The Lifecycle Mindset

You’ve probably been hearing the words Life Cycle and Life Cycle Assessment more and more in the past few months. That’s because Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) is increasingly recognized as the most complete way to measure the environmental impact of a product or service. At Carbonrally, LCA is at the core of the way we think about our Carbon Challenges and calculate our CO2 numbers.

What is an LCA? According to the EPA,

LCA is a technique to assess the total environmental impact associated with a product, process, or service, by:

* compiling an inventory of relevant energy and material inputs and environmental releases;
* evaluating the potential environmental impacts associated with identified inputs and releases;
* interpreting the results to help you make a more informed decision.

But as you can probably tell, actually doing a complete LCA is difficult. As the name implies, LCAs are comprehensive, and encompass raw materials extraction, manufacturing, transportation, use, maintenance and re-use or disposal. The sheer volume of data required for a complete LCA makes them expensive and time-consuming. LCAs can include hundreds of inputs and sometimes thousands of choices about which data to use and how deeply to dig into the dozens of processes that go into the life cycle of a product. One might even ask: what is the LCA of an LCA? As you can imagine, such complexity opens LCAs up to lots of debate and scrutiny.

Take, for example, the question of locally-grown versus imported food. Local-food advocates suggest that besides tasting better, local foods have a lower environmental impact than imported foods because they don’t travel as far, and therefore less fossil fuel is used in taking the food from farm to table.

But expand the LCA of local and imported foods to include on-the-farm inputs such as fertilizer and feed, and the picture can look quite different. Research by scientists at Lincoln University in New Zealand compared the LCAs of apples, onions, dairy and lamb – either locally grown in the UK or imported to the UK from New Zealand.

The scientists found that local efficiencies in New Zealand (such as rich pasture land) make food imported from New Zealand to the U.K. less energy- and CO2-intensive than U.K. grown food. And that includes the plane ticket.

According to James E. McWilliams, author of “A Revolution in Eating: How the Quest for Food Shaped America”, More complete LCAs such as this one give us the chance to refine our…sustainability strategy by revealing hidden energy and environmental costs in the life cycle.

But others claim that the New Zealand LCA was flawed and biased – arguing that some of the measures used by the scientists were inappropriate. As you can see, there is plenty to disagree about when it comes to such large and complex studies.

Still, the concept of LCA is a powerful one. In theory, the LCA can give a more complete picture of the CO2 and energy impact of practically anything. At Carbonrally, whenever possible, we use existing LCA studies and concepts to calculate the impact of items such as bottles of spring water and farm-raised beef. But we have to admit that, in absence of full LCA studies to support our challenges, we sometimes need to make some conservative assumptions about the CO2 associated with some aspect of the challenge.

Our advice? When looking at an LCA for a given product or service, dig deep. Look around for competing assessments and professional critiques of the LCA in question. The EPA and Wikipedia both have good overviews of the methodology behind LCA, and the ISO 14000 standard provides lots of info on what goes into the products and services we use.

One good rule of thumb is that the true impact of a product or service is probably higher than any LCA assesses it to be. Of course, if you want to be sure you’re lowering your own impact you can simply reduce the amount you consume, which is what we often advocate here on Carbonrally.

Head spinning yet? If not, tune-in to the Carbonarally blog soon for a primer on Embodied Energy – a related concept that’s being applied to – among other things – alternative energy devices such as windmills and solar panels.

Rally on!