A primer on lifecycle assessment

Linda Brown

The term “lifecycle assessment” (LCA), once an obscure term, is today a hot topic of discussion among businesses of all kinds. For decades, companies such as Coca Cola (NYSE: KO) and Procter & Gamble (NYSE: PG) have been using LCA to help guide internal product and packaging development.

In the 90s, a Clinton administration executive order cited LCA as a tool to determine whether products are environmentally preferable. Now, Wal Mart (NYSE: WMT) has launched a multi-stakeholder initiative to establish a global product database based on LCA, to be used as the basis of its long-anticipated Sustainability Index

So, what exactly is LCA, and what do you need to know as you consider putting it to use?

LCA quick overview
LCA is a method for evaluating products to determine their environmental and human health consequences from “cradle to grave”—that is, from the time raw materials are extracted from the earth to manufacture products through the end of the product’s useful life, when materials are disposed of or recycled. Companies use LCA in product development to choose from among different materials and designs. Power utilities use LCA to evaluate options for meeting growing electricity demand. Policymakers use LCA to evaluate different policy and regulatory approaches, and to screen applicants for government funds. Procurement officials, retailers and consumers increasingly use LCA information to make product choices.

Historically, LCA grew out of the desire to better understand the material and energy flows in industrial systems, in response to concerns about the long-term availability of resources. As an engineering science, LCA involved establishing an “inventory” of the inputs and outputs of the system. It was only later that practitioners began to track environmental emissions data and evaluate the environmental and human health impacts associated with these inputs and outputs.

Challenges in practice
LCA is an easy concept to grasp, but a complex analysis to perform. It took more than 40 years to mature this process to the point where the basic analytical framework could be internationally standardized (ISO-14044). This framework lays out separate steps for establishing study goals and scope, collecting inventory data, classifying and characterizing these data to evaluate their environmental and human health significance (“impact assessment”), and interpreting results. But the framework alone does not guarantee the thoroughness or accuracy of the LCA conducted.

Some common problems encountered include:

Chasing irrelevant data. Given the cradle-to-grave scope, practitioners can waste countless hours (and dollars) chasing down data that do not materially affect the environmental or human health profile of the product. Practiced properly, LCA is an iterative process by which it is possible to screen out unnecessary data collection through successive review and sensitivity analysis.

Hidden assumptions in LCA software. Off-the-shelf software tools are designed to make LCA more accessible by non-experts, but this accessibility comes at a cost.  Such tools are replete with hidden assumptions, such as weighting factors that overrate the significance of some results and mask the importance of others. “Black box” calculation algorithms buried within the software often leave out critical data needed to determine the linkages between inputs, outputs, and the actual effects they cause. As a result, these tools frequently fall short of the rigor needed to support decision-making and comparisons.

Outdated metrics. Methods for conducting impact assessments have continued to undergo improvements and refinements. Depending on the model or practitioner selected, you could be the beneficiary of these improvements, or saddled with an assessment that provides irrelevant or misleading results. Some important developments in impact assessment involve the integration of environmental “fate and transport” modeling data, the incorporation of biological indicators, and the use of factors that account for regional variability.  

For instance, LCA advances now point to multiple indicators for assessing climate change impacts—not just in terms of annual greenhouse gas emissions, but also in terms of the accumulation of these emissions over time, and important regional differences.

Standards on the horizon
A substantial body of LCA inventory data have been generated. The U.S. National Renewable Energy Laboratory is one of several national and international repositories of such data. Now, the Sustainability Consortium, established by Wal-Mart and jointly administered by the University of Arkansas and Arizona State University, has set out to create a global LCA database on products that can, in turn, be used as the basis of sustainability rankings.  

LCA is also creeping into the general vernacular, heard on radio talk shows and appearing in articles. In terms of green marketing, LCA based claims are now used regularly to differentiate products. In his recent book, “Ecological Intelligence,” Dan Goleman argues for “radical transparency” in the next wave of green labeling, using lifecycle information to “introduce an openness about the consequences of the things we make, sell, buy and discard that goes beyond the current comfort zones of most businesses.”

Meanwhile, substantive decisions about the direction of LCA practice in the United States are now taking place inside the multi-stakeholder American National Standards Institute and American Society for Testing and Materials processes. A battle is brewing over the metrics and methods, with real consequences for the decisions we make. My November column will seek to address this debate.

To learn more about developments in LCA, go to: www.iso.org/iso/catalogue_detail.htm?csnumber=38498.  

Linda Brown is executive vice president of Scientific Certification Systems, a third-party certifier of environmental, sustainability and food claims, and an internationally recognized lifecycle assessment practitioner.