There’s only one way to truly understand the environmental impact of your products: a Life Cycle Assessment (LCA). It’s the most reliable method, offering a full view of how your packaging affects the planet from start to finish.

But for most packaging companies, traditional LCA just isn’t practical—it’s too expensive, too time-consuming and impossible to scale when you’re managing thousands of products.

That’s where Pickler’s Fast-Track LCA comes in: a much faster and scalable version of the LCA, developed by Sustainability Impact Metrics (a spin-off of the Delft University of Technology). In this article, you'll learn how this works.

Traditional LCA can be overwhelming because it requires gathering primary data from across your entire supply chain for each product. This means collecting data directly from the source.

For example, to assess the environmental impact of producing plastic bottles, you'd need to gather information on energy use, the type of energy (renewable or fossil fuels), machine efficiency, chemicals, water consumption, and more.

For companies with thousands of products, this process can take months. And, to stay compliant with upcoming regulations, you'd also need to regularly update this data, making the task even more daunting. It’s simply not feasible.

With Pickler, the process is much faster. Instead of collecting data from every step of your supply chain, Pickler taps into IDEMAT, a database filled with pre-validated market average environmental data for over 2000 materials and processes, which is regularly updated.

The use of idemat reduces your assessment time from months to minutes, without sacrificing accuracy or level of detail. For example, details like the transportation from the production site to where the product is used are taken into account. It also factors in the country-specific pollution caused by electricity during production. These are just some of the extra layers of accuracy that Pickler includes.

To complete an LCA, you need to make several assumptions about what data to include and how to handle missing information. These assumptions, known as boundaries, act as a rulebook that guides the entire process.

For instance, when calculating the environmental impact of transporting goods by truck, you wouldn’t just look at the distance traveled. You’d also have to make assumptions about factors like the type of truck, fuel consumption, cargo weight, and more. The challenge with traditional LCA is that these assumptions can vary significantly between assessments, leading to inconsistent and non-comparable results.

For example, if two companies assess the environmental impact of a cardboard box but one includes transportation emissions while the other doesn’t, it becomes impossible to compare the two accurately. Worse, the assumptions made are often not transparent, leaving you with results you can't fully trust or use for reliable decision-making.

Pickler’s Fast-Track LCA solves these issues by following the same general calculation rules across all products, ensuring that the results are always comparable. For example, when assessing truck transportation, we consistently assume a standard 40-ton European truck with an Euro 6 engine, a 24-ton trailer capacity, a full outbound load, and an empty return trip.

Additionally, unlike many traditional LCAs, Pickler fully discloses both the sources and the assumptions made, ensuring complete transparency. This approach makes Pickler's calculations fast, transparent, and easy to compare across your entire packaging range.

You might wonder, "Does faster mean less accurate?" Not with Fast-Track LCA. Pickler’s calculations are fully aligned with international standards, including ISO 14040, ISO 14044, and EN15804, which ensures scientific validity.

Additionally, it follows the ILCD Handbook guidelines (“General guide for Life Cycle Assessment – Detailed guidance”), providing robust, credible data. Fast-Track LCA uses the same high standards as traditional methods, so you get both speed and accuracy without compromise​

With Pickler’s Fast-Track LCA, the heavy lifting is already done for you. Instead of spending time collecting data, you can focus on making decisions—like choosing the most sustainable materials for your packaging. Whether you’re debating between plastic or paper-based materials, Pickler gives you clear, comparable data quickly, allowing you to take action faster.

In short, Pickler uses the power of the IDEMAT database and Fast-Track LCA to make assessing your environmental impact faster, more consistent, and reliable—perfect for companies with large product ranges.

Want to know more about how it works? Read more on the IDEMAT calculation rules and how Fast-Track LCA works.

Want to know what you can do with the data, read What Data Do You Get From Pickler's Calculations?