What can you expect when you commission an LCA for your product? What does the planning process for an LCA report look like? In this article, we take you through the entire process, so you know what to expect.
Note: some products are more complex than others, and various factors determine the exact duration of the LCA study. However, in this article, we outline an example of a typical timeline you might anticipate.
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1. Kick-off meeting
We begin our collaboration on your LCA with a kick-off meeting. The purpose of this meeting is twofold:
- We aim to understand your organisation, your product, production processes, and challenges.
- You will learn about the LCA and the process surrounding it.
During this meeting, we also make several decisions, such as defining the system boundaries and the scope of the LCA study. You can choose between:
- Cradle-to-gate: from the extraction of raw materials to the moment the product leaves your organisation.
- Cradle-to-grave: from the extraction of raw materials to the disposal at the end of the product's life cycle.
We also establish the functional unit and calculation rules we will use. The functional unit is the precise definition of what we will calculate the environmental impact for.
Let’s use a washing machine as an example. You can conduct an LCA for a single wash cycle, for 10 kg of clothing that needs to be washed, or for the use of the machine over 10 years. The choice of functional unit depends on what you want to know and the purpose of the study.
In the kick-off meeting, we also set a clear structure and division of roles for data collection. We provide you with customized datasheets to support this, and schedule bi-weekly meetings with the project manager.
2. Data collection
Data collection is the most time-consuming part of the LCA; on average, companies spend 2-3 months on this.
The duration of data collection depends on the complexity of your product, the type of data that needs to be collected, and the availability of the data.
We distinguish between primary and secondary data. Primary data is specific to your product, collected from your daily operations or from your suppliers/chain partners. Primary data provides the best insight into your product and is preferred. Secondary data comes from studies/benchmarks/sources such as the Ecoinvent environmental database, which is accessible online. This data is not product-specific and is therefore of lower quality.
The primary data comes from your organisation and needs to be collected by you. For example, data on exact electricity consumption, energy provider and type of electricity, quantities of materials used, transport kilometres, and data on how your customers use the product.
Primary data is preferred over secondary data because it is more accurate. However, it is common that primary data is not available for the entire supply chain. For instance, a raw material for which no supplier-specific LCA is available.
When primary data is not available, we work with secondary data to make a good estimate of the emissions of the different products and processes.
At the start of data collection, we give you a customised data sheet, tailored to your product and context, where you can collect all the necessary data. And we guide you during data collection as needed. We map the data sources and data owners, so you can do the data collection for the next LCA yourself.
3. LCA modelling
Once the data sheet is fully (or as far as possible) completed, the next step is LCA modelling. We do this by creating a digital twin, a digital model, of the product. We do this in LCA software, such as Simapro. Here, we link the data to datasets from LCI databases such as Ecoinvent.
We allocate an average of 2–4 weeks for this step.
4. Meeting to discuss preliminary results
The next step is a meeting with you, in which we discuss the preliminary results. This is the moment we take you through the data; what does all the data you have collected tell you about your product? This is often a moment when companies get to know their product in a whole new way.
During this meeting, we also discuss which data may still need to be supplemented, so that we can prepare the final LCA.
5. Finalising the LCA report
With the input from the joint meeting, we finalise the LCA. We compile the results in a comprehensive and clear report. With this report, you have insight into the precise environmental impact of your product, in all relevant impact categories.
The international standards ISO 14040 and ISO 14044 always form the basis for the LCA report. Depending on the sector and the purpose of the LCA, additional standards may be followed, such as the Product Environmental Footprint (PEF) method.
The report describes everything from the purpose and scope, assumptions, suppliers to the results. We also add a hotspot analysis and a sensitivity analysis. A hotspot analysis makes clear where the environmental hotspots are located; here the greatest or most notable environmental impact occurs.
In a sensitivity analysis, we test the "sensitivity" of certain parts of the LCA. This could be, for example, an assumption that contains a certain degree of uncertainty. In a sensitivity analysis, we therefore investigate how small changes in the data (such as energy use or material choice) affect the final result. This step checks whether the LCA results are really solid, or whether we need to do more research
6. Presenting results
In a meeting, we summarise the key results for you and answer any questions you may have about the LCA and its outcomes.
We also look together at what logical next steps could be. Now that you have the results of the LCA, you can use them for your further sustainability strategy. Read more about this in the next step.
7. Possible further steps
Some companies choose to have the corresponding Environmental Product Declaration (EPD) prepared after an LCA. An EPD is a standardized version of the results of the LCA, with company-sensitive information omitted. You may need an EPD, for example, because your customers ask for it, or you want to register your product in an EPD database.
We allocate 1-2 weeks for the preparation of an EPD. And verification takes 2-4 weeks, depending on which database you want to include the EPD in. Keep in mind that the external verifier and EPD database charge costs.
If you want to communicate externally about a comparison between your product and other option(s), according to ISO 14044 it is mandatory to have a so-called panel review take place. This means that external experts check whether the boundaries and assumptions in the LCA are correct and realistic. We also guide in setting up and conducting panel reviews.
On average, setting up and conducting a panel review takes about 2 to 3 months, so it's good to work towards this from the start of the LCA.
The results of the LCA study also form a good stepping stone to calculating your carbon footprint, setting Science Based Targets, or meeting CSRD requirements.
Contact us if you want to know more about the journey to an LCA report. Schedule a free 30-minute consultation with one of our experts.
