LEARNING RESOURCE

Lifecycle Assessment

INTRODUCTION

Lifecycle Assessment (LCA) is a foundational tool for sustainable LCA can be used for many purposes, from helping inform the
design. It is a way of quantifying the environmental impact of your early stages of the design process to providing detailed data for
designs so that you and your customers can make more informed environmental reporting. The depth and breadth of analysis can
decisions. This brief primer introduces the basic terms, vary greatly; take care to match the sophistication of the analysis
methodologies and tools of LCA. It is a resource for designers to its intended purpose.
looking to follow a design process that incorporates Whole A rough assessment can take less than an hour, while a full
Systems and Lifecycle Thinking. assessment performed to international standards may take
hundreds of hours. Many methodologies and software tools are
available for LCA, and these should also be matched to the
WHAT IS LIFECYCLE ASSESSMENT? intended purpose.

Lifecycle assessment (LCA) is a method to quantify the

environmental impacts of a product or service, such as USES OF LIFECYCLE ASSESSMENT
greenhouse gas emissions, water pollution, land use, toxins, and
more. These impacts can be measured for any or all phases of a The most common uses for LCA are internal decision-making and
products lifecycle, including manufacturing, distribution, use, and external reporting
disposal.

| academy.autodesk.com LIFECYCLE ASSESSMENT

p. 1
LEARNING RESOURCE

Lifecycle Assessment
For internal decision-making, LCA is useful to identify the In terms of breadth, analyses can include your factorys direct
products biggest environmental impacts and to provide a impacts, your suppliers impacts, transportation, customer usage,
benchmark for further analysis. Both of these are useful for and end of life. Enterprise carbon accounting has three standards
guiding product development and are best performed early in the for this: scope 1, scope 2, and scope 3, shown in the following
design process. While more detailed analyses always provide diagram.
deeper understanding, they may not always be time and cost-
Scope 1 boundaries only include emissions produced by your
effective.
manufacturing plant. Scope 2 boundaries also include impacts
For external reporting, LCA is useful to prove that a product is from the upstream supply chain and energy generated offsite.
environmentally preferable to its competitors or to verify that the Scope 3 boundaries add the downstream supply chain. The most
impacts of the product meet governmental or third party widely useful assessments for product design use scope 3
standards. Both of these uses require that lifecycle assessment boundaries.
be as accurate as possible, using standardized methodologies
and boundaries.

SCOPE AND BOUNDARIES

How much should you include in your assessment? There are

direct impacts, such as resource use and waste during
manufacturing. But there are also many indirect factors, such as
emissions of the power plant that generated electricity for the
Standard options for the scope or breadth of lifecycle assessment.
factory; impacts from mining and refining of raw materials;
transportation; energy use during the products life; and the
products end of life. The more factors you include, the more FUNCTIONAL UNITS
complete your assessment will be, but the more time and money
it will require. Also, when you include factors that are out of your Most LCAs do not simply list the environmental impacts of a
direct control, such as supplier and user behavior, your results product; instead, they list impacts per unit of service. If you
will be less certain and precise. compare the environmental impact of a disposable paper coffee
Boundaries define what your assessment will include, both in cup to a ceramic mug, the paper cup has a lower impact to
terms of lifecycle stage and whats considered within each stage. manufacture. This is misleading, however, because the ceramic
For lifecycle stage, some analyses (called gate to gate) only mug lasts much longer, which makes its environmental impact per
consider impacts from manufacturing. Some consider impacts liter of coffee consumed much lower than that of the disposable
from material extraction until the final product leaves your factory cup.
(cradle to gate). Others consider impacts until the end of a
products life (the grave). The most widely useful assessments
use cradle to grave boundaries, including all stages of your Functional Units
products lifecycle, from resource extraction to end of life.
Per liter of coffee consumed,

the environmental impact of

a ceramic mug is much lower

than a paper cup, because it

lasts much longer.

Common boundaries for lifecycle assessment.

| academy.autodesk.com LIFECYCLE ASSESSMENT

p. 2
LEARNING RESOURCE

Lifecycle Assessment
INVENTORY End of Life

You must also estimate your products end of life impacts. Will it
To sum up all the impacts of your products lifecycle, you must be sent to the landfill? Recycled? Incinerated? The ends may
create an inventory of everything within your chosen boundaries vary from one material to another within your product. It is good
that causes an environmental impact. practice to run multiple scenarios to see how results change, and
it is probably safe to assume that a certain percentage of your
products will meet different ends.
Materials and Processing

