LCA – Life Cycle Assessment: complete guide
Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) is now an essential tool for understanding, reducing, and enhancing the environmental impact of your products. It helps identify the most impactful stages, guide your decisions in a concrete way, and meet the new regulatory and environmental expectations of the market.
WeLOOP supports you in your LCA initiatives with reliable analyses tailored to your challenges and directly applicable to your projects..
What is a Life Cycle Assessment (LCA)?
Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) is a multi-criteria, multi-stage evaluation method standardized by ISO standards. It is used to measure the impacts of a product, process, or service throughout its entire life cycle, from the extraction of required resources to end-of-life, including manufacturing, transportation, distribution, and use.
A What is an LCA used for?
Understanding the global impact
Analyze holistically how a product, service, or organization impacts the environment, society, economy, or territory throughout its life cycle.
Make better decisions
Identify the most relevant levers for action to reduce negative impacts and enhance positive effects, based on reliable and comparable data.
Enhance and substantiate your impact
Communicating transparently about the steps taken makes it possible to demonstrate the results achieved and strengthen the trust of clients and stakeholders.
Optimize processes
Improve overall operational performance by reducing inefficiencies, lowering resource consumption, and promoting a more sustainable use of available resources.
The normative framework for LCAs
ISO 14040
Standard defining the principles and methodological framework for Life Cycle Assessment (LCA). It specifies the main stages of an LCA: goal and scope definition, inventory analysis, impact assessment, and interpretation of results.
ISO 14044
This standard, complementary to ISO 14040, details the requirements and guidelines for carrying out an LCA in a rigorous and consistent manner. It notably sets out the framework for data quality, calculations, and the critical review of studies.
ISO 14075
Published in October 2024, ISO 14075 is the international standard that governs the Social Life Cycle Assessment (S-LCA) of products.
ISO 14067
This standard is dedicated to the carbon footprint of products. It describes how to quantify and communicate greenhouse gas emissions across the entire life cycle of a product.
What are the different types of Life Cycle Assessment (LCA)?
LCA environmental
It quantifies impacts on climate, natural resources, air quality, and water quality, enabling your teams to make informed decisions and produce certified environmental declarations (FDES, EPD, PEP).
Life Cycle Cost Analysis
(LCCA)
This analysis provides a long-term perspective that goes far beyond the purchase price and supports your eco-design trade-offs. It takes hidden impacts into account.
Social Life Cycle
Assessment
It assesses working conditions, respect for human rights, and impacts on communities across your product’s value chain, from suppliers to the end user.
How do our experts conduct an LCA study?
Your needs
We define together
your objectives and your needs.
The data
We assist you in collecting
the data of your activities.
Modelling
We model your activities using
databases
The results
We help you
understand the results.
Implementation
You take ownership of the results
and implement actions.
How to use LCA for your communication?
Communicating LCA results is essential to transform technical data into clear and actionable information. Even a highly comprehensive study loses value if its results are not understood by teams, partners, or decision-makers. The objective is therefore to make this information accessible, tailored to the target audience, and useful for decision-making, while ensuring its reliability and accuracy.
Discover our article on simplified communication in LCA and learn how to effectively use your LCA results in your communication by making them clearer, more accessible, and better suited to your different audiences.
How is a Life Cycle Assessment verified?
For a Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) to be recognized and reliable, it is essential to subject it to a critical review. This step verifies the methodology, assumptions, data used, and results obtained. Having your LCA study validated by experts strengthens its credibility and facilitates its publication or its use in environmental and strategic decision-making.
For more information on the process and best practices of critical review, consult our dedicated page on critical review in LCA.
Discover our critical review service
Conducting a Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) can represent a significant cost for your project, but several public grants and funding schemes can support you. These mechanisms are specifically designed to support companies engaged in innovation and the ecological transition.
For example, the Booster Transformation Rev3 program helps companies finance sustainable projects, BPI France offers grants and funding for innovative initiatives, and ADEME provides financial support for environmental initiatives and the assessment of the ecological impact of products.
Thanks to these schemes, you can benefit from financial support to carry out your LCA and make your project more responsible and competitive.
Why work with an LCA expert?
Calling on a life cycle assessment expert helps you better understand the impacts of your products and make concrete decisions to improve your sustainable performance. Thanks to a rigorous analysis, you move forward with clear and actionable data.
Our tools to carry out your LCA studies
LCA software
Tools and methods
- ISO and EN standards
- The UNEP guides
- Data collection tools
- Social scoring tools
LCA databases
Take action with our experts!
