What is Life Cycle Assessment?

Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) calculates the greenhouse gas (GHG) impacts of a product or service over its whole life cycle, from acquiring the raw material through to its production, packaging, use and disposal.

You can see an example of an LCA for a product here (PDF; 516KB) as a complete LCA report, or go here to see a summary.

Why do a Life Cycle Assessment?

The reasons will be many and varied and may include:

• Improved environmental performance of your products and the ability to substantiate environmental claims.
• Market positioning to meet customer requirements - for example Wal Mart  has announced that it will require all of its product suppliers to calculate the environmental costs of their products.  
• Efficiency and cost – identify opportunities to increase efficiency, reduce GHG’s and therefore cost
• Understanding the relative position of your and your competitor's products.

What's involved ?

We will work with you on:

1. Defining the product to be analysed. 
2. Determining the scope of the analysis i.e. how much of the supply chain is to be included.
3. Obtaining the information.  Typically what is needed is:

1.  
   1. A list of processes that you carry out in making the product
   2. A list of the materials used and information about them such as:
      1. Where from?
      2. How transported?
      3. How they are processed?
      4. Energy used in transporting or processing them
      5. Packaging – what types and how much
      6. Markets and how the product is transported

There are international standards for LCA and we use specialist software which uses recognised LCA methodologies.  CATALYST^® is a member of Life Cycle Assessment New Zealand (LCANZ).

What will you get?

Depending on your specific requirements you will receive:

•  
  • An analysis of your products and processes showing:
    • CO₂ emissions per unit of your product
    • CO₂ emissions from various parts of your supply chain, and 
    • opportunities for reduction of emissions.

You can use to this information to demonstrate the GHG impact of your product and communicate this to customers or as the basis for improvements in your processes.