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Life Cycle Assessments (LCA) are the key to conquering carbon. In this episode, Tad and Julianna discuss what an LCA is, how to use an LCA to understand the impacts of raw materials in products, and how organizations can use the information they get from an LCA.
What is a life cycle assessment (LCA)?
LCA is a study of a product or a service from cradle to grave. Unfortunately, we have to say cradle to grave because our whole society is based on making something, using it, and then disposing of it. Really what we're looking at is the very beginning stages of the life of a product. A product starts out with raw materials. So for example, the paper we write on goes through an entire life cycle process before it becomes the final product.
So what we look at with LCA is every step in the process it takes for a tree to become paper. In the raw materials extraction stage, a logger cuts down the trees. The trees are then going to be transported out of the forest. The logs it gets loaded onto a log truck and transported to a facility to be processed. When they're processing the log, they'll remove the bark and then grind the tree up to start making it into pulp. Then they go through a whole process of making paper.
There is energy and fuel associated with all of those steps I just explained. Fuel is used when the logger comes in with the chainsaw to cut down the tree. Fuel is also used in the equipment that drags the tree out of the forest and puts it on the log truck as well as the log truck that transports it. There are a lot of inputs of energy and emissions at the facility where they remove the bark and process the wood into paper. These life cycle stages cover the raw materials extraction phase, initial product manufacturing phase, and the final product manufacturing phase would be where that pulp is converted into the paper. The paper is then packaged up and shipped to your local Staples or wherever you buy your paper. And then we eventually buy it. We use it. And then at the end of use, or end of life, that paper will either go into the landfill, get recycled, or go off to waste to energy.
How do you Use lCA to understand the impacts of the raw materials that go into the final product?
Typically what they're going to do is use an LCA software. We use SimaPro and GaBi at our company. This software actually has a lot of that data already built in. We call those data sets or processes. In that paper example I gave, if you wanted to understand what it took to get the logs out of the woods and off to the manufacturing site, you could go into your software. You would look in either the US LCI Database or the ecoinvent database, or there's a lot of other ones in there. Then you would say, ‘I'm looking for paper making or pulp production,’ and you would go in and find that information. You could then read all about it and see what steps it covers. Then you'd grab that, and you pull that into your LCA model. Once we have all the data from all the life cycle phases for the products, we run the analysis and we are going to get results. The results are typically going to be in the form of different impacts that occur at each life cycle stage.
What can an organization do with this lCA information?
A lot of the companies that ask us to do this LCA work are trying to meet a requirement. The United States Green Building Council has credits in the LEED standard standard for green buildings, that you can earn by selecting products that have these things called Environmental Product Declarations (EPDs). Most companies want us to conduct an LCA so they publish an EPD. An EPD is a much more simplified document that doesn't disclose all the company's top secret information like their bill of materials, recipes, or their manufacturing processes. EPDs give enough information to understand the impacts of the product and architects and designers can look at that information and try to select products with lower impacts.
That's a big movement right now in the green building world. Many architects and designers are really committing to selecting products with reduced embodied carbon or reduced global warming potential in their life cycle. However, I don't recommend that companies go through this process just to meet a LEED credit. I strongly recommend that they take this information and use it to understand all the impacts across their life cycle. Then they should use that to do sustainable product innovation in their new product development process.
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