Life Cycle Assessment: Do more than measure your environmental impact
Advanced digitalization helps companies achieve their carbon neutral goals by not only measuring their current environmental impact, but also the impact of future decisions.
Urgent times call for effective solutions
Committing to carbon neutrality is just the first step. The second is how you actually achieve it. This starts with being able to measure the environmental impact of your business end-to-end.
But that shouldn’t be the limit. Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) tools/software, also known as life cycle analysis, enables you to assess the sustainability of any decision you make, even before they’re implemented.
Sustainable Innovation Intelligence
How Manufacturers Are Planning for a More Sustainable Future
80%1 of a product or service’s design determines its environmental impact throughout the lifecycle.
56% of executives know the importance of integrating sustainability principles into product and service development.
Yet only 26% have revised their product and service development processes to maximize any sustainability benefits.
Life Cycle Assessment in Action
csi entwicklungstechnik
German engineering services provider csi entwicklungstechnik adopted the 3DEXPERIENCE platform and its cloud-based sustainability solution to embed Life Cycle Assessment into a virtual twin to support the eco-design process for its customers which include international automotive OEMs.
EPFL Racing Team
The Swiss EPFL Racing Team is the first Formula Student organization with its own sustainability department. The team uses the 3DEXPERIENCE platform and its solution, Eco-Design Engineering for Education, to assess the environmental impact of its electric formula racing car. Through a comprehensive lifecycle assessment (LCA), they were able to examine which areas of the vehicle to improve, using this analysis to guide the eco-design of its next-generation racing car.
What is Life Cycle Assessment and why do you need it?
LCA quantifies the environmental impact of end-to-end business products and services, from sourcing raw materials to delivering finished goods. By using data about a company’s processes and from thousands of sources, LCA aims to answer questions such as:
- Which product designs and material selections are the most sustainable ones?
- Which processes have the lowest consumption of land and water resources?
- Which manufacturing and supplier strategy has the best carbon footprint?
LCA tools have been available for decades, but they have long been the preserve of specialist teams, and their findings have been difficult and time-consuming to integrate into product development and delivery.
However, thanks to advanced digitalization and virtual twin technologies, LCA is now being put in the hands of teams who can use it to optimize design choices, right from the beginning, with a clear understanding of what actions have the highest environmental impact.
This allows project teams to work collaboratively and identify optimal trade-offs, test designs virtually and cost-effectively, and reduce cycle times.
The above is a simplified LCA demonstration of two HVAC components. We invite you to explore different results using the Recalculate button to see how the different human activities compare with each other and with your sustainability goals. The data for the human activities comes directly from the 3DEXPERIENCE platform’s built-in LCA solution, with the ecoinvent database2 fully integrated.
The power and potential of LCA within the virtual twin
Dassault Systèmes’ Sustainable Innovation Intelligence solution enables this integration of LCA and virtual twin technologies with design and delivery functions.
By combining LCA with the virtual twin, detailed environmental assessments are available from as early as the ideation stage, and then to every member of the innovation process downstream.
To consistently deliver accurate insights, Dassault Systèmes has partnered with environmental intelligence provider ecoinvent. Their database monitors 20,000 activity types, with data updated every year, and allows for optimization across 16 different KPIs.
LCA brings the metrics needed to evaluate environmental impacts across the product lifecycle. Integrating that with virtual twin technology opens new possibilities to address those impacts very early on.
Key Factors of the Sustainable Innovation Intelligence Solution
The Sustainable Innovation Intelligence solution enables companies to:
- Follow a sustainability-driven engineering approach that sets sustainable goals, reinforces eco-design practices and drives innovation throughout the product lifecycle
- Assess human activities and optimize for sustainability
- Understand a product’s environmental impact across the value chain, from raw materials, to packaging and transport, to manufacturing, to recovery and end-of-life
- Explore design alternatives and model various trade-off scenarios
The ecoinvent Database
The ecoinvent association is the world leader in the provision of environmental data. The ecoinvent database contains over 19,000 life cycle inventory datasets across all industrial sectors. It covers a diverse range of sectors on a global level. A not-for-profit association, ecoinvent was founded by the Swiss research institutes ETHZ, EPFL, PSI, Empa and Agroscope and promotes the availability of environmental data worldwide.
1Source: “The Contribution of Design to Sustainable Development” by Euractiv
2Source: “Ecoinvent database” by IISD
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Life Cycle Assessment: Frequently Asked Questions
According to the KPMG Life Cycle Assessment Guide, a product's life cycle comprises:
- Raw material extraction
- Manufacturing and processing
- Transportation and distribution
- Usage and retail
- Waste disposal/recycling
Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) evaluates the environmental impact of a product or system throughout its life cycle. According to science portal ResearchGate, steps include:
- Goal and scope definition
- Inventory analysis
- Environmental impact assessment
- Interpretation at each of the three steps above.
LCA aids in making sustainable decisions and reducing environmental footprint.
ISO standards 14040 and 14044 provide guidelines for conducting Life Cycle Assessments (LCA), which generally consist of four main phases:
- Defining study objectives and scope
- Compiling a life cycle inventory, which lists inputs and outputs
- Conducting an impact assessment
- Performing an evaluation of the findings
These standards ensure a standardized and structured approach to LCA studies.
Life Cycle Analysis assesses environmental, economic, and social impacts across a product's entire life cycle. It quantifies resource use, emissions, and waste generation to inform sustainable decision making and identify areas for improvement. LCA supports holistic evaluations and comparisons of products or processes.
According to the European Environment Agency, Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) is the process of evaluating the effects that a product has on the environment over the entire period of its life thereby increasing resource-use efficiency and decreasing liabilities. It can be used to study the environmental impact of either a product or the function the product is designed to perform.
A simplified version of a life cycle assessment application is available in the form of an interactive calculator within the Life Cycle Assessment page by Dassault Systèmes.
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