Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) is an internationally-recognised environmental accounting tool used to identify, characterise and assess the potential impacts of products (goods or services) throughout their life cycle. Conducted in accordance with the ISO 14040/44 standards, organisations can use LCA to gain insights into their environmental performance, guide process improvements, and to demonstrate their commitment to addressing environmental challenges.

Why Perform an LCA?

• Establish a baseline understanding of your product’s environmental impacts

• Make informed product design decisions or targeted improvements by identifying “hotspots” and developing specific actions to achieve company goals

• Optimise processes to conserve resources and reduce costs

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

• Communicate environmental achievements to retailers and consumers.

• Strengthen customer loyalty by demonstrating a proactive approach to environmental challenges and making verifiable environmental claims.

• Ensure legal compliance by aligning products with upcoming sustainability regulations that would otherwise present a barrier to entry for business.

Our LCA Services

Whatever your motivation, our experts are available to support you with your LCA needs

1. Environmental Profile LCA: Understand the environmental impact of an individual product or service; assessing the contribution of ingredients, materials and processes, in addition to the cumulative environmental load.

2. Benchmarking LCA: Compare the environmental ‘preferability’ of two or more products or services with the same function.

3. Scenarios Modelling: Identify the preferable product development options by comparing the impact of potential decisions, including choice of raw materials, suppliers, sourcing locations, processing methods, and energy sources.

4. Streamlined LCA: Gain insight into the potential environmental impacts of products at low cost through the use of secondary data and a simplified analysis focused on a particular life cycle stage (e.g., manufacturing) or environmental concern (e.g., carbon footprint assessment). Carbon footprint assessments are popular as they are useful to support net zero and carbon neutrality claims.

5. Social LCA: Go beyond environmental impacts and consider the social impacts of product supply chains to ensure alignment with corporate social responsibility goals

6. Product Environmental Footprint: Conduct LCA studies that are aligned with the European Commission’s recommended Product Environmental Footprint (PEF) methodology and related product category rules.

7. LCA peer review: Conduct a review of any previously commissioned LCA study to ensure that the quality of the LCA meets internationally approved standards and withstands scrutiny. Our LCA practitioners can perform reviews either as independent experts or as part of a wider review panel.

Our Approach