Life Cycle Analysis
Life Cycle Analysis traces a product's environmental footprint from raw material through to disposal, so you can see which stage is actually doing the damage instead of guessing.
Stages line up left to right, raw material at the start and disposal at the end, each one its own checkpoint.
Reach for this when…
- You want to make a sustainability claim and need to know it's actually true.
- A 'green' change in one area might just be shifting the impact somewhere else.
- A customer or regulator is asking for evidence, not intentions.
How to run it
- Define the product and the boundaries of the analysis, cradle to grave or cradle to gate.
- Map every life-cycle stage: raw material, production, distribution, use, disposal.
- Gather data on energy, water, waste and emissions at each stage.
- Find the hotspot: the stage doing most of the damage.
- Target that stage first, then re-measure to check you didn't just move the impact.
A worked example
Situation. Erik Lindqvist ran Nordtextil, a cotton garment manufacturer in Gothenburg, Sweden, that had switched to organic cotton and assumed that settled the sustainability question.
Applied. A Life Cycle Analysis across the full chain, from field to finished shirt, found the dyeing and finishing stage used more water and energy than the raw cotton stage ever had.
Result. He redirected the sustainability budget from cotton sourcing, already fine, into a water-recycling system at the dye house, which cut the factory's actual environmental footprint far more than the organic switch had.
The catch
Good LCA needs real data at every stage, and that data is often patchy, estimated, or supplied by parties with an interest in the result. Comparing two products' LCAs is only fair if they used the same boundaries and assumptions, which in practice they often don't.
A single-issue sustainability claim, recyclable packaging, organic material, is not a life cycle analysis. It's one stage of one.
Origin: Formalised under ISO 14040/14044; developed through the 1990s from earlier resource and environmental profile analysis work