Life Cycle Assessment’s to Compare Products
Suppose you are at a store to buy a product such as a new cellphone and trying to decide between several different options. You care about the environmental and health impacts of phones in addition to cost and functionality. When it comes to the environmental footprint of cellphones you know that smartphones are highly environmentally damaging consumer electronics devices. For instance, cellphones require the mining of significant amounts of precious metals contributing significantly to climate change, consume lots of electricity at data centres to service apps, and are associated with recycling practices in developing countries that pose a human health danger. You also know that cellphone manufacturers have each adopted different environment-friendly practices to address these concerns such as the use of renewable energy for making phones, energy efficiency strategies during phone use, and environmentally friendly cellphone packaging. How do you know which phone is the most environmentally friendly given that the environmental footprint of a phone is multi-faceted and includes inputs such as energy and metals (to manufacture) as well as outputs such as climate change emissions and electronics waste? To compare the environmental impacts of different products you might talk to a sales rep or visit websites that are designed for this purpose. To help make educated choices wouldn’t it be better to have standard reporting methods on environmental impacts that all manufacturers conform to and which can be easily accessed prior to purchase? This can be done by performing a Life Cycle Assessment (LCA).
How it Works
So how does LCA work? The LCA practitioner must first determine the goal and scope of the assessment. This includes identifying stages of a product’s life cycle to consider, the environmental impacts to be measured, and environment-related inputs and outputs for each life cycle stage. Typically stages include raw material extraction, manufacturing, usage, recycling, and final disposal. Examples of impacts include resource use, climate change, human health, and ecosystems quality. Examples of inputs and outputs include mining waste during material extraction, carbon dioxide emissions during manufacturing, and energy consumption during product usage).
The LCA practitioner must also determine what is known as a functional unit. This is a metric that quantifies a product’s usage to allow comparing between products. For a cellphone, a functional unit might be the ability to make 1000 calls each year for 3 years.
The next step is to collect data for the inputs and outputs for each stage of the product life cycle given the functional unit – this step is known as a Life Cycle Inventory (LCI). The data collected will be used later on to quantify impacts. So for the cellphone example above the LCA practitioner might determine values for energy usage, raw material inputs, carbon dioxide emissions, etc. for each stage of the life cycle to perform the 1000 calls annually.
Next comes the determination of impacts from the inputs and outputs – this is known as a Life Cycle Impact Assessment (LCIA). The LCIA quantifies the different impacts for each stage using the data collected by the data inventory. This makes it possible to determine the stages of the product’s life cycle which contribute more to impacts (to help determine valuable countermeasures). Scoring methods can be used to compare different impacts such as climate change, human health, and ecosystem loss to each other. For a cellphone, an LCIA might look into the ecosystems quality impact of the raw material extraction stage by determining how much mining waste chemicals poison aquatic and terrestrial ecosystems.
Finally comes the interpretation of the results – for example deciding which cellphone to choose from given the different impacts studied. This will typically involve trade-offs – one cellphone might contribute more to ecosystems loss but have less of a human health impact. It’s also possible at this point to look into reducing the overall environmental footprint of a product by finding ways of reducing or changing high impact activities (as reported by the LCIA).
Life Cycle Assessment in Practice
Here is an example of LCA in the real world. A 2019 research article entitled “Environmental Impact and Carbon Footprint Assessment of Taiwanese Agricultural Products: A Case Study on Taiwanese Dongshan Tea” published in the journal Energies describes an LCA study of tea in a county within Taiwan. The motivation for the study included the fact that tea production is resulting in significant environmental impacts including threats to biodiversity and greenhouse gas emissions. The study was performed to better understand the environmental impacts of tea production in the county as well as propose countermeasures to reduce these impacts.
The stages (raw materials collection, manufacturing, transportation, consumer use, and disposal) and their corresponding inputs and outputs were determined. The functional unit was set to 1 kg of tea. The inventory phase of the study involved “face-to-face interviews, databases, and other studies” to collect data for each stage of the tea life cycle. The impact assessment used software that mapped the inputs and outputs from each tea life cycle stage into each of 4 understandable impacts: human health, ecosystem change, climate change, resource use. This allowed, for example, the ability to compare the contribution to climate change from the consumer use stage to the total climate change contribution from all tea life cycle stages. The algorithm also allowed a comparison between different impacts in a particular stage of the life cycle – for example between human health impacts and climate change at the manufacturing stage of the life cycle.
The study found that key life cycle impacts of the tea “mainly come from fertilizer input during the raw material phase, electricity use during manufacturing, and electricity use during water boiling in the consumer use phase”. Suggested countermeasures to reduce environmental impacts included the use of organic fertilizers in the raw material phase, the use of renewable power such as solar for the manufacturing phase, and efficient water boiling to help with the consumer use phase.
Next Steps
Canada is not that far away from having environment-related labels on consumer products. With Motion M-35, introduced by Nova Scotia MP Jaime Battiste, the House of Commons has agreed in February 2021 to studying having consumer-friendly environment grading labels on all products. The LCA approach is a good foundation for environment grading labels as impacts considered from these evaluations can be reported to consumers.
We need legislation requiring LCA analyses to be performed for all products on shopping shelves with the results easily accessible to consumers. To help make LCA successful it is also important to establish (beyond existing standards) procedures, tools, and data developed by government and industry groups that all manufacturers can use to perform their evaluations. Work is needed to accomplish this. This will ensure that each evaluation is performed in a way in which products can be compared. It is important not to be comparing apples and oranges which is what would happen without good standards.
Having such LCA measures can help to reduce the environmental footprint of products. Deciding between products such as cellphones will also be easier for consumers.
