Sustainability
June 6, 2023
LCA in Fashion: Clothing impact backed by data
Why Life Cycle Assessment is the best tool for sustainability.
A deep dive into the system boundaries of Product LCAs
How can Life Cycle Assessment improve my product's sustainability? What are its benefits and limitations? Which standards should I follow?
If you have asked yourself these questions you came to the right place. We will deep dive into the system boundaries of Product LCAs and what role they can play in our sustainability strategy, shown with specific examples.
This article is part of our comprehensive guide A Deep Dive into Product LCAs.
What is Life Cycle Assessment?
Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) is an internationally standardized methodology designed to quantify the environmental pressures related to goods and services (products), the environmental benefits, the trade-offs and areas for achieving improvements taking into account the full life-cycle of the product.
LCA follows a holistic approach by studying systems in their entirety rather than focusing on specific product or service components. It also avoids ‘burden-shifting’ by encompassing multiple environmental impact categories.
A product draws resources from the environment and the technosphere across all (or most of) its lifecycle stages. An LCA study aims at quantifying the impact of this exchange of resources and emissions between the product system and the environment.
Applications of Life Cycle Assessment
The growing importance of a detailed quantification of the environmental impact of companies is bringing LCA into the spotlight as the go-to framework.
This is particularly true for consumer product companies, like the fashion ones, where up to 90% of the company's impact comes from the making and selling of products.
Moreover, with the growing pressure of regulations and consumer demand for transparency, performing product-level LCA becomes key to:
- Comply with upcoming regulations such as Ecodesign and Digital Passport
- Effectively communicate product sustainability performances
- Corporate sustainability disclosure
- Develop an effective product-based sustainability strategy
Life Cycle Assessment can therefore be a powerful method for several departments of your company, such as sustainability, product, or marketing.
Benefits of Life Cycle Assessment
There are a lot of benefits associated with Life Cycle Assessment which we will dive deeper into, such as:
1. Corporate reporting
LCA is used to demonstrate corporate credibility and transparency to stakeholders and customers. It can help you build the emissions inventory for corporate reporting following the Greenhouse Gas Protocol, Scope 3 reporting, and Science-Based Targets. Moreover, as we shift from GHG emissions inventories to Environmental Footprinting at an organization level, the use of LCA we be even more key.
2. Credible claims
LCA helps to communicate a company’s or a product’s sustainability performances relying on credible, scientific, and data-driven measurements. As we move towards the adoption of regulations such as the Green Claim Directive, LCA will be key to effectively substantiating any type of marketing claim regarding sustainability.
3. Identify + discover hotspots
LCA facilitates continuous improvement as the system generates actionable KPIs for each impact metric and each production process involved in the production of the product analyzed. These results help companies to understand the hotspots in their product's supply chain instantly from which they can build effective strategies to improve their footprint.
4. Quantify environmental impacts
LCA calculates the environmental footprint of products & services and makes the process of collecting and mapping environmental performance data, extracting relevant insights about the company’s footprint, and using that information to produce more sustainably easier.
5. Measure + mitigate risks
LCA determines any potential risk of existing or future products and therefore helps to make better business decisions. They know even better than humans, how to prioritize the most important impact areas. In that sense, LCA is simply good risk management.
Let’s have a look at a specific example to showcase the benefits mentioned above. The following graph shows the relevant impacts of a product with common LCA impact categories listed on the left and the production stages listed underneath. Impact categories are the environmental issues you want to measure and compare.
We can see in that example that raw materials have the highest environmental impact in the global warming category, similar to fossil resource scarcity. In the category of (product) use, water footprint can be identified as a potential business risk.
An LCA allows you to quantify the environmental impacts and identify hotspots to understand which phases contribute the most.
By understanding which phase is the most impactful on the environment you can decide where to focus your efforts to improve your product and company sustainability. It also gives a clear guideline on which factors have the highest impacts and therefore will deliver the biggest results when changed.
