LCA application context matters in the way that an LCA is designed and carried out. The application context is the decision on what purpose this LCA is to be applied for at the early design and planning phase. An LCA can be used in several contexts, including product development and improvement, marketing, public policy making, and strategy planning. These application contexts directly influence the methodological choices made to conduct the LCA (e.g., attributional or consequential modeling framework, will be discussed in details in the next LCA blog) and the results communication with the corresponding audience (e.g., eco-labeling, product sales, and incorporate social responsibility claim).
Context 1: Ecodesign for product development and improvement
Our growing product consumption pays a great price for pollution and resource depletion. Early incorporation of LCA into the product development phase could save approximately 80% of the environmental impacts. Moreover, the International Energy Agency (2020) also highlighted the need of innovative technologies for the anticipatory sustainable product development, and those at the prototype or demo phase could reduce ~35% of the cumulative carbon dioxide emissions by 2070. Technologies that have not been commercialized into the market could reduce additional 40%. Therefore, early product design and development exert great influence on developing and improving a product’s life cycle and the subsequent environmental performance.
To integrate the environmental criteria
into the early design, ecodesign is a prospective environmental product design that minimizes the environmental burdens across the product’s lifecycle without compromising its functionality, aesthetics, and cost. LCA supports ecodesign implementation. For example, the ecodesign of a coffee pod via LCA provides insights into which packaging materials (e.g., bioplastics, PE, PP, or aluminum) are greener and where carbon emissions originate along the whole life cycle. A Swiss LCA shows that the biggest carbon footprint happens where the machine supplies us with coffee due to the huge energy consumption when heating water and when waste is generated after coffee making. Therefore, to develop strategies in the ecodesign activity, the machine’s energy efficiency and the number of coffee beans used in a single pod should be prioritized to minimize carbon footprint and reduce waste, respectively.
Despite the benefits in reducing environmental impacts, the implementation of ecodesign in a company (e.g., Environmental and Health Safety and Product Development departments) faces challenges. One major challenge is the gap between the limited investment in the early analysis phase and the opportunity for this early analysis to affect the results' reliability. This challenge may need to learn the design and material properties from similar products previously developed in the product chain. Another challenge is the interdisciplinary requirements for both LCA experts and engineers. LCA is science-based and relies on demanding analytical information and communication while ecodesign is engineering-based and requires technical information. Thus, pairing LCA experts with product development specialists is essential to bridge LCA knowledge and product manufacturing process knowledge.
Context 2: Eco-labeling for marketing and environmental declaration
Producers and manufacturers who apply improvement approaches to product development and management at times aim for marketing and environmental declaration by claims that their products are ecologically friendly. To declare the environmental claims, ecolabels are used by business as a marketing label to prove environmental preferability among product alternatives and reach consumers and wake up their sustainability consciousness.
As the European Commissions define, Ecolabel is “a label of environmental excellence that is awarded to products and services meeting high environmental standards throughout their life-cycle: from raw material extraction, to production, distribution and disposal.” The ecolabel is a voluntary method of business to market their green products. The certification process relies on the LCA evaluation by considering all the product’s life cycle stages to quantitatively guarantee that the product is as effective as other similar products on the market but reduces the environmental burdens. The ecolabel allows consumers to easily recognize thetrusted green products and also creates a favorable climate for the business market that improves the standing of brands with a good reputation.
Context 3: Public policy making
An LCA can also assess how much a tax proposal improves the environmental performance and if any possibilities exist to enhance the tax design. For example, a national policy proposal on a Swedish waste incineration tax was tested in LCA, which was supposed to encourage reducing cup waste, increasing materials recycling, and enhancing biological treatment. The proposed tax results in increased recycling but only improves the environmental performance in a small step compared with the other two proposals. The other two proposals in the comparison pool include (1) maximizing energy recovery through incinerating organic waste to generate electricity and further replace biofuels in heat production, and (2) minimizing greenhouse gas emissions by treating organic waste in anaerobic digestion with biogases collected to replace diesel as vehicle fuel. To improve the waste incineration tax, fossil fuel carbon tax should be integrated with the waste incineration tax. For example, suppose the waste incineration tax on a specific fraction (e.g., polyethylene [PE] waste products) exceeds the difference of treatment costs between incineration and recycling. In that case, the tax proposal could facilitate the recycling of PE materials.
Context 4: Strategy planning
LCA applications for policy making assess static plan while LCA supports strategy planning by setting strategic priorities that focus on energy and resources minimization. LCA helps decision making on selecting the best strategies that reduced environmental impacts the most. For example, how can an LCA help evaluate the proposed Strategy for a Waste Free to reduce the cup waste in Ontario, Canada in 2016? The goal of the strategy is to build a circular economy by diverting more waste from landfills. In this case, comparative LCAs can be applied to compare the multiple innovative technologies developed to improve coffee pods' functionality (e.g., recyclability, composability) or waste management services (e.g, bury, burn, or recycle). The LCA results could be communicated by answering questions like “Which coffee pod to develop, recyclable or compostable?” and “How should the city manage discarded coffee cups, incinerate with energy recovery or separately recycle at the source?”