Understanding Life Cycle Assessment (LCA)

1. What is LCA? 

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Life Cycle Assessment, or LCA, is a method for quantifying the environmental impacts of a product, process, or service, taking into account all stages of its life cycle: from raw material production to end-of-life, including manufacturing or transportation. 

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Also known as cradle-to-grave analysis, LCA has become the reference method for assessing the environmental impacts of a product or service. First, because it considers, as we have said, all stages of the life cycle, but also because it integrates a multi-criteria approach. LCA thus compiles all incoming and outgoing flows associated with each stage of the product or service life cycle. For incoming flows, these can be raw materials or energy (oil, electricity, water), for example. And for outgoing flows, waste, emissions, or discharged liquids. 

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And since we are talking about a multi-criteria approach, it is necessary to well define and understand the different types of LCA that exist. 

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• ACV iso compliant

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This is the complete LCA, the one that complies with the standards ISO 14040 and 14044. 

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This is a multi-criteria LCA because it allows looking at all the impact indicators of a product or service: climate change (through CO2e emissions) but also ozone depletion, fine particle emissions, terrestrial and freshwater acidification, or freshwater eutrophication. These indicators are very numerous. And it is possible not to analyze all of them. Depending on the product or service on which the LCA will focus, the company can choose to select only a few indicators. The vision of the impact of the product or service analyzed may be a bit less exhaustive but more global. 

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To perform one, you need to follow 4 main steps: 

• definition of objectives and scope of the study
• life cycle inventory (LCI)
• impact assessment
• interpretation of results

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We will detail these 4 steps later in the article. The level of granularity of the data is adapted to the objectives of the study. The results of the LCA are the subject of a report that must also include the assumptions made and the data collected. It is this report that is finally reviewed by one or more third parties. This is what allows validating the results of the study. 

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• Simplified LCA

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This LCA follows the same process as an ISO 14040 standard LCA: objectives and scope of the study are defined, data is collected, impacts are assessed, and results are interpreted. However, the simplified LCA can "make do" with secondary data or focus on certain indicators rather than others depending on the product or service studied. Another difference, the simplified LCA report does not need to be reviewed. This type of study is very often used by companies to carry out eco-design studies and/or compare several products internally. 

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• Carbon footprint or Product Carbon Footprint (PCF)

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This LCA corresponds to the ISO 14067 standard. This methodology, also called product carbon footprint, will allow looking only at the greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions of a product or service, thus giving a precise idea of the carbon impact of the system observed. Again, the analysis covers all stages of the product or service life cycle and can be used to identify the most impactful stage on the total carbon footprint. The carbon footprint LCA can be used for the eco-design of a product. But it has its limits: what is good from a carbon point of view is not always good for other environmental indicators (on biodiversity, for example) and there may be impact transfers to other indicators. 

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2. Why do an LCA? 

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On this topic, you can consult our article: what LCA for what strategy?

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Companies are increasingly aware of the importance of understanding the environmental impact of their products. A carbon footprint assessment provides a first view of this impact. But it is a very broad view, at the company level and only on the climate change indicator. This is where LCA comes into its own: it allows you to zoom in on the environmental impact, not just climate change, of one or more products or services.

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• An eco-design approach

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According to the ADEME definition, “eco-design allows reducing the negative impacts on the environment of products, processes, or services throughout their life cycle”. In short, it aims to reduce all environmental impacts of products from their design stage. 

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To implement this approach, the first step is to assess the environmental performance of products or future products. It is from this analysis that the company can then work on improving the performance of its products. This is where LCA comes in, as it allows the company to identify the main impacts of its products or services throughout their life cycle. LCA also allows comparing two or more products internally, comparing one of its products with the competition, or comparing a current product with an alternative. 

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Carbon LCA can be used in an eco-design approach with the limitation already mentioned previously that this analysis only focuses on the impact on climate change and that there may be a transfer of impacts on other indicators. The ideal tool for eco-design remains a multi-criteria LCA in order to determine the overall environmental performance of the system studied. And the multi-criteria LCA can be a simplified LCA if the results are not published or do not serve to compare several products publicly between them. 

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• Communicating on the environmental performance of its products

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Companies are increasingly keen to communicate about the environmental impact of their products or services. LCA is therefore essential to make environmental claims. In this case, to publicly communicate about the impact of a product or to publicly compare several products, an LCA must be carried out that meets the ISO 14040 standards with a report reviewed by one or more third parties. 

