What is a Life Cycle Assessment?

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Today’s conscientious consumers want to connect with and trust brands that prioritize environmental sustainability. To do this, you need a clear picture of your product’s impact.

An LCA is the tool of choice for this purpose. In Stage 1, you’ll define the goals and scope of your assessment. During Stage 2, you’ll collect data related to your product’s environmental inputs and outputs.

How does a Life Cycle Assessment work?

Using the standardized ISO framework, an LCA determines the environmental impacts of your product or service through all its stages – from extraction of natural resources to the final disposal or repurposing. This allows you to compare the impacts of your product against its competitors and develop strategies for reducing them.

LCA results can be used in many different ways, depending on your needs. For example, product designers can use them to compare the environmental impact of their designs with those of similar products to optimize for sustainability. Sustainability managers can utilize them to achieve their carbon footprint goals, while marketing teams can get real-data for their sustainability communications.

An LCA can be as complex or as simple as you need it to be. For instance, a conceptual LCA might only assess a few life cycle stages or impact categories to reduce time and costs, while a detailed LCA would look at all the steps of the system. If you want to know more about life cycle assessment click here.

How does a life cycle work?

A life cycle (or cradle-to-grave) assessment is the study of the resource use, environmental loads, and impacts associated with an entire product or service system, from raw materials to disposal. The goal of an LCA is to identify opportunities for reducing the impacts of products or services throughout their whole life span.

In today’s market, consumers want to connect with brands that share their values and prioritize sustainability. By conducting a life cycle assessment, your business can communicate these values to your target audience and set itself apart from competitors.

What do LCAs measure?

LCAs are a great way to quantify the environmental impacts of your product. This is done by collecting and modeling the inputs and outputs of your production process, and then sorting those impacts into pre-defined categories such as global warming or human health.

Once a study is set up, experts follow a series of standards to ensure that the system model, functional unit, and the data collection are all accounted for. This helps businesses get accurate results while reducing the amount of time and resources needed to perform an LCA.

A well-performing LCA is a critical component of your company’s sustainability efforts. This is because it enables you to identify and focus on the most effective ways to reduce the environmental impact of your products.

An example of a lifecycle assessment

An LCA looks at the inputs and outputs of a product’s material flows – energy, resources, and emissions. These are tracked and recorded for every process within the functional unit.

These are then compared to pre-determined impact categories and aggregated into an overall score for the product. Typically, impacts are measured in terms of climate change and human health.

This provides valuable information that can be used to compare the environmental impact of products. It also helps businesses inspire trust and connection with consumers who are increasingly conscious of the environment. In addition, it can be used to support compliance with environmental standards or regulations. For example, it could help you choose more environmentally friendly production processes or materials. Or, for buildings, it might help you design more energy-efficient buildings with reduced operational carbon emissions and embodied carbon.

What are the different types of Life Cycle Assessments?

LCAs can be categorized into different levels of detail and complexity. Screening LCAs offer a balance between cost and time, while full or detailed LCAs involve custom investigations and data collection tailored to the product in question.

During Stage 1, precise goal-setting and scope definition are critical to the success of your LCA. This will help ensure that your LCA can provide the actionable insights you need to make sustainable changes in your business.

Other types of LCA include cradle-to-cradle, gate-to-gate, and well to wheel. Cradle-to-cradle is a common approach within the circular economy, whereas gate-to-gate is a simplified version of a full LCA that focuses on just one value-adding process in your production chain. Well to wheel is a specific LCA focused on fuels and their use as energy sources.

The go-to carbon accounting platform for your business

The right software makes carbon reporting easier, faster and more accurate than manual spreadsheets. Trying to calculate emissions totals by hand (or with internal systems that don’t have the same capabilities) is a time-consuming and error-prone process. As emissions disclosure is increasingly written into everything from regulatory rules to procurement contracts, it’s a task businesses need to address with efficiency and accuracy.

Choosing the best carbon accounting software for your business requires considering your needs and objectives. It should be user-friendly, data-driven, scalable, and feature tools that help you discover hidden emissions hotspots and identify opportunities for improvement through decarbonization modeling.

A robust carbon accounting platform should also make it easy to create audit-ready reports, set KPIs and highlight any red flags for potential compliance issues or sustainability risks. Look for a solution that is aligned with leading GHG accounting standards and provides up-to-date emissions factors to avoid costly mistakes and delays when it comes to regulatory disclosures or third-party assessments.

What is greenly?

Greenly is a software solution that enables all companies to simplify their carbon footprint and combat climate change. Its mission is to help companies of all sizes and sectors take action with their carbon accounting, combining the best of technology with the best of human monitoring. With a single interface, users can integrate their physical and monetary flows, monitor their carbon emissions in real time, and define their reduction trajectory.

The startup offers a complete package that makes it possible to measure, reduce, and offset a company’s carbon impact at an affordable price. Its unique technology automates data collection & carbon analytics thanks to integrations with accounting, travel, cloud data, electricity vendors, and more. It also supports a wide range of CSR initiatives. Greenly has become a leading player in the market with a B Impact assessment score of 95.3.

Greenly’s team uses the free CRM, Marketing Hub, and Sales Hub to build inbound marketing campaigns using Facebook and Google ads that direct prospects to a customized landing page to identify qualified leads. This has contributed to positioning the company as a carbon accounting expert, while helping the sales and marketing teams align their strategies and boost conversions. In fact, between 2021 and 2022, the number of MQLs jumped fivefold and turnover increased strongly as a result of better communication between teams. This facilitated the expansion of the Greenly community to more than 1,000 customers. This rapid growth has fueled a new phase of development for the startup, which is now seeking to develop an ecosystem of partners and launch a marketplace of carbon calculators.

Here you will know Why Choose Greenly? Using state-of-the-art technology and a team of climate experts, greenly supports companies at each stage of their carbon reduction journey. Whether they are implementing a new green purchasing policy, working towards achieving a sustainability label or certification, or just wanting to communicate their action plan to their stakeholders, the Greenly team will be on hand to help them succeed.

Greenly rewards your ecological choices by measuring the CO2 emitted or avoided with every purchase via its Spend-Based method. This is done by analysing the categories of products purchased and then calculating the resulting kg of CO2 through a calculation that takes into account your profile (for example, meat consumption) and the carbon footprint of the chosen products. The Greenly solution also allows you to offset your remaining emissions through the purchase of certified carbon credits.

The personalised video that is produced for each company can then be shared with their stakeholders to demonstrate the progress made by the business and highlight the commitments that have been undertaken in order to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. This can then serve as an incentive to encourage other companies to join the Greenly movement and take up a responsible attitude towards the environment.

The Greenly teams are genuinely satisfied with HubSpot’s services, which they believe have contributed to their company’s success. They particularly appreciate the ease of use and ability to synchronise information from various tools, as well as the way in which KPIs can be monitored and optimised.

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