Do You Need Separate Products per customer I sell to ?

If you follow pure LCA logic, each country can have a different waste treatment system. That means the end-of-life phase of a product may differ depending on where the product is disposed of.

As a result, the lifecycle impact of the same packaging could technically vary per destination country.

In most real-world situations, you do not need to create a separate product or SKU for every country.

Especially within regions like Europe, differences in waste treatment systems are often relatively small. In those cases, it is more practical — and fully acceptable — to model countries together within a single product setup.

Instead of duplicating products, you can reflect regional differences using a distribution across end-of-life regions.

This means assigning percentages based on where products are actually sold and disposed of.

If most products are sold in the Netherlands and the rest across Europe, you could model:

This captures the real-world flow of products without adding unnecessary complexity to your dataset.

It only becomes valuable to model regions separately when the differences are:

For example, if one market has a very different recycling infrastructure or disposal method, separate modelling may improve the accuracy of the assessment in a meaningful way.

This approach aligns with LCA best practice:

Focus on differences that materially impact results, and simplify where they don’t.

The goal of an LCA is not maximum complexity, but meaningful and decision-useful insights.

You do not need exact precision per country. It is completely acceptable to:

As long as the setup reflects reality reasonably well and the assumptions can be clearly explained, the model is considered valid and robust.