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• Environmental display

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The deployment of environmental display, through a voluntary but regulated approach, is planned for 2024 for the textile and agri-food sectors. Other sectors will follow: furniture and cosmetics in particular. The work to define the calculation methodologies for textiles and agri-food is still ongoing. They should be unveiled at the end of 2023. But several impact criteria are already known. 

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Many of the impact criteria are linked to the LCA method but some concern other aspects. They are called non-LCA complements. But the latter remains the basic analysis, there is no environmental display without LCA.  

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3. How to do an LCA? 

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There are 4 main steps in conducting an LCA. 

3.1 Define the objective and scope of the study

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This is the first step of a life cycle analysis and it should not be neglected as it will determine what type of LCA is necessary, what level of detail is expected in the data collection, the results and their interpretation or even what are the impact indicators that will be retained. 

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• Study objective

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This is the reason why the company decides to carry out an LCA. Some examples:

• eco-design
• comparison of several products or services
• comparison with the competition
• environmental display
• encourage subcontractors to improve their environmental performance

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These objectives lead to the scope of the study.

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• The scope of the study

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This is when the type of LCA to be carried out is specified, as well as the main characteristics and assumptions chosen.

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• Are we going for a “cradle-to-grave” LCA, i.e. covering all stages of the product's life cycle, or a gate-to-gate LCA, i.e. focusing on a specific process?
• What is the functional unit of the product or service on which the LCA is based? This is fundamental in defining the scope of the study. The functional unit is the primary function, the service provided by the system studied.

Some examples of functional units: the number of times a garment is worn for the LCA of that garment, writing over a distance of 90km for the LCA of a pen, covering 15,000 km/year and for 20 years for the LCA of a car.

• Selection of environmental impact indicators and characterization methods.
• Methodological limitations.

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3.2 Life Cycle Inventory

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This is the most time-consuming step, corresponding to data collection. It involves tracing all the flows of the system studied: the incoming and outgoing flows. Incoming flows are the flows of raw materials, energy or even water that are involved at each stage of the life cycle. Outgoing flows are emissions into the air, water, soil and waste, again at each stage.

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Here you will find a simplified diagram of the flows of the company Picture Organic Clothing, in the textile sector, for which we carried out an LCA.

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Some examples of flows to consider in this LCA:

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• Composition of the garment: what raw material (cotton, polyester, wool, etc...) and the quantity of raw material (kg).
• Traceability: study of the countries in which the different phases of manufacture are carried out (spinning, weaving, assembly, etc...)
• Manufacturer data: energy used (coal, renewable electricity, etc...), quantity of energy consumed, chemicals, quantity of water used. If these specific data are not available, generic data can be used, which can be found in databases.
• Downstream: mode of transport used, distances, usage assumptions, end of life.

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Here are some databases used:

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• generalist databases: Ecoinvent, Gabi, Impacts database
• sectoral databases: Acyvia, Agribalyse or even AgriFootprint for the agri-food sector; Kering database or WALDB for textiles; Worldsteel for steel.

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3.3 Impact Assessment

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This involves converting the data collected into environmental impact potential. These conversions are most often done with software (SimaPro, Gabi, OpenLCA…).

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Very concretely, we multiply the collected flows by what are called characterization factors in order to obtain an environmental impact. For example, for the impact indicator on climate change, the unit used is the CO2 equivalent (CO2e). Thus, for all greenhouse gases that will appear in the life cycle inventory, they will need to be converted into CO2e by associating them with a characterization factor. For methane, for example, we know that 1 tonne of methane is equivalent to 28 tonnes of CO2. We will therefore multiply the methane flows by this factor of 28. Another example, for nitrous oxide, its global warming potential is 298 times higher than CO2. We therefore associate it with a factor of 298.

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Which environmental impact indicators to choose? Climate change? Ozone depletion? Eutrophication of fresh waters? As we said before, the impact categories are retained according to the objectives of the LCA set from the first step.

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Several options exist: 

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• Most companies that carry out one or more initial LCAs start by looking at all 15 of the impact indicators recommended by the European Commission. These potential impact indicators (also called midpoints) are the most well-known and precise. Next, for each indicator, the recommended characterization method is chosen. You can rely, for example, on European recommendations, via the EPLCA (European Plateform on Life Cycle Assessment). Several characterization methods can exist for the same indicator. 
• There are also damage indicators (also called endpoints). They estimate the potential damage caused by the environmental impacts of the product studied. Damage indicators are often found: human health, ecosystem or resources. These indicators are fewer in number and can therefore facilitate the understanding of the results. However, they are less used because they are less precise. 
• For an LCA carried out as part of environmental labeling, we will look at the indicators and characterization methods that are required in the reference associated with this labeling (see above and the section dedicated to environmental labeling). 

