The Environmental Life Cycle Assessment (E-LCA) is a tool that forecasts potential environmental impacts of a product or service. This is possible by assessing all energy, water and raw material inputs, and all air, water and soil outputs, as well as co-products throughout the entire life cycle of a product or service.
The advantages of performing an E-LCA are many:
- Reflects the environmental commitment of the company
- Facilitates innovation
- Promotes production cost savings
- Prepares the company towards compliance of standards and norms
- Encourages environmental risk reduction
Our personalized assessment places a special emphasis on the Global Warming Potential (GWP) impact category in order to provide useful information to the company when making decisions about introducing a climate-friendly product or service.
Bioeconomy Smart Systems uses a free access software like openLCA (https://www.openlca.org/) to model and simulate the life cycle of a specific product or service according to the international standards of ISO14040 and ISO14044. These norms establish four phases to take into account:
DEFINING GOAL AND SCOPE
LIFE CYCLE INVENTORY
LIFE CYCLE IMPACT ASSESSMENT
LIFE CYCLE INTERPRETATION
The life cycle of a product, “from cradle to grave”, within a linear economic model is as follows:
- Raw material extraction
- Production of raw material
- Manufacturing of product
- Packaging and distribution
- Use of product
- Disposal and recycling
Furthermore, we use the “cradle to grave” information for the reengineering of a product or service by implementing the “3R strategies”: Reduce, Reuse and Recycle, i.e., to reduce the amount of waste, find new ways to reuse, and establish or measure the increase of the recycling rate in the value chain.
These are the first steps towards a “cradle to cradle” life cycle within a circular economy perspective that would produce less greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, and therefore, would lower production and operation costs.
The following graphic clearly shows how this cycle works:
