What is a Life Cycle Assessment and Why You Need One

Article
February 11, 2024

The world is moving toward sustainability more and more, and as it does it is becoming more important than ever to understand exactly how your company performs with regard to its environmental footprint. This information is critical for companies as investors, customers, and partners are demanding sustainably sourced goods and services. 

Understanding a product’s life cycle can be difficult and complex. There are many hidden environmental impacts that can be difficult to uncover.

A life cycle assessment can help you understand your product’s impact, and equip you with the knowledge you need to know in order to take advantage of new opportunities and grow your business.

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What is a Life Cycle Assessment?

A life cycle assessment provides a comprehensive evaluation of the environmental impacts at each stage of a product’s life cycle, from resource extraction through to product end-of-life, and every stage between—manufacturing, shipping, and use.

The assessment identifies supply chain hotspots and provides a starting point for targeted improvements. These insights can increase resource efficiency, waste reduction, and supply chain optimization, resulting in cost savings and reduced emissions.

Why is Doing a Life Cycle Assessment Important? 

Whether you’re preparing for your next round of funding, marketing your products, or simply seeking to make continuous improvements to reduce your environmental impact, a life cycle assessment can help.

The insights provided by this process can be used to attract customers, funders and investors, and equip you with the knowledge you need to know to understand the demands of a dynamic market. 

Our life cycle assessment program gives you the data and insights on your company's environmental impacts and emissions so that you can have confidence in your value proposition and impact. We work with companies to measure the carbon footprint of their supply chain to equip them with vital data and understanding to work to reduce the carbon footprint of their products.

We can provide you with actionable insights on efficiency to allow optimization in your operations. The detailed life cycle assessment allows companies to evaluate the environmental impacts at every stage of their product’s life cycle, enabling them to take informed action in product and process design or to make changes within their supply chain for continuous improvement to reduce environmental impacts.

The Life Cycle Assessment Process

Our life cycle assessment process is focused on providing cleantech companies with data and insights on the environmental impacts of their operations to provide confidence in the sustainability of their products or services. We do this in a three-step process:

  • Discover: our team will work with you to understand your company’s sustainability goals and intended outcomes for the life cycle assessment.
  • Data Collection: based on your needs for the life cycle assessment, we will work with you to collect relevant data and engage stakeholders.
  • Analysis and Reporting: we will model and perform an impact assessment and summarize the results in a technical report that you can share with stakeholders.

These insights will lead to strategies in resource efficiency, optimized investment strategies, and supply chain transformation, resulting in a more efficient, focused pathway to net zero. Our life cycle assessment program will:

  • Measure the carbon footprint of your product or service
  • Identify supply chain hotspots, offering a foundation for targeted enhancements.
  • Obtain valuable environmental impact insights that can be communicated to customers, funders, and investors
  • Enable stakeholders to take meaningful action

Who needs to do a Life Cycle Assessment?

Are you developing or implementing decarbonization technologies but aren’t sure how to measure your results?

Cleantech companies that are interested in measuring and reducing the carbon footprint of their products, processes, or services, or ventures looking to highlight the environmental benefits to investors and customers can find out how a life cycle assessment can benefit them with our Program Guide.

Download our Life Cycle Assessment Program Guide to learn more! Need more information? Contact us today.