Understanding Life Cycle Assessments (LCAs): A Comprehensive Guide

As a climate tech company focused on building a sustainable cold chain, we’re committed to helping businesses electrify their temperature-controlled supply chain.

To that end, we want to spotlight a powerful tool—the Life Cycle Assessment (LCA)—which helps companies understand and mitigate the environmental impacts of their operations.

In this article, we’ll explore what an LCA is, how it works, and why it’s crucial for understanding the system-level impact of the the cold chain logistics industry.

What is a Life Cycle Assessment (LCA)?

An LCA is a systematic analysis of the potential environmental impacts of a product throughout its entire life cycle.

This means measuring the environmental impacts from upstream manufacturing processes, transportation methods, and the product use phase, all the way to the end-of-life of a product.

An LCA measures the entire spectrum of environmental effects throughout a product's lifecycle. In addition to greenhouse gas emissions or CO2, an LCA will quantify the water usage, energy consumption, resource depletion and waste generation, as well as the impacts on ecosystems and human health.

Importance of LCAs

Since LCAs primarily focus on product-specific impacts rather than overall company emissions, they are a valuable tool for understanding and reducing the environmental footprint of a product throughout its lifecycle.

For example, by providing a detailed analysis of environmental impacts, LCAs can help companies make informed decisions about component choices, manufacturing processes, and supply chain transportation methods. It may also inform the selection of suppliers, manufacturers, or even warehouses.

Standards Governing LCAs

LCAs are governed by a set of global standards that provide a common language, useful guidelines, and reduce the potential for confusion. Two important standards are:

• ISO 14040: This standard focuses on the principles and framework of LCAs.
• ISO 14044: This standard provides detailed requirements and guidelines for how to conduct an LCA.

Although these standards provide a good foundation, conducting an LCA requires direction from researchers, as there is no single method for carrying out an assessment - it’s an art as much as a science. Thus, the best practice is to perform an LCA and review it with other industry experts to compare methodologies, get feedback, and ensure accuracy and comprehensiveness.

Steps to Conduct an LCA

Conducting an LCA involves four independent steps:

1. Determining the Goal and Scope of the Study
   • Why: To understand the purpose of the LCA and what it aims to achieve. Is the goal having a benchmark to understand your product’s environmental impact? A way to compare your product with the industry status quo? Or, a report to share with key stakeholders?
   • Functional Unit: Define a functional unit, which is a quantifiable measure that serves as a comparator between products and sizes. For example, an LCA of a wool rug may have a functional unit of one square meter, so that the LCA can be scaled appropriately based on each customer’s floor size.
   • Boundaries: Set the boundaries of the LCA by determining where the analysis will start and end. One of the common system boundaries is a cradle to grave approach, which includes everything from raw material extraction to the product's end-of-life. Another is a cradle to gate approach, which focuses on the environmental impacts associated with manufacturing and transportation up to the point of sale.
2. Compiling an Inventory of Relevant Energy and Material Inputs
   • This step includes detailed data gathering to understand the full supply chain, manufacturing processes, materials, size, weight, and other aspects of each component. It also involves measuring the relevant energy inputs, material inputs, and their associated outputs. This may require making any necessary assumptions where data may not be available.
3. Evaluating Potential Environmental Impacts
   • Leveraging LCA databases that provide standard conversion metrics for mapping environmental factors with common materials and processes, the LCA analysis begins.
4. Interpreting the Results
   • This interpretation helps in making informed decisions to mitigate negative environmental effects. At this stage, it's common practice to share your LCA methodology and results with others in the industry.

Conclusion

LCAs are essential tools for understanding the environmental impacts of a product. Although LCAs are not perfect, they are a meaningful way that businesses can begin to make informed decisions about how they manage a product throughout its lifecycle and reduce their environmental footprint.

At Artyc, we are dedicated to leveraging LCAs to measure the impact of our shippers, and to ensure that our operations and those of our customers are environmentally friendly.

Stay tuned for more insights and information on cold chain logistics and sustainable practices.

In Part 2 of this series, we share the details of our Medstow Micro LCA and how we’re using it to make decisions.