What is a Life Cycle Assessment?

Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) is a methodology used to assess environmental impacts associated with a product, service or process over its entire life cycle. It looks at a wide range of environmental issues including resource use, land use and toxicity.

Life Cycle Assessment provides organisations with a comprehensive understanding of their environmental impact and allows them to make informed decisions about how they can improve their environmental performance.

Benefits of carrying out LCAs

• Establish a baseline understanding of your environmental impacts

• Make targeted improvements and optimise processes to conserve resources and reduce costs

• Manage supply-chain risk by embedding sustainability intelligence into everyday decision-making

• Strengthen customer loyalty by demonstrating a proactive approach to environmental challenges

Our LCA services

• Environmental Profile (EP): seeks to quantify the environmental impacts associated with a product or process, identifying priorities for improvement (‘hotspots’).

• Benchmarking LCA: compares the environmental impacts of two or more developed product systems.

• Environmental Scenarios Modelling (ESM): identifies the environmentally preferable product development options by comparing impacts associated with different material, ingredient and/or process decisions.

• We also offer streamlined LCAs which focus on a specific environmental impact (e.g. carbon footprint) or part of the supply chain (e.g. manufacturing).

  Typical environmental impact categories:

• Climate change

• Ozone depletion

• Ionising radiation

• Particulate matter formation

• Photochemical oxidant formation

• Terrestrial acidification

• Freshwater eutrophication