Using Lifecycle Thinking
Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) is a technique used to measure environmental impacts of all sorts of products, including foodstuffs, electrical devices, building components and packaging materials. It works by effectively creating a catalogue of everything that goes into — and comes out of — the system to make a product. This cataloguing applies across the entire product ‘life-cycle’, often described as from cradle to grave, which means every stage from extraction of raw materials, through manufacturing, transport, retail, consumer use, and eventual recycling or disposal. The list of inputs and outputs are then translated into environmental impacts including climate change, human & water toxicity, acidification, particulates (air quality), resource depletion and many more.
LCAs have been performed and published for all manner of products. When performed correctly, LCA results can be used: for comparing similar products to assess relative environmental performance; to identify hot spots within a supply chain to focus reduction efforts; to gain insights into environmental performance at the early stages of product design; and to inform policy makers (particularly popular in Europe).
LCA in practice
As useful as it is, LCA is not without its issues. There are the operational challenges associated with getting access to the necessary data to enable comparisons, and the sheer analyst time it can take (six figure project values are not unheard of!) but perhaps more fundamental, is the reliance on system modelling, leading to a dependence on analyst judgement and underlying assumptions.
As an example, I have been closely following the public reaction to plastic packaging, and the market response. Given the alternative materials available for food packaging such as cardboard (e.g. for fruit punnets), aluminium cans and glass bottles, LCA would appear the perfect tool to measure environmental performance and identify the best format. From a brief Google search however, it is easy to find three LCA studies for beverage containers which each find in favour of plastic, glass and aluminium — so it’s always worth reading the small print and who commissioned the research!
Lifecycle thinking
The good news is that many of the advantages of LCA can be accessed using quicker, simplified approaches if you know what to look out for. The fundamental concepts of LCA can be translated as a way of thinking, rather than a heavyweight, fully documented analysis. Loosely termed ‘lifecycle thinking’, this more informal approach can be used to inform discussions, for brainstorming, and quick options appraisal.
The essential requirements include:
Clear unit of study: what is the function of the product in question?
Agree impact categories: which environmental issues matter (most)?
Define system boundaries: where does product system start and end?
Map out product lifecycle: what are the core inputs and outputs?
Each of these elements guides the discussion, focusing attention on what matters and ensuring there aren’t important activities that are overlooked when considering design changes. And from this solid foundation, it is straightforward to upgrade the insights into a streamlined LCA that adds data to populate the lifecycle framework.
Making it work for design
There is a widely cited statistic that 80% of environmental impacts are determined at the design stage, so having the ability to determine these impacts to inform decision making is vital. However, full blown LCAs require enormous depth and rigour, and can be very time consuming and costly to perform — attributes that are not necessarily helpful in the early stages of design.
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Author: Alex Hetherington, Senior Consultant at 3Keel