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3.4 Interpretation of results

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This is the final step of the LCA. Here, we validate that the results meet the objectives set at the beginning of the study. 

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Below you will find an example of anonymized results from an LCA that we have carried out. 

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Here, we decide to focus on two impact indicators: climate change and freshwater eutrophication. The impact potential is set at 100%. This allows us to see where the main environmental impacts are among the different phases of the life cycle. Here, the results are very clear since the vast majority of the impact for both indicators is at the manufacturing level. 

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It is quite possible to go further and “zoom in” within a phase of the life cycle to be more precise about the origin of the impacts. We could do this in this example for manufacturing to see if the impact comes from a product, energy, a particular supplier, etc… 

In the analysis and interpretation of the results, we can also work on a normalization of the impacts. We will look, for example, at the order of magnitude of the impact of the product compared to the impacts of an average European over a year.

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4. LCA and carbon footprint: differences and complementarity

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The carbon footprint is a snapshot at a given moment of all greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions related to the activities of the company.

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How to calculate the carbon footprint of a company? Discover our article.

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Two major differences with LCA should be noted: 

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• The scope of the study

The carbon footprint analyzes the GHG emissions of the company and its value chain and not of a product or service. Thus, in a carbon footprint, we will take into account all inputs, the impact of all products manufactured by the company but also the movements of employees (home-work and professional), food, assets or the energy used to heat the premises. While LCA focuses solely on the data of the product(s) studied. Travel is not taken into account, nor is food, etc. In short, LCA allows you to zoom in on the precise impact of a system studied where the carbon footprint allows you to have an overall view of the emissions related to the company's activity. 

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• The impact indicator

And since we are talking about emissions, this is the other major difference between these two methodologies. The carbon footprint allows to evaluate a company's dependence on carbon. And on carbon only. It is all its GHG emissions and those of its value chain that are traced. Thus, with the carbon footprint, we focus on the impact of the company's activities on climate change. Whereas the ISO compliant LCA looks at the impact of the product on climate change but also on many environmental indicators (freshwater eutrophication, resource depletion, air pollution, etc…).

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As a result, carbon footprint and LCA do not allow to achieve the same objectives. These are indeed two different tools for different applications. 

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However, while the applications of an LCA and a carbon footprint are different, these two methodologies are also complementary. 

First of all, by conducting an LCA on one or more products, specific data on the impacts of these analyzed products are obtained. However, the impact of these products is included in the calculation of the company's carbon footprint. By having precise data on the impact on climate change of its flagship products, those that are most sold for example, the company then gains a lot in precision on its carbon footprint. 

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And then, LCA and carbon footprint are complementary because both obviously fit into the company's climate strategy. Because it allows the company to provide very detailed levels of detail on GHG emissions and other environmental impacts of a product or service, the LCA allows going further than the carbon footprint. For example, it allows the company to commit to an eco-design approach and thus reduce the impact of its products, notably on climate change. Another example, by comparing several products or alternatives, it also allows the company to make the most sober choices in terms of impact again. Carbon footprint and LCA are thus complementary and essential tools for any company wishing to commit to an ambitious and effective strategy to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

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5. How to finance an LCA? 

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The Eco-design Diag

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The Eco-design Diag is a device funded by the ADEME and operated by Bpifrance. Its objective is to reduce the environmental impact of a product, service or process of a company thanks in particular to an environmental assessment based on life cycle analysis. 

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The support lasts between 6 and 8 months and includes: 

- An analysis of the context, definition of the perimeter and issues

- Awareness of eco-design and training of an eco-design referent

- The realization of an environmental assessment based on Life Cycle Analysis (LCA)

- Identification of eco-design levers

- Preparation for the implementation of an action plan

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SMEs with fewer than 250 employees and turnover of less than 50 million euros or a balance sheet total of less than 43 million euros are eligible. 

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After subsidy, the price is: 

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• 5400€ HT for companies with 1 to 49 employees and less than 10M€ in turnover or total balance sheet.
• 7200 € HT for companies with 50 to 249 employees and less than 50M€ in turnover or 43M€ in total balance sheet.

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Several of our consultants are part of the selected and authorized consultants to accompany companies in the Eco-design Diag and thus carry out LCAs within your company. 

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To understand everything about the Eco-design Diag, we invite you to watch the second part of the replay of our online workshop organized in September 2023 with the BPI and dedicated to the Eco-design Diag and the Decarbon'Action Diag. 

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Finally, many other devices exist to accompany companies in their climate strategy. 

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You will find the details of all these devices (definition, support, eligibility, subsidies) in this article.