Life cycle assessment:
The backbone of our services

Where does your environmental impact actually hide? Usually not where you're looking.

Life cycle assessment doesn't just measure emissions. It exposes the trade-offs you didn't know you were making. The supplier that looks clean on paper but relies on energy-intensive processes upstream. The material that performs well in use but creates problems at end of life. The packaging decision that saved cost but shifted burden elsewhere. These hidden dynamics shape your actual environmental footprint far more than the obvious choices you've already optimised.

Life cycle assessment (LCA) is the backbone of our services. It examines the entire journey from cradle to grave and reveals where your system is quietly working against you. By evaluating the entire life cycle, LCA avoids cherry-picking only parts of your impact along the value chain. It quantifies a wide variety of environmental impacts, from climate change and resource depletion to water use and biodiversity loss, and brings clarity to complex decisions.

By mapping out each stage, LCA provides the structured, science-based view you need to make decisions with confidence. It supports more responsible choices, helps organisations meet both operational and stakeholder expectations, and reveals opportunities that intuition alone would miss. Remember that everything you do is a choice with consequences. Even doing nothing is a choice.

Why LCA matters: Three key benefits

An LCA study provides detailed insights into the supply chain of your product or service and its overall environmental footprint. This makes LCA particularly valuable for documentation, decision-making, and building trust in your organisation.

A tool for decision-making
LCA improves product design by revealing the impact of different choices before they're made. Raw materials, production methods, packaging, and end-of-life scenarios can significantly affect your product's overall footprint. LCA identifies where environmental impacts are largest throughout a product's life cycle and supports better decisions about where to focus reduction efforts.
Transparent documentation
LCA documents your environmental impacts and demonstrates compliance with emerging EU legislation. With LCA, you stand on solid ground to avoid accusations of greenwashing. Additionally, LCA helps future-proof your product by providing the documentation that customers, investors, or regulatory bodies may require down the line.
Trust builder
Publishing a high-quality and transparent LCA study improves trust in your brand. Being open about your environmental impacts and how you address them makes your organisation stand out as trustworthy and ambitious.

Understanding the benefits is just the beginning

Many organisations recognise the value of LCA but struggle with where to begin, how to frame the right questions, or how to navigate complex standards and methodologies. That's where we come in. Our approach ensures that your LCA study isn't just technically sound, but strategically aligned with your actual decision-making needs.

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How to use LCA for decision-making

When we talk about LCA, the conversation often starts with reporting and compliance. But in our work with clients, we see something more interesting happening. Once you really map a value chain, LCA stops being a tick box exercise and starts changing how decisions are made.

Many companies first meet LCA because a regulation requires it, a major customer asks for documentation, or an ESG report needs a carbon footprint. A study is carried out, the numbers are reported, and the results risk being parked in a slide deck. Yet a proper life cycle view reveals far more than a single footprint figure. It shows where processes waste value, which products and materials really drive impacts, and which suppliers or process steps sit at the crossroads of environmental pressure and financial cost. In other words, LCA tells you where your system is quietly working against you.

Used in this way, LCA becomes a translator between climate and finance. On one side, it describes environmental performance, emissions and resource use. On the other, it exposes financial risk, operational fragility and hidden cost drivers. The same hotspots that matter for emissions often matter for money. Waste is not only a climate problem, it is lost value. Inefficient or fragile processes are not just bad for the environment, they are highly exposed when prices move or when parts of the supply chain fail. When companies listen to what LCA tells them and act on it, they start to redesign products, rethink sourcing and question old habits. The story they can tell then exists in two languages at once: lower costs and reduced volatility on one side, lower emissions and clearer environmental performance on the other.

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How we guide you from first conversation to actionable insights

Every project begins with a conversation, not a template. We sit down with you to understand your specific challenges. What decisions are you trying to make? What pressures are you facing? What opportunities do you want to explore? From these discussions, we develop the Goal and Scope of your LCA together, defining the purpose of the study, the functional unit, system boundaries, and the environmental impacts to assess.

