Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) – The Method for Measuring Climate and Environmental Impact
Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) is a fundamental method for understanding the environmental impact of a product, service or process throughout its entire life cycle. It helps you identify what drives the impact, compare alternatives and make decisions from a holistic perspective.
We help you start at the right level, from an initial analysis to building data, models and ways of working that can be applied across more products and more parts of your organisation.
Do you have any of these questions?
What drives our environmental impact? What is our climate impact?
You want to understand which materials, processes and stages of the life cycle account for the greatest impact – and where it is most relevant to start.
Which option is better from an environmental perspective?
You want to compare materials, suppliers, designs or other product alternatives and understand the consequences before making decisions.
Can we communicate our carbon footprint?
You want to communicate transparently with customers and in sustainability reporting. An LCA conducted according to ISO 14040–44 is well documented and ensures that you have a robust basis for your communication.
How do we move from individual sustainability analyses to an established way of working?
The need for environmental and sustainability data is growing across more products and use cases. You need a way to reuse data, models and methodologies instead of starting from scratch every time. LCA provides a transparent and reproducible approach.
Different questions – the same methodological foundation
LCA helps us understand environmental impact from a life cycle perspective. This means that we do not look at just one individual part, but examine how materials, production, transport, use and other relevant stages together influence the result.
The type of analysis you need depends on the question. Sometimes you need an answer to support a specific decision. In other cases, you need to build a model that can be used repeatedly.
That is why we do not start with the scope of the analysis. We start with what you need to understand.
From a Question to a Way of Working
An LCA can start with a specific question. But the data, models and knowledge generated by the analysis can also form the foundation for an LCA approach that grows with your organisation’s needs.
1. Understand
What do you need to know?
We start with the question. What do you want to understand, compare or make a decision about? From there, we determine what type of analysis is needed and which data is relevant.
2. Structure
How do we build a solid foundation?
We structure data, methodological choices and models so that the calculations are transparent, robust and reusable.
3. Scale up
How do we scale it to more products?
As your needs grow, the same foundation can be used for more products, variants, scenarios or calculations – without starting from scratch.
4. Next step
From the very beginning, we identify what can be reused if you want to analyse more products, develop EPDs or build a more scalable approach to LCA.
From an Initial LCA to a Scalable Approach – AJ Produkter
AJ Produkter started by building knowledge and experience in LCA. The work then developed step by step into models that could be used for more products and variants – while also strengthening internal expertise and ways of working.
Today, the models cover more than 70 product variants and several hundred individual products.
Want to learn more about LCA methodology? Explore the articles in our Knowledge Hub.
What is LCA? An Introduction to Life Cycle Assessment
Getting Started with LCA: Make Life Cycle Assessment More Efficient in 3 Steps
What do you need help with?
Whether you’re carrying out your first LCA or looking to further develop an established way of working, we help you find the right path forward.
Book a meeting with Maja at maja@miljogiraff.se or fill in the form below and we’ll get back to you!