This knowledge can be used in the sustainability strategy of your company and can save financial resources that might have been spent on the ‘wrong’ or less impactful factors otherwise.
Let’s have a look at another example. The following graph shows how two materials (A and B) have different environmental impacts in each LCA category on the left.
Material A in this example is a bio-based one, while material B is a fossil fuel-derived one, such as plastic. It can be common to see that the fossil fuel one scores better on global warming but has a high impact on water footprint and ozone depletion.
So if we would only focus on global warming we would miss out on the bigger picture. That’s why LCA is so significant: It provides a holistic view and fosters decision-making based on multiple categories instead of just one.
LCA makes sure we look at multiple impact areas and avoid a material change that could lead to accidentally shifting a burden to another area without realizing.
Challenges & Limitations of Life Cycle Assessment
Besides all the great benefits of Life Cycle Assessment, there are also some challenges and limitations to consider. Let’s have a look at what they are:
1. Lack of consistency in defining system boundaries & scope
The approach to the LCA study should be aligned with the goal that the company aims to achieve. However, the flexibility of the framework can also lead to a lack of consistency in the LCA outcomes for the same product system. To mitigate this issue, the use of product category rules can be very useful, for example the PEFCR or EPD PCRs.
2. Dependent on secondary data, assumptions & scenarios
When primary data are not available secondary data comes into play, which is usually an average and rarely is a good proxy to represent the actual impact of a company's supply chain.
3. Lack of sufficient & qualified data
It can be time-consuming and challenging to gather new and primary data, especially in a field where not a lot of data is available in the first place.
4. Omission of certain impact areas
When conducting LCA you naturally omit certain areas of impact as LCA doesn’t measure every impact directly. Examples are deforestation, labor issues, microplastics, and biodegradability. The reason is that there isn’t a strong scientific methodology currently available to measure these impacts. Therefore LCA in its current status should be considered as a starting point and not a point of arrival.
5. Difficulty in communication & comparability
It can be challenging to communicate the benefits and limitations of LCA to non-LCA professionals. When comparing products wrong conclusions could be drawn as different studies could be conducted based on different methodologies. That’s why it is important to work with parties that built their LCA on international standards, as we did at SBP.
Which International Standards of LCA to follow?
There are several international standards for Life Cycle Assessments which are general guidelines on how to conduct an LCA. They can be downloaded for free on their website.
- The ISO Standards 14040/44 lay the ground rules on how an LCA study should be conducted and usually all frameworks follow them.
- The European Product Environmental Footprint (PEF) gives specific recommendations on how to calculate the footprint of a product based on different categories. It applies 13 categories designed specifically for fashion to make the comparison of the sustainability performance of products easier.
- The Environmental Product Declarations (EPD) is a global program for environmental declarations and presents transparent, verified and comparable information about the life-cycle environmental impact of products and services.
All mentioned standards above are the most commonly used ones in the fashion industry. When conducting an LCA with Sustainable Brand Platform you can choose to calculate your product impacts based on the ISO, PEF or EPD standard. Book a demo here!
Conclusion on Life Cycle Assessment
While LCA has its limitations, as with any scientific method, the benefits outweigh them. It is crucial to understand how Life Cycle Assessment works, and what its capabilities and challenges are to gain its full potential.
By ensuring the correct usage of LCA and following international standards, LCA can be one of the most important tools for sustainability managers to consider when setting out the sustainability strategy for your company.
It is an important key solution in the transformation of the fashion industry to sustainability. Moreover, Sustainable Brand Platform’s LCA tool can meet the needs of technical and non-technical users and can be scaled depending on your company’s needs.
It is compliant with all the international standards we described above and the assessment can be conducted based on ISO, PEF or EPD methodology. You choose based on your product’s needs and our tool delivers the results in a user-friendly interface.
If you would like to know more about Product LCA and how it can be applied specifically for your business you can leave a comment or reach out to our Sustainability Success Team here. We are here to ease your sustainability journey.
