But it’s all about environmental impact and performance.ĭesign: what changes can we make to the product to lessen its environmental impact? By quantifying the environmental impacts at the different stages of producing the product or service, stakeholders may understand what changes to make at the distinct stages to improve environmental outcomes overall.Īn LCA can be used by different people for different things. LCAs thus permit us to quantify environmental impacts and make better environmental decisions. It is very hard for individuals to assess the actual environmental impacts of a product or service without quantifying the inputs and outputs as is done in an LCA. It might be that different alternative ways of creating a product or providing a service are being compared to see which has a lower environmental impact. The stated purpose of an LCA is to find the environmental impacts of a product, service or material, typically so some decision can be made in the design of that item or in the formulation of some policy. There have been LCAs on all manner of things from diapers to jet engines, on entire systems like recycling, and on comparing materials like glass versus plastic. It’s called “life cycle” because it usually takes the entire existence of the product into account: from the raw material stage of putting the product together, through the use phase where the service, material or product serves its’ purpose, to the “end-of-life” stage where the product is broken down in whatever fashion occurs. Ultimately, an LCA is interested in what we have to take from the environment, in terms of raw materials and energy, and what impact the product then has on the environment during its use (or the service, or the material). An LCA is a standardised method to quantitatively assess environmental impacts. They are as close to the gold standard of understanding the environmental consequences of a product as researchers can currently get. There’s more than one type of LCA as it happens, but they all do the same thing: measure environmental impacts of a product, service or material.
What’s The Purpose Of A Life Cycle Assessment? What Is An Environmental Life Cycle Assessment? There's quite a lot involved in an LCA and they can be quite costly and time consuming to implement, but they help us understand how different products and services, when designed differently, can reduce the impact we have on our planet. This helps us compare between products, materials, and methods used, providing useful information by which to make decisions that could help the environment. An LCA measures the environmental impacts of each distinct part involved in creating and using products and services, such as energy used in production, fuel used in transport, and end-of-life ecological costs. So what is a life cycle analysis (LCA), what do they tell us and why are they so important? In short, a life cycle analysis is the act of measuring the environmental impact of a product or service throughout its life cycle, from the resources used to create the product or service, across its use by the user, to it's final end of life destination. Life cycle analysis and life cycle assessment are the same thing, the latter is the term more widely adopted in the US whereas the former is used more often within the UK
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