How life cycle assessments can help your business

The best tool for businesses measuring their environmental impact is the life cycle assessment (LCA). LCAs track the environmental impacts of products and processes from creation to disposal. Ideally, sustainably minded businesses use them to understand how their goals match up to reality.

In reality, LCAs have complexities and nuances that can lead to greenwashing and misinterpretation. But they are still one of the best tools businesses have for tracking environmental impact and making positive changes.

Here are a few recommendations for using and understanding LCAs.

How to understand LCAs

LCAs are holistic evaluations for understanding of the sustainability of a product, process, or system. They help decision-makers identify trade-offs between environmental, economic, and social impacts and make informed choices for sustainable development.

However, LCAs are only as good as the data they use. Limited data or inappropriate data-set substitutions across product life cycle stages can impact LCA results or lead to errors or distortions.

Preexisting perceptions, use of certain terminology, or hard-to-decipher scientific data can also create audience misunderstandings of LCAs. I recommend presenting information in LCAs using clear language and visuals to avoid its readers experiencing these issues. Also, using clear and readily accessible data sources is crucial.

Why use LCAs?

LCAs help companies improve internal processes and identify problem areas for mitigating environmental impact. LCAs are also helpful for making sure organizations meet or exceed environmental regulations and standards.

Using these assessments can help organizations ensure products and services meet consumer demand for environmental responsibility, with the scientific backing to be marketed as “eco-friendly” or “sustainably produced” if the company is marketing them that way.

LCA limitations

No two LCAs are precisely the same. Variability arises from differences in software, data sources, and methodology. Different software tools have distinct databases and acquisition methods, leading to variations in results.

Because LCAs rely on life cycle models, they may not be fully accurate. Assumptions must be made about product distance shipping or electricity usage on a typical day, for example.

Data availability is another issue. Many times, specific product components are not available in the LCA software datasets. For accuracy, it can be worthwhile to invest in custom data sets for your novel ingredients, as my company did.

Peer review questions also contribute to limitations. While comparative LCAs require peer-review under ISO 14040 (an international standard for LCAs), non-comparative LCAs do not require peer review.

Just as we differentiate between the context of a news article versus an opinion piece, we must understand the review process of each LCA.

Communicate results

LCAs are complex and offer diverse insights. One obstacle to avoid is misinterpreting complicated results.

Plastics, for instance, are lightweight but have slow biodegradation timelines. The transportation and disposal portions of their life cycles sometimes yield low CO2 emissions compared to other biodegradable products. This means plastics must be examined holistically. By ignoring impacts on human health, landfill space, and marine ecosystems, stakeholders may misinterpret LCA findings.

We can more appropriately understand their positive impacts by creating a deeper understanding of what LCAs explain and don’t explain.

Why LCAs are invaluable

Even though they aren’t perfect, LCAs are invaluable for businesses that want to understand their environmental impact.

In an ideal world, there would be more standardization above and beyond the ISO standards. But even without them, LCAs are a massively important business tool. It’s a shame more organizations don’t know about them.

Businesses that embrace LCAs will have a clear competitive advantage as the marketplace moves increasingly toward more efficient energy usage and more sustainable material usage throughout their supply chains.

John Felts is CEO and cofounder of Cruz Foam.