The Complete Guide to Life Cycle Assessment (LCA)
Life Cycle Assessments (LCAs) are increasingly necessary to prove the environmental credentials of your products and processes. LCAs are then able to help your products stand out in competitive markets, and stand behind the sustainable claims you make. But it can be daunting to know how to start, especially if environmental reporting isn’t your day job.
Our expert environmental consultants have therefore put together a comprehensive guide to Life Cycle Assessments. The full guide is available to access below.
In detail, the complete guide contains all the information you need to understand LCA, and what questions your internal team can expect. Plus, by downloading the guide you’ll also receive a comprehensive checklist to help you prepare for your own Life Cycle Assessment.
What is a Life Cycle Assessment (LCA)?
Life Cycle Assessments calculate the environmental impact of products, materials and processes. A LCA considers the entire life of a product, explicitly raw material extraction and processing, manufacturing and assembly, transportation and distribution, use and disposal.
As such, creating an LCA involves gathering data from each of these stages, and using it to build a model in LCA-specific software. This software combines your primary data (related to products, emissions, transportation etc.) with secondary data from databases such as Ecoinvent.
You can also find out how Blue Marble can support you in creating Life Cycle Assessments.
Why should you read The Complete Guide to LCA?
As a comprehensive handbook to help you navigate the complex world of environmental regulation, the guide is designed to support you in learning the basics of LCAs. Download The Complete Guide to Life Cycle Assessment to discover:
- Differences between Primary and Secondary Data, which are combined to build the LCA model
- The Scope and Boundaries typical in LCAs, such as cradle-to-gate, cradle-to-customer and cradle-to-grave
- How to follow the methodology of ISO 14040 so that your LCA is fully compliant
- What a Functional Unit (FU) is, and also how to identify the Functional Units for your products and processes
- The different types of data required at each lifecycle stage, starting with data on raw materials, processing and manufacturing