determine the scope of the assessment, including the objective of conducting the assessment, whether it is simply to understand and reduce your environmental impact or wanting to compare it with others. 

The audience that the LCA’s results are meant for must be defined as well, since it will determine, to some degree, the level of detail required and how the results will be presented.

Inventory Analysis

This is the stage where the use of data begins, as you compile all the relevant inventory data. 

The analysis should reveal the inputs and outputs to the inventory throughout the life cycle of your product, that has an environmental impact. All inputs and outputs must be accounted for, in accordance with the level of detail required by the goals and scope.

Impact Assessment

It is at this stage that you categorise the resources being used and emissions being generated into a few impact categories. 

Categorising these impacts help a more structured analysis of the relevant data. The assessment in this stage will help reveal which of these factors are the most relevant for the assessment, as defined by the goal. 

Interpretation

Of course, simply compiling and categorising the data is inadequate. The use of data is only maximised when the proper interpretation of the results provided by the data analysis is carried out.

In this stage, you evaluate any opportunity that may be present to try and reduce the environmental impact during your product’s LCA. The intention is to look for alternatives and solutions, not to find who to blame.

For example, an LCA might reveal that the source of raw materials used for production are the most significant cause of environmental impact. In this case, the goal, after interpretation should be to find other sources of the required materials. The LCA helps you find the exact causes of environmental damage and shows where the action is needed the most.

Are there any downsides to conducting an LCA in your business?

An LCA does help bring in some amazing results, that much is not up for debate. However, as evident from the several stages involved in it, it is a long and difficult process.

Conducting an LCA does have the potential to help reduce significant environmental impact for your business. However, there is a cost associated with this. 

As mentioned, it is a long process that involves the significant use of data. Data that must come from several different sources across your business’s functions and often, from even outside of your business (suppliers, distributors etc.).

Collecting this data will be a difficult task that requires strong collaborative efforts from several different organisational functions. After the data collection comes the compiling and categorising of it.

Performing analysis on such vast amounts of data is also going to be resource-intensive, with significant time and effort likely being required to conduct it. 

For most businesses, the longer timeframe and resource-intensive nature of an LCA may make it an unattractive proposition. And that’s to be expected. But for large businesses with significant resources, it is a very useful tool that can make a significant difference.

Using LCA to communicate business sustainability

LCA is certainly an internal tool at its core. Its primary goal is not to improve your marketing efforts, but to be an effective tool in understanding your product or service’s sustainability impact.

But that doesn’t mean the findings of an LCA cannot be used to enhance your sustainability communication efforts. The findings from an LCA can be used to communicate each step of your journey towards achieving business sustainability.

The problems or issues that have been identified by the LCA and the steps you have taken to eliminate those issues can form a major part of your sustainability communication. The key here is to show the considerable effort your business is putting in to become sustainable.

What if your business doesn’t have the resources to conduct an LCA?

It is perfectly normal for most small and medium-sized businesses to be wary of committing the resources and effort needed to conduct an LCA. There is clearly a risk involved, and if your business is one of these two types, you would be smart to hedge this risk.

It is here, that sustainability firms such as ourselves hold out our hand.

Although much of our work begins with the focus on communicating the sustainability impacts and actions of your business, we are well-versed and equipped to meet your business’s needs when it comes to an LCA.

Contact us now, and take your first significant step towards business sustainability with SUSTINARO.