Life Cycle Assessment: The Ultimate Tool for Reducing Product Environmental Impacts

In today's world, where environmental concerns are top of mind for many consumers, the scrutiny of product environmental impacts has intensified. With consumers demanding greater transparency and accountability from corporations, understanding and mitigating the environmental impacts of products has become essential. As expectations for corporate accountability rise, companies must not only comply with regulations but also meet the heightened demands of a more informed and discerning public.

SCS Global Services (SCS) Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) team supports businesses in achieving these goals. By conducting thorough LCAs and providing verified Environmental Product Declarations (EPDs), SCS empowers companies to transparently communicate their environmental performance and make impactful changes.

In this blog, we offer insights into our LCA process and explore how LCA can support companies as they demonstrate their commitment to sustainability and environmental stewardship.

What is a Life Cycle Assessment?

Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) is the systematic study of environmental and human health impacts over all life cycle stages of a product, including raw material extraction, manufacturing, transportation, use and maintenance, and disposal. LCAs enable greater transparency into supply chains and allow companies to make data-based decisions to decrease their impact on the environment.  

An Environmental Product Declaration (EPD) is a verified report based on an LCA study. It is used to communicate information about the potential environmental and human health impacts of a product. It states what a product is made of and how it impacts the environment and is generally governed by rules put forth in Product Category Rules or PCRs. PCRs are category-specific standards which define how to conduct the LCA for the product category being assessed (e.g., furniture, textiles, etc.). It lays out which impacts must be reported and ensures that all EPDs under the same category report the same information.

Maximizing the Benefits of LCAs

To get the most accurate results possible, LCA practitioners collect a wide range of data from clients regarding their product and supply chain. This data collection process includes understanding what data are requested by the LCA practitioner and acquiring it from company records, after which the practitioner validates and models the data in LCA software. Data are collected for a specific time period, typically one year.  

The types of data collected include: energy and water consumption, waste generation, materials and packaging used for manufacturing, and supplier locations and transportation distances. It is important to ensure that these data are correct and consistent, because even small deviations can lead to big differences in a product’s final impact results. If certain data are onerous to collect, the LCA practitioner can use assumptions and estimations based on data in literature to provide a reasonable estimation. Primary data, however, are always the most valuable and produce the best results.  

Mind the (Data) Gap

A very common occurrence in LCA concerns inevitable gaps in essential data. Throughout SCS’ more than three decades of experience in LCA, we’ve learned that a common gap in data occurs because some companies may not be able to track, monitor, or curate data for energy, water, or waste at a product level across the entire manufacturing process. Instead, companies may only collect data at a facility level — and facilities often produce many different products, not just those that we are interested in modeling.  

To resolve this issue, our technical team can perform different allocation approaches. Two of the more common approaches involve collecting the total mass or total revenue of all products produced at a facility and dividing the facility level data by these quantities.  

For example, a hypothetical chemical facility produces two chemicals, A and B, which have similar weights. Chemical A, however, costs ten times more than Chemical B. Using economic allocation, the environmental impacts from that manufacturing facility will be allocated in the ratio of 10:1 to Chemicals A and B, in line with the economic values of the products. For mass allocation, that ratio would be 1:1. LCA practitioners generally test all possible allocation methods using sensitivity analyses for added transparency, and by providing this data, LCA practitioners can apply their expertise to ensure each product is allocated the correct impact.

Companies are often understandably hesitant to share these types of proprietary data, but this information is not published in the LCA. Furthermore, practitioners are under exclusive Non-Disclosure Agreements.

The Value of LCA Expertise

LCAs are complex studies that require highly trained technical staff. And while the process of collecting essential data is more or less straight forward, true LCA expertise is demonstrated across a much wider range of technical skills honed over decades, such as choosing the appropriate datasets for modeling, validating the data, handling data gaps, interpreting complex standards, and conducting additional research as needed to strengthen the LCA. The SCS LCA team has combined decades of experience working in a range of specialties including construction products, interior building materials and furniture, textiles, agriculture, chemicals, and recycling industries to name a few.

Small Changes Add up to Big Impacts

Performing LCAs over time and across different industries reveals several interesting and often surprising trends about the environmental impacts of products and the materials that are used to produce them. These trends help identify some small tweaks that companies can make to their manufacturing processes to reap some big benefits in terms of environmental impact. 

One straightforward change is to incorporate the use of more renewable energy at the manufacturing facility. Generally, companies pull from regional grids that have a fixed share of renewable energy. This share can be boosted by installing on-site solar or wind energy generation or buying directly from renewable energy suppliers. To contextualize these benefits, the life cycle greenhouse gas emissions from electricity generated using wind are about 90 times lower than from coal.  

Another interesting category of changes is material substitutions. Clinker is a commonly used raw material in the making of cement. Clinker is produced by mixing limestone and clay in a kiln at a high temperature, which releases carbon dioxide and contributes to global warming impacts. Replacing clinker with industrial waste materials like fly ash or blast furnace slag can be effective ways to reduce the impacts associated with cement manufacturing.

Additionally, procuring raw materials with a higher recycled content is another way to decrease the impact of your product.  Using the cut-off method of allocation, which posits that any secondary material entering the product system comes burden-free, recognizes the benefits from the use of recycled materials. Steel, for example, can be produced using two methods: using a basic oxygen furnace (BOF) or using an electric arc furnace (EAF). EAF steel generally contains 90-95% recycled raw materials — as opposed to 30% for BOF steel. The greenhouse gas emissions for BOF steel are 1.6 times that for EAF steel, and thus replacing BOF steel with EAF steel is an effective way to decrease the impact of products that use a lot of steel.

The manufacturing and upstream materials stages of a product life cycle are often the biggest contributors to environmental impact and are also the stages that companies have the most control over. Small changes in these life cycle stages can help companies see a drastic reduction in overall impact.

SCS Global Services — Offering LCA for over 30 Years

SCS has served as a global leader in third-party environmental and sustainability verification, certification, auditing, testing, and standards development since 1984, and we have an experienced in-house LCA team that manages every aspect of the LCA/EPD process. We can collaborate with you to ensure a smooth, efficient LCA and an accurate EPD, supporting you during every step of the process. As a Program Operator, we offer two services: 

1. LCA and EPD Development. SCS conducts the LCA and prepares the EPD report based on the appropriate PCR. We then work with an external third-party to independently verify both the LCA Report and the EPD before publishing. If a PCR is not available for your industry’s category, SCS can help with the development of a PCR.
2. EPD Verification. If you already have completed an LCA, SCS can critically review the LCA and provide a template for the EPD. SCS will verify the EPD against the LCA report and designated PCR.

Going through the LCA/EPD process will allow you to identify the various environmental and human health impacts of each life cycle stage of your product and develop ways you can reduce them. 

Learn More About LCAs

You can learn more about LCAs here. If you are interested in SCS’ LCA services, please contact us for a no- charge discussion about your project needs.