What is LCA?

Life Cycle Assessment and/or Life Cycle Analysis (LCA), uses a wide range of individual sectors and impact category models to help us identify, understand and calculate the many complex interactions which occur between a product and our environment as it makes its way from the cradle to grave.

The use and development of Life Cycle Assessment and/or Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) begin in the late 1960's when it became clear that the only reliable way to truly examine industrial systems was to analyze their performance beginning with extraction of raw materials and following all operations until its final disposal of the materials as wastes back into the earth (cradle to grave).

The main reasons for this approach are:

First, individual component operations could apparently be made cleaner and more efficient by simply displacing the pollution elsewhere. These benefits occurring in one location were offset by the problems generated elsewhere so that there was no overall real improvement. A current example is the proposal to introduce electric cars into towns: this reduces the pollution in the towns but displaces it to the pollution arising elsewhere from the power stations needed to provide the fuel (electricity).

The second reason was that traditionally engineers had concentrated their efforts into making individual unit operations more efficient, but nobody was looking at the way in which these unit operations were put together to form an overall production and use sequence. Sometimes, by rearranging the building blocks, overall systems can be made more efficient.

In the early 1970's, LCA's concentrated mainly on energy and raw materials but later air emissions, water emissions and solid waste were included in the calculations. The 1990 SETAC conference in Vermont was the first to analyse LCA's into three main stages as shown below.

• Inventory process - This step identifies, classifies and quantifies the source for all emissions which occur during the life cycle of the product, from raw materials used to produce all the way to the final use or grave.
• Impact Assessment - Once the inventory is complete then we are able to develop an Impact assessment statement, which clearly shows the sectors, which have the greatest, impact on your product and in turn our planet.
• Continuous Process Improvement - By improving the process, collection methods and calculations you will continue to create large leaps in overall process improvement

Why should you use LCA?

This methodology has become a generally recognized and accepted method for Governmental Agencies, Non-Governmental Agencies, both Private and Public Sector organizations and, most importantly, the scientific community that is working to develop the solutions to our global climate crises.

Regulatory- If you are required by certain Continuous Process Improvement (CPI) compliance organizations, such as ISO, you will be forced into a compliance or regulatory position at some point. Regulatory compliance will become critical to avoid penalties whether they are Governmentally imposed or imposed in the marketplace by your stockholders or customers they are real to all organizations

Today your customers simply expect that your company is paying attention to the environmental properties of all products. Thus LCA and its utilization for product/process improvement is the way to meet this demand.

LCA: An Open Source Approach

The LCA methodology has been born out by many years of shared global experiences. There are some global organizations, which have taken a lead in defining and helping to detail out this process for all users. If you visit the website at SETAC and CML (University of Leiden) you will see a great deal of work on procedure and practices. There is also a large "Open Source" movement that is developing and will be releasing the first truly open source LCA database and software.

But for now SETAC's Code of Practice lays out the process in 5 simple stages.

Planning Stage:

• Scope and Objectives identified
• Defining the product
• Agreeing on the limits or boundary of the process
• Decide on environmental sectors for analysis
• Agreement on strategy & process to collect, aggregate and evaluate data

Screening:

• Initial project launch and execution of LCA
• Continuous Process Improvement and Adjustment of plan

Data collection and data treatment:

• Defining methodologies for collection & measurements
• Define calculation and impact analysis procedures and processes
• Use literature search, theoretical calculations, database search, and qualified guessing when necessary
• Computation of the inventory table

Evaluation:

• Managing inventory & data into individual sectors and impact categories
• Merge inventory data and collect into individual sectors and impact categories
• Run Calculations
• Relational weighting of all individual sectors and impact categories

Improvement assessment:

• CPI analysis - Improvements, Sector & Impact priorities