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Life-Cycle Assessment (LCA) - Products
If you need a Life-Cycle Assessment (LCA) for a specific product or service CO2focus has the tools, experience and capability to do this. We are able to analyse complex product life-cycles and to deliver state of the art solutions to major international clients
CO2focus' purpose is to promote the use of LCA (see definition below) to make more informed decisions through a better understanding of the human health and environmental impacts of products, processes, and activities.
Life-Cycle Assessment (LCA) models the complex interaction between a product and the environment from cradle to grave. It is also known as Life Cycle Analysis or Ecobalance.
What is the ecobalance of a product? Products themselves do not pollute, it is the factories that made them, the trucks that transported them, the user who uses them and the incinerator that burns them. You need life-cycle thinking to understand how products impact on the environment. If you want to be more precise, you need life-cycle assessment (LCA) to quantify and balance the impacts of products.
U.S. Environmental Protection Agency guidelines presents the four basic stages of conducting an LCA: goal and scope definition, inventory analysis, impact assessment, and interpretation. The major stages in an LCA study are raw material acquisition, materials manufacture, production, use/re-use/maintenance and waste management. The system boundaries, assumptions, and conventions to be addressed in each stage are presented.
http://www.epa.gov/nrmrl/lcaccess/
The LCA methodology is described in detail by SETAC and CML (University of Leiden).
In SETAC's Code of Practice, it is recommended that the LCA be split into five stages.
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1. Planning
- Statement of objectives
- Definition of the product and its alternatives
- Choice of system boundaries
- Choice of environmental parameters
- Choice of aggregation and evaluation method
- Strategy for data collection
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2. Screening
- Preliminary execution of the LCA
- Adjustment of plan
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3. Data collection and data treatment
- Measurements, interviews, literature search, theoretical calculations, database search, qualified guessing
- Computation of the inventory table.
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4. Evaluation
- Classification of the inventory table into impact categories
- Aggregation within the category (characterization)
- Normalization
- Weighting of different categories (valuation)
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5. Improvement assessment
- Sensitivity analysis
- Improvement priority and feasibility assessment
Why is LCA documentation important for international brand owners? Governments and customers simply expect that companies pay attention to the environmental properties of all products. EMAS, BS and ISO 14000 series demand continuous improvement in your environmental management system. LCA and its utilisation for product/process improvement is the way to meet this demand.
In a bid to push processors, manufacturers and vendors to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions, the EU/EES governments will propose new regulations to put "environmental product declaration" (EPD) labels on all products. The voluntary labelling scheme would help companies to measure the greenhouse gases associated with their products and reduce them. Products will display labels showing the greenhouse gas emissions created by their production, transportation, consumption and disposal, similar to the calorie or salt content figures on food packaging. The EU/EES proposal on EDP labelling is part of a wider government plan to reduce the environmental impact of doing business. Proposals on packaging waste reduction and other "green" measures are already impacting processors. This is a source of immense opportunities to pro-active companies and major international market operators.
The UNEP (The United Nations Environment Programme) Life-cycle Initiative is a response to the call from governments for a life-cycle economy in the Malmo Declaration (2000). It contributes to the 10-year framework of programmes to promote sustainable consumption and production patterns, as requested at the World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg (2002).
http://jp1.estis.net/builder/includes/page.asp?site=lcinit&page_id=9FDF7FDF-261F-4F0E-A8E3-5FF4E16B33C2
Contact our product manager:
Per Otto Larsen
