Life Cycle Assessment

Companies are increasingly being held accountable for their climate and environmental impacts, but it can be difficult to get started and recognized for your sustainability efforts. Either way, a Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) will help you target and document your efforts.

LCA is a methodology designed to help businesses measure and quantify the end-to-end environmental impacts of a product or service. By thoroughly examining each step in the life cycle - from the sourcing of raw materials to manufacturing, use and final disposal. A LCA can help identify the areas where the biggest opportunities to reduce a product or service’s environmental footprint are across the entire value chain.

At Deloitte, we are experts at supporting our clients in leveraging these LCA findings to manage their environmental footprint, reduce costs and improve their brand identity.

What does a LCA cover?

A LCA can show the environmental footprint of a product on a wide array of dimensions including precise information about the product’s carbon and water footprint, the total resource and energy consumption, associated waste, and other impacts such as the toxicity of the product and its contribution to air or water pollution.

By gaining insight into the impact of every step of the value chain, you are better equipped to target your efforts and manage your environmental footprint. In addition to improving your environmental footprint, LCAs are also useful in improving your design, procurement processes, communications, reduce costs and achieving compliance.

” Life Cycle Assessments are a great tool to avoid claims of greenwashing – if done right.”

Helena Barton, Partner and Climate & Sustainability Lead

LCAs are fast becoming a central method for understanding and reducing a product or service’s environmental footprint. But to be credible, the assessment must be very clear on what is included and excluded in the measurement. And it must seek to be as complete and transparent as possible.

Read more in the blog post Are you greening your company, or are you greenwashing it?

How we can help

In Deloitte, we have extensive LCA experience and have thus developed a methodology to integrate insights from complex science-based analyses to actionable sustainability strategies and relevant communication content. Our team of skilled experts have worked with LCAs, impact measurements and sustainability strategy for years. We can help you:

Measure and document impact of products or services through the full life cycle
Perform quality assurance of LCAs
Formulate a data-driven sustainability strategy
Develop a decarbonisation strategy based on rigorous LCA data
Assess the cost-benefits of decarbonisation
Develop your carbon abatement cost curve
Compare your impact with your competitors’ to identify your strengths
Communicate your impact while avoiding accusations of greenwashing.

Want to know more? Find contact information below.