As organizations and regulators work urgently to address climate change, disputes exist around what methods are best for understanding environmental impacts.
A widely practiced method, and one of WSP’s areas of expertise, is Life Cycle Assessment (LCA). An LCA is defined in ISO standards 14040 and 14044 as the specific study of the environmental impacts of life cycle phases of a product.
Recently, claims have been made within the climate science community that point to certain drawbacks of LCAs, suggesting they can be a hindrance to reaching net-zero emissions. It should be noted that these claims were made with reference to "Life Cycle Analysis," a generic term that deals with issues beyond environmental impacts and does not appear in the ISO standards on the topic of environmental management. Nonetheless, these comments caught the attention of WSP leaders in Sustainability, Energy and Climate Change who maintain that Life Cycle Assessment remains a powerful and essential tool to help organizations achieve carbon neutrality.
To contextualize LCAs and highlight their ongoing value, Julie Sinistore, PhD, vice president and technical fellow at WSP; and Jonathan Balsvik, WSP senior consultant, outlined the following five advantages of LCAs for product manufacturers and service providers actively working to mitigate environmental impacts, reduce their carbon footprint and support sustainability practices across their value chain.
LCAs let you see your processes through a sustainability lens.
LCA undertakes a cradle-to-grave analysis of the environmental impact drivers of a product or service. As a scientific framework, an LCA provides insights about the material flows and emissions that make up an organization’s value chain, starting from raw materials extraction, and proceeding through to manufacturing, transport and distribution, product use, recycling and final disposal.
Many organizations know their value chains intimately, but from a business perspective an LCA provides a sustainability lens, which helps identify carbon reduction opportunities that directly contribute to meeting net-zero targets. LCAs are also holistic frameworks. Alongside critical carbon emissions information, LCAs provide insights into other environmental impacts such as energy use, air quality, water consumption and land use that impact people and communities.
LCAs identify opportunities for carbon neutral innovation and sustainable design.
Organizations frequently conduct LCAs in response to external stakeholder requests — to satisfy reporting or policy requirements regarding environmental claims or impacts. However, the outcome of an LCA is not simply a static snapshot of a value chain for audit and filing purposes only. LCAs can drive internal innovation toward environmental impact reduction of products and services.
In many cases, the LCA process may identify an area of excessive energy use or carbon-intense material along the value chain — prime areas for re-evaluation and upgrading with sustainable product design. As one example, WSP conducted an LCA for food technology company, Perfect Day, Inc. The process helped Perfect Day identify the environmental impacts of its novel alternative dairy ingredient. The company could then provide that information to food manufacturers to reduce the environmental impacts of its final products.
From an innovation perspective, LCAs support carbon neutrality by increasing the availability of environmental knowledge around a product or service line. They also help expand datasets and benchmarking tools around environmental targets for industry sectors.
LCAs support and improve greenhouse gas (GHG) inventories – for organizations, products and sectors.
LCAs and GHG inventories are different things. LCAs help measure the environmental impacts related to a product or service across its lifespan and value chain. GHG inventories provide a summation of an organization’s GHG emissions for a given year, according to Scope 1 (direct), Scope 2 (direct utilities purchase) and Scope 3 (indirect upstream/downstream) carbon emissions categories.
GHG inventories are instrumental in setting emissions reductions targets and monitoring an organization’s progress toward meeting those targets. However, they’re even more effective when used in tandem with LCAs. Scope 3 data, for instance, is made more precise when combined with LCA results. Product-specific LCAs can help improve the accuracy of GHG inventories and help zero in on priority areas for GHG emissions reduction.
LCA data supports reduction, abatement and offset decisions.
Organizations conduct LCAs to not only understand more about environmental impacts, but to make focused decisions about how to reduce, abate or offset carbon emissions. Given context provided in ISO 14064, organizations will normally make reduction the first order of business.
LCA data gives leaders the tools they need to identify and evaluate their reduction options. What alternative energy sources could they use to power their facility or factory? Could they manufacture using different materials? What transportation options or sourcing regions would help reduce their overall greenhouse gas emissions and help achieve carbon neutrality?
Once LCA data has helped identify carbon reduction measures, organizations can use the data to move forward on emissions abatement and offset decisions to reach carbon neutrality.
ISO-conformant LCAs are best practice.
While a screening-level LCA could be helpful in supporting internal decision making, many organizations perform LCAs in accordance with ISO standards 14040 and 14044. ISO-conformant LCAs are a best practice to support external environmental claims made about their products or services. LCAs can also be used to support carbon neutrality on the path to net zero.
The release of ISO 14068 on “Climate change management – Transition to net zero – Part 1: Carbon neutrality” provides additional context on how to use the results of an LCA to first reduce carbon emissions before turning to abatement or offsets. A recent amendment to ISO 14064, furthermore, provides new clarifications on avoided emissions, emissions reductions and removals that help organizations find new ways to meet net zero targets within existing frameworks and standards, including LCA.
As scientists, climate advocates and regulators work to legislate a global policy for carbon neutrality, LCAs — as defined by ISO standards and conducted by experienced practitioners — have a vital role to play.
