Business Benefits of LCA

Using Life Cycle Management techniques can bring a range of benefits to your business, from managing risks to winning work. While Life Cycle Thinking gives a great overview and understanding, Life Cycle Assessment is essential to get meaningful results that can drive real change.

Benefits fall under three main areas: Business Performance; Supply Chain Knowledge; and External Perception.

Business performance

• Decreased costs: An LCA can provide feedback on areas of inefficiency, potentially leading to reductions in energy or materials used.
• Win business: By communicating the results of an LCA, a product may be exposed to clientele that it may not have otherwise been exposed to.
• Benchmark: Having a base line of the impact of a product acts as a marker in the future, for showing progress.
• Internal cohesion: The objectivity that an LCA provides can give different departments a better understanding of company-wide priorities and can provide them with a common goal on which to achieve.

Supply chain knowledge

• Risk management: Find the risks and reduce the occurrence of expensive incidents within the supply chain.
• High impact areas: Determine the ‘hotspot’ areas of significant environmental impact along a product’s lifecycle.
• Discussion: By taking an honest look at supply chains, companies can have open discussions about supply decisions made and the reasoning behind them, both internally and with suppliers.
• Future changes: By modelling the product lifecycle, scenario testing can provide information on the impacts of future product development.

External benefits

• Regulatory preparedness: An LCA can provide companies with estimations on the impacts of future regulations and what these regulations might cost them.
• Brand reputation: By doing an LCA a company demonstrates corporate responsibility and shows that it is committed to a sustainable future.
• Credibility: An LCA is an internationally accepted standard which allows external parties to know that a product has undergone an independent analysis to verify its sustainability.
• Marketing: LCA results can be combined with other environmentally relevant information to create an Environmental Product Declaration, containing the key results of an LCA in a user-friendly format.