LCA without overkill: how to choose the right approach for your goals

What is a Life Cycle Assessment?

A Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) is the most accurate method for mapping the full impact of a product or process throughout its life cycle. While Scope 3 is usually calculated organization-wide, an LCA provides crucial emission factors for specific products and raw materials, which customers and suppliers use for their calculations.

Additionally, an LCA helps your organization meet the reporting requirements of various sustainability frameworks, which call for transparent reporting on different environmental impacts such as CO₂emissions, water usage, and biodiversity.

The detailed data from an LCA helps you fulfill these obligations at the product level and contributes to consistent and accurate reporting. You then use these insights to make the right sustainable choices.

How an LCA Guides Sustainable Choices

Setting the Right Priorities

An LCA shows you exactly where the greatest environmental gains can be made.

For example: Suppose an LCA shows that 60% of a product's environmental impact comes from the raw materials used. This immediately provides direction: by revising material choices or selecting alternative suppliers, you can both reduce the ecological footprint and save costs.

Substantiating Strategic Choices

With LCA data, you can not only confidently make strategic investments in green technology but also convincingly defend them.

These decisions are often perceived as expensive, but LCA data not only demonstrates environmental benefits but also long-term cost savings through more efficient raw material use or lower operational costs. This is essential for gaining buy-in from internal stakeholders such as management or investors.

Strengthening Your Competitive Position

An LCA shows how your products contribute to transparency and sustainability within the value chain.

This gives you an advantage with customers, suppliers, and tenders, and strengthens your position in a market with increasingly stringent demands.

Do you always need a Life Cycle Assessment?

LCA is a powerful tool, but not a panacea.

For instance, you often hear that a full Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) is the only way to get a complete picture of a product's environmental impact. But is that really the case? The answer is, as is often the case, nuanced.

When is a full-option LCA necessary?

LCAs measure a wide range of environmental impacts, including CO2 emissions, land use, water consumption, and ozone layer depletion. This makes an LCA a powerful tool for complex value chains or products where the impact of multiple factors varies significantly.

For example: in the chemical industry, where complex production chains and various emission sources converge, a detailed LCA is often essential to set priorities and reduce the greatest impact.

But... comprehensive isn't always better

An exhaustive LCA is not always necessary. Many factors are correlated, meaning a simpler model often provides sufficient insight.

Consider agriculture, for example: Reducing the use of synthetic fertilizers in favor of organic fertilizers not only lowers CO₂ emissions due to reduced fertilizer production, but also improves soil quality, carbon sequestration, and water management. This means that by focusing on one intervention, you can achieve multiple environmental benefits without analyzing the entire life cycle.

Our approach: focused and pragmatic

At Mantis Consulting, we advocate for a pragmatic approach that combines analysis with action.

• Carbon Footprint Analysis: start with a basic analysis to identify the largest sources of emissions.
  
  
• An 'LCA light': focus on specific materials, processes, or products instead of modeling the entire life cycle.
  
  
• Focusing on relevant indicators: choose the indicators that matter most for your sector and goals, such as CO2, water consumption, or toxicity.

This approach prevents 'analysis paralysis' and allows you to take action faster.

The bottom line? Don't get lost in endless analyses or expensive reports that raise more questions than they answer. Ask yourself: what is practically feasible and which insights are truly necessary? Targeted action often yields more than striving for completeness.