How To Use a Lifecycle Assesment

Brenden Macaluso

I’ve written previously about Life Cycle Assessment (LCA).  The idea of LCA is relatively new, becoming popular in the 1990s and continuing to grow.  When the basic concept of LCA was burgeoning in the industry, it was a considered to be a good tool to support sustainability claims that could eventually be used for marking purposes.

The Problem With Results

The problem is the LCA results tend to be very complex and not easy to express in a simple marketing product.  In 2000, Frankl and Rubik released a report showing the uses of LCA in industry.  They found that companies who used LCA were using it primarily for internal purposes.

In particular, they used this for product improvement, support for strategic choices, benchmarking, and external communication.  Companies were split in their original decision to employ LCA – bottom up or top down.  It turns out that either way the strategy was successful.
However there are pitfalls that can derail the LCA within the company.  Usually the problem is that the company has not clearly defined the purpose of using LCA.

When Marketing adopts the practice, they find that LCA results are difficult to communicate (see my blog entry on Hummer vs. Prius as an example).

When R&D adopts the practice, the issue of communication is less important – they are used for internal consumption.  But, according to Frankl and Rubik, if the first LCA gives unexpected results, some organizations use this as a reason to stop using it as a tool.  Of course other organizations take this as a positive learning experience.

Why Are You Using It?

LCA is an effective tool within an organization when they have a clear understanding of WHY they are using it; have a clear definition of how the results will be communicated both internally and externally; and have an appropriate budget to support the activity.

The budget concern is very real – in the early stages of LCA development, it is very slow and expensive to document every step of the process and collect all the relevant data. However once the process is in place, it is easier to maintain it.  Each successive LCA costs less and is faster than the previous one.

The Clear Benefit

One clear benefit to LCA is that regardless of the outcome, the staff become more aware of environmental impact in general, and learns the importance of accounting for all of the different phases of product life cycle.

“Life cycle assesment in industry and business: Adoption patterns, applications and implications”, P. Frankl and F. Rubik, The International Journal of Life Cycle Assessment, Vol 5, Number 3, May 2000.