At Pickler, we use Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) to calculate the complete environmental impact of your packaging products. In this article, we’ll break down what LCA is, why it’s essential, and the common challenges businesses face when using it.
What is LCA?
Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) is a method used to measure the environmental impact of a product, either across its entire lifecycle (cradle-to-grave), which includes everything from raw material extraction, production, and transportation to disposal or recycling, or just up to the factory exit (cradle-to-gate), stopping short of what happens after the product leaves the factory.
Many sustainability discussions often focus only on carbon footprint, which is a measure of greenhouse gas emissions. While this is important, it doesn’t capture the full picture of environmental impact. LCA, however, goes beyond just carbon emissions and considers multiple impact categories to give a more holistic view:
Nature: Looks at ecosystem damage, including deforestation, biodiversity loss, and water pollution.
Human Health: Measures the effects of pollutants like toxic emissions on air quality and public health.
Material Scarcity: Highlights the reliance on non-renewable resources such as rare minerals.
Global Warming: Accounts for greenhouse gas emissions and their contribution to climate change.
By analyzing these factors, LCA uncovers hidden environmental issues—such as resource scarcity and pollution—that might not be visible if you only focus on carbon emissions. This broader, more detailed perspective gives you a comprehensive understanding of how your product affects the environment. It's essential for making well-rounded sustainability decisions.
Why Use LCA to assess environmental impact?
Sustainability has become a term so widely used that it can mean different things depending on who you ask. Businesses and consumers often rely on eco-labels or gut feelings to present their products as environmentally friendly. For example, labels like FSC certification emphasize responsible forestry, and claims of recyclability or biodegradability suggest a product is good for the environment.
But these approaches usually only tell part of the story. The issue is that these labels and assumptions focus on specific aspects of a product's lifecycle. FSC certification may ensure sustainable wood sourcing, but it doesn’t consider the energy or emissions involved in production and transport. Similarly, just because something is labeled recyclable or biodegradable doesn’t guarantee it will be processed as such in real-world conditions.
That’s where Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) comes in. Unlike eco-labels or gut feelings, LCA looks at the entire lifecycle of your product and considers all impact categories. It provides the most complete and reliable picture of your product’s environmental footprint and helps you pinpoint the "hotspots" where the biggest environmental impacts occur.
How to conduct a LCA and why is it a big challenge?
Traditional "full" LCA gives you a thorough look at the environmental impact of a product. The downside is, that it’s far from practical at scale for businesses that manage thousands of different products.
That’s a serious challenge. Here’s why:
High Costs: Because of the complexity of doing a full LCA, it's done by consultants. Prices range from €10.000 to €30.000 per LCA! Doing this for each product can get very expensive, especially when you’re dealing with a large number of SKUs.
Time-Consuming Data Collection: Gathering all the necessary data is a slow process, often taking months to complete, which can hold up important sustainability reporting.
Not Scalable: Traditional LCA methods work well for a handful of products, but when you’ve got thousands, it simply doesn’t scale. It takes too long to gather the information and run the calculations.
Incomplete Information: Some LCAs don’t consider all stages of the product’s lifecycle, like disposal, meaning you might not get the full picture of the environmental impact.
Hard to Compare: Different products are often measured with different criteria, making it tough to directly compare, say, a plastic bag with a paper bag in terms of their overall environmental impact.
At Pickler, we have solved these issues. Read How our LCA-based calculations work.