Streamlined LCA: Developing a sustainability improvement strategy for products and services

Streamlined Life Cycle Assessments - the situation

It is estimated that 80% of a product’s impacts are decided during the design stage of its life cycle. With the main environmental and social impacts usually embedded in supply chains, your business cannot make significant progress without improving the sustainability profile of your products and packaging.

Carrying out ‘Life Cycle Assessments’ (LCAs) is time and cost-intensive task. Current LCA tools are challenging to use early in a product design process – a time when key decisions are being made. For this reason, businesses are simplifying this process by using a more strategic form of LCA known as ‘Streamlined LCA’. This is a solution which:

• Identifies and focuses in on the main impacts in relation to a product or process, and allows key issues to be explored in more detail where necessary
• Provides an agile and cost-effective alternative
• Uses a combination of qualitative and quantitative approaches to evaluate impacts
• Allows the user to “design out” the main impacts of a product through the life cycle

Is Streamlined LCA right for you?

Our experience tells us that companies can benefit from the Streamlined LCA approach in many instances, including if you:

• Want actionable and accessible information from your LCAs
• Perform multiple LCAs
• Have numerous product lines
• Have complex products
• Think in terms of business KPIs like “zero waste” and “zero virgin fiber” that go beyond carbon and the scope of traditional LCA tools
• Are concerned about your scope 3 sustainability
• Want to improve the sustainability of your packaging