Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) consulting

A Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) is a method for quantifying the environmental impact of a product. It considers the entire life cycle, from raw material extraction, production, transport, use, to waste management.

An LCA provides insights into environmental impacts across various categories, such as climate change, land and water use, toxicity, and acidification. With this, giving comprehensive insights.

A carbon footprint is limited to greenhouse gas emissions and only shows the CO₂ impact. Both methods are similar, but an LCA is broader in scope.

An LCA provides detailed insights into environmental impact per life cycle stage and identifies the hotspots where the impact is most significant. The LCA report presents these impacts for each category in specific units and summarises them in charts and tables, offering clear guidance on how to reduce your environmental impact.

The insights from an LCA allow you to communicate your environmental impact clearly with stakeholders, such as investors, supply chain partners, and customers. You will understand where the greatest environmental impacts occur (the hotspots) and know what actions to take to reduce them.

An LCA depends heavily on data availability, and we aim to use as much primary data as possible. Primary data refers to information directly gathered from suppliers and other partners.

The data collection phase typically takes between 1–3 months, depending on the product and chain. Therefore, an average LCA process takes about 4–6 months.

The data required for an LCA includes details about raw materials and materials used (type, quantity, origin), production processes (energy consumption, energy sources, efficiency, transport), as well as transport modes, fuel types, and distances.

For some LCA's, the use and disposal stages are also considered, requiring data on energy use, product lifespan, maintenance, disposal, recycling potential, and waste flows.

This depends on your product: sometimes all the data is available within your organisation, but in other cases, you may need to request it from suppliers of raw materials or semi-finished products.

We provide a tailor-made data sheet to help you easily and clearly collect the required information. Additionally, our LCA team will assist and facilitate you throughout this phase.

It is helpful to have a primary contact responsible for data collection. Different departments, such as process and project managers, procurement, logistics, or R&D, may provide the data. We guide you through the entire process.