To determine the impacts of your product, you must know all your
products components and how they were processed. This METHODOLOGIES AND UNITS
includes knowing, for example, not only what kind of plastic was
used for a certain part, but the mass of that part and whether There is no perfect way to measure environmental impacts. Some
injection molding, extrusion, or other process formed it. For measure only a single kind of impact (such as greenhouse gas
assemblies from suppliers, you may need to get information from emissions), while others are more comprehensive.
them, disassemble a unit and weigh its parts, or estimate in other
Each of these impacts will be measured in different units. For
ways.
example, greenhouse gases may be measured in kg of CO2
Often there will be some materials or processes in your products equivalents, while carcinogens may be measured in Disabili-
lifecycle that you do not have data for. In this case, you often ty-Adjusted Life Years (a World Health Organization standard),
have to use the data available and estimate the best item or and land use may be measured in hectares.
combination of items as a substitute. It is good practice to run
Most LCAs track these impacts by the mass of the products
multiple analyses with different substitutions to see how sensitive
ingredients and kWh (or other units) of energy used, but an
the results are to your assumptions.
economic input-output LCA instead tracks impacts by dollar value
of each ingredient and energy input.
Transportation Some lifecycle assessments show the results of each impact
Transportation of finished goods and component parts should be category separately, while others combine many different kinds of
factored in as well. Often design engineers wont know these impacts into a single score. To convert many different kinds of
figures with certainty, so you may want to try several alternatives impacts into a single score, you must first normalize and weight
to see how much it changes the results. Average transportation them.
impacts from mines to material factories are already included in Normalizing translates all the different units of measurement into
the material properties data of some databases. a single generic unit (such as points), while weighting multiplies
different impacts by different amounts to scale them by impor-
tance. Even within a single methodology, there may be multiple
Energy and Resource Use During Life weighting schemes.
Energy use during the products life must be estimated, as well as Single-score analyses can be controversial because of the value
other resource use (water, paper, or other materials). You can do judgments inherent in normalizing and weighting (how many kg of
this by estimating both the usage profile and the lifetime of the CO2 emissions equal one hectare of land use?), but single-score
product, and multiplying them. results are generally the easiest for designers to use in decision
As an example, a laptop might use 25 W of power for eight hours making for product development. Figures 4 through 6 show the
per day for four years, for a total lifetime energy use of 292 kWh. results of a single product analysis in three different formats.
Because there can be a high degree of uncertainty in these
estimates, be sure to run multiple analyses with different
estimates to see how sensitive the results are to your
assumptions.

| academy.autodesk.com LIFECYCLE ASSESSMENT

p. 3
LEARNING RESOURCE

Lifecycle Assessment
Eco-indicator 99

Eco-indicator 99 methodology measures greenhouse emissions,

fossil fuel depletion, ozone layer depletion, two kinds of air
pollution, water acidification, water eutrophication, mineral
depletion, land use, ecotoxicity, ionizing radiation, and
carcinogens.

IPCC Global Warming Potential

By contrast, IPCC Global Warming Potential methodology only

measures emissions of greenhouse gases such as CO2,
methane, and nitrous oxide.
Each impact category shown separately relative % by lifecycle stage.
For more in-depth explanations of these, see the Eco-indicator
99 Manual for Designers listed in the Resources section.

INTERPRETING RESULTS

Once you have analyzed your inventory, you will get a series of
charts or tables of numerical results. It is up to you to turn those
numbers into meaningful strategies to improve environmental
performance.

Remember that the way you present the data (such as grouping
several components into one bar in the graph) can affect the
Impacts shown with points that have been normalized and weighted. conclusions it suggests. Your initial results may suggest different
scenarios for analysis as well (such as greater customer energy
use or a longer life).

Running multiple scenarios like this and comparing them is called

sensitivity analysis. Seeing your results may even cause you to
rethink your boundaries, functional unit or other aspects of the
analysis.

Based on what you learn from doing an LCA, you can make more
informed choices about the design strategies that will reduce
your products environmental impact. For example, if the use
phase dominates, you could prioritize energy efficiency or reduce
the use of consumables. Or if disposal has the most impact, you
may want to focus on recycling or repair.
Normalized and weighted points wrapped up into single scores.

| academy.autodesk.com LIFECYCLE ASSESSMENT

p. 4
LEARNING RESOURCE

Lifecycle Assessment
TOOLS

There are many tools available to perform LCA, ranging from

paper pamphlets with tables of eco-impact scores, to databases,
to desktop software, to web-based software, to plug- ins for CAD
programs. Generally, the web-based and plug-in software is the
most convenient for designers, but the least detailed in results.
Desktop software is currently the most powerful tool for
sophisticated analysis. It is the best tool for detailed LCAs for
external reporting, but it may be too cumbersome for simple
analyses. Most simple tools have just one analysis methodology
built in, while advanced desktop tools generally allow users to
choose their methodology.

Regardless of the tool, the analysis is driven by a database of

environmental impact factors for various materials and
processes. These come from previous studies done within
academia or industry. Using this industry-average data greatly
simplifies and accelerates the work of LCA, though it is less
accurate than directly measuring emissions in your own factory.

PERFORMING LIFECYCLE ANALYSIS

The process of performing an LCA is generally as follows:

1. Determine system boundaries.

2. Determine product lifetime and functional unit.

3. Gather inventory

Materials

Manufacturing processes

Transportation

Energy and other resource use during life

End of life

4. Compute impacts (often with several variations)

5. Interpret results

This process is not always linear. Your interpretations of one

analysis may cause you to run different scenarios or change
assumptions, or data difficulties may cause you to change
boundaries. But in the end, you will go through all these steps,
emerging with a greater quantitative understanding of the
environmental impacts of your product and enabling you to make
informed decisions to make it more sustainable.

| academy.autodesk.com LIFECYCLE ASSESSMENT

p. 5