FAQ's

LCA helps organizations make informed decisions to minimize environmental impacts, improve resource efficiency, and enhance sustainability by identifying hotspots in the life cycle.

The life cycle typically includes stages such as raw material extraction, production, use, and end-of-life.

The reference service life in LCA refers to the assumed or declared period of time over which a product, process, or service is expected to fulfil its intended function. It is a critical parameter in life cycle assessments as it influences the allocation of environmental impacts over the entire life cycle. Accurate determination of the reference service life is essential for meaningful assessments and comparisons between different alternatives.

There are five main types of system boundaries in LCA:

1. Cradle-to-Gate (Partial) Boundary: This boundary includes all life cycle stages from raw material extraction (cradle) to the point where the product leaves the factory gate. It does not consider the product's use or end-of-life stages.

2. Cradle-to-Grave (Full) Boundary: This boundary encompasses all life cycle stages, including raw material extraction, production, use, and end-of-life disposal or recycling. Cradle-to-grave assessments provide a more comprehensive view of the product's environmental impacts.

3. Cradle to Cradle: Cradle-to-cradle is a specific kind of cradle-to-grave assessment, where the end-of-life disposal step for the product is a recycling process.

4. Gate to Gate: Gate to Gate includes the processes from the production phase only; used to determine the environmental impacts of a single production step or process.

5. Gate to grave: Gate to grave method is an assessment of a partial product life cycle includes manufacturing phase, use phase and disposal phase of the product. This stage phase doesn’t involve raw material extraction stage.

Comprehensive data on energy consumption, raw material use, emissions, and waste generation at each life cycle stage are necessary.

Environmental impacts are evaluated through impact categories such as climate change, resource depletion, and toxicity. These impacts are quantified and assessed using specialized methods.

Weighting is the step in Life Cycle Assessment where we assign importance or significance to different environmental impacts. Not all impacts are equally critical, so weighting helps us prioritize and focus on the aspects that matter most to create a more balanced and meaningful assessment.

Normalization in Life Cycle Assessment involves putting the environmental impacts into context by comparing them to benchmarks or standards. It helps us understand the scale of impact in relation to global or regional norms, making it easier to interpret and communicate the significance of the environmental effects associated with a product, process, or service.

In Life Cycle Assessment (LCA), "cutoff" refers to the decision or limit set on excluding certain processes or inputs from the analysis based on their perceived relevance or significance. The cutoff criteria are established to focus the assessment on the most relevant and impactful stages of a product, process, or service's life cycle.

Climate change refers to long-term changes in temperature, precipitation, and other atmospheric conditions on Earth. Global Warming Potential (GWP) is a measure used in environmental science to understand how much a certain amount of a substance, like a greenhouse gas, will contribute to the overall warming of the Earth's atmosphere. Essentially, GWP helps us assess the impact of different substances on global warming.

GWP 100 is a specific measure within Global Warming Potential that looks at the warming impact of a substance over a 100-year period. It's like asking, "If we release a certain amount of a gas today, how much will it contribute to global warming over the next century?" GWP 100 helps compare the long-term effects of different greenhouse gases.

Biogenic carbon comes from living organisms or recently living materials. When we talk about biogenic carbon in the context of climate change, we're usually referring to carbon dioxide (CO2) that comes from renewable sources, like plants. These sources are part of the natural carbon cycle, and the carbon they release is considered part of a balanced system, as opposed to fossil carbon from long-buried sources, which disrupts the balance when released into the atmosphere.

LCA can help businesses identify opportunities for efficiency improvements, reduce environmental impacts, and meet sustainability goals, leading to enhanced competitiveness.

The softwares that can be used for LCA are SimaPro, Gabi, openLCA, Umberto, etc.

Yes, LCA allows for the comparison of different options by assessing their environmental impacts on a standardized basis.

Yes, organizations can use LCA results to support environmental claims and certifications, such as eco-labels.