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 LCA is superior to eco-claims and labels in making sustainability decisions.
Sustainability has become a term so widely used that it can mean different things depending on who you ask. The most common way you see this now is through eco-labels. These labels can either be official certifications, such as FSC or OK Compost, or they can be claims made by sellers, like Compostable, Plastic-free, Biodegradable, Recyclable, or Carbon-neutral.
The problem is that eco-labels and claims focus on just one part of a product’s lifecycle. They may highlight one benefit, like being recyclable or carbon-neutral, but miss other important factors like energy use or actual recyclability in real conditions.
Click to view common eco-labels and their problems when used for sustainability claims
Click to view common eco-labels and their problems when used for sustainability claims
FSC: Ensures sustainable sourcing
Problem: May ensure sustainable sourcing, but ignores emissions from transport.
OK compost: Certifies that product is industrially compostable
Problem: Doesn't mean that it will be composted
Recyclable materials: claims product can be recycled.
Problem: Doesn’t mean the product will be recycled in real-world conditions.
Recycled materials: made from recycled content.
Problem: Doesn't consider the energy-intensive process required for recycling.
Eco-friendly: General claim of being environmentally friendly
The problem: Vague, no specific standards, may be misleading without clear proof.
Carbon neutral: Claims the product offsets its carbon emissions.
The problem: May ignore other impacts like water use, resource depletion, or indirect emissions.
ALU: The item is made of recyclable aluminium.
The problem: The claim doesn't guarantee it's recycled
Re-usable: Claims the product can be used multiple times
The problem: Can still have a higher environmental impact if not reused enough to offset its production.
This does't make them suitable for making well-rounded sustainability decisions.
That's where LCA comes in. The big difference between eco-labels and LCA is that eco-labels only tell one part of a product's impact—like being recyclable or biodegradable—while LCA looks at the entire lifecycle. From raw material extraction to production, usage, and disposal, LCA covers it all.
This full-picture approach reveals hidden environmental impacts that eco-labels can’t show, such as energy consumption, resource depletion, or pollution across the product's entire journey.
As a result, LCA provides a more accurate and comprehensive understanding of a product’s true environmental footprint, making it far superior for sustainability decisions.
The risks of mis-use of traditional LCA
While LCA provides a comprehensive view of a product’s impact, it can still be misused. For instance, a company might highlight their packaging's low carbon footprint, but ignore the fact that it's difficult to recycle.
Misusing LCA like this, by cherry-picking positive data while ignoring negatives, skews the overall picture. Outdated data or inconsistent methods can also lead to incomplete results.
Common pitfalls include:
Cherry-picking data: Highlighting positives (e.g., low carbon) while ignoring negatives (e.g., poor recyclability).
Inconsistent approaches: Different focus areas across LCAs can make product comparisons difficult.
Outdated data: Using old information can make products seem more sustainable than they currently are.
End-of-life issues: Ignoring disposal, such as compostable packaging that ends up in landfills.
Incomplete assessments: Some LCAs don’t cover all lifecycle stages, leaving important impacts unexamined.
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.
Practical challenges of traditional LCA
Besides the risk of misues, traditinal "full" LCA has also practical challenges for business for businesses that manage thousands of different products.
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.
At Pickler, we have solved these issues. Read How our LCA-based calculations work.