If you're new to LCA, we take time to explain how life cycle thinking works and what different methodological approaches reveal. When challenges are particularly complex, we often recommend a workshop or training course before the project begins. This investment in shared understanding isn't a delay. It's what enables clearer scoping, better data collection, and results you can trust and use strategically.

This is just the beginning. From here, we work alongside you through data collection, impact assessment, and reporting to ensure your LCA delivers insights you can actually use. We don't rush through projects to maximise volume. We take the time to understand your system, collect the right data, and deliver results that support genuine environmental impact reduction.

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Why most LCAs answer the wrong questions

Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) has become the gold standard for measuring sustainability impacts. It gives us a complete picture by looking at every stage of a product's life cycle and relating impacts to the actual functions of products and services. This holistic view helps us compare different options and identify the most sustainable path forward.

The value of LCA lies in its ability to support better decisions. It should help us understand which choices will reduce future environmental impacts. To do this effectively, LCA needs to focus on causality—the links between our choices and their effects.

Understanding these causal relationships is crucial. The consequences of our decisions are often complex and unintuitive, so we need robust methods that can capture this complexity. Only then can we make informed decisions about the future.

Unfortunately, many current LCAs take a different approach. They focus on mapping past emissions rather than predicting future consequences. These backward-looking models isolate products from their real-world context, which can be useful for historical documentation but problematic for decision-making.

When used to guide choices, retrospective LCAs risk answering the wrong questions. They describe what has already happened rather than what will happen as a result of our decisions. For LCA to fulfil its purpose as a decision-making tool, it must look forward, not backward.

Contact our Specialist

Jonas Eliassen

Life Cycle Specialist

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Our life cycle solutions

Life cycle assessments are always tailored to your specifications and can provide granular detail on what matters most to you. From simple product assessments with one impact category to portfolio-wide assessments covering all impact categories. The greatest advantage is that they enable you to reduce your environmental impact where it matters most.

LCA quality assurance

Have LCA expertise in-house? Let us strengthen the quality of your assessments with a peer review or seamless quality control integration, ensuring your methodology and data live up to the highest standard.

Product Footprint

A product life cycle assessment provides detailed insight into the environmental footprint of your specific product throughout its entire value chain. From the extraction of raw materials to manufacturing, distribution, use phase, and end-of-life treatment, a product life cycle assessment maps every stage where your product interacts with the environment.

The value of a product life cycle assessment lies in its ability to identify hotspots where your product has the greatest environmental impact. This knowledge is essential for making informed decisions about material choices, production processes, packaging, and logistics. Rather than guessing where improvements should be made, a product life cycle assessment shows you exactly where changes will have the most meaningful effect.

Whether you're developing a new product, improving an existing one, or need to document your environmental performance for stakeholders, a product life cycle assessment gives you the robust, science-based data required to support better decisions and demonstrate genuine progress.

Corporate Footprint

A corporate footprint life cycle assessment goes beyond single products to quantify the environmental performance of your entire organisation. By applying life cycle thinking across all your operations and products, corporate footprint life cycle assessments provide a comprehensive 360-degree view of your company's impact on the planet.

Unlike simplified carbon calculators, corporate footprint life cycle assessments capture the full complexity of your value chain. This includes direct emissions from your facilities (scope 1), purchased energy (scope 2), and crucially, all upstream and downstream activities in your supply chain (scope 3). The result is a complete picture that reveals where your organisation's greatest environmental impacts lie and where interventions will be most effective.

Corporate footprint life cycle assessments are essential for setting credible reduction targets, tracking progress over time, and demonstrating genuine commitment to sustainability. They provide the robust baseline data needed to make strategic decisions about operations, procurement, product development, and investment priorities.

Carbon accounting

Carbon accounting is the process of quantifying greenhouse gas emissions across your organisation's activities, measured in carbon dioxide equivalent (CO2e). By systematically tracking emissions from all sources, carbon accounting provides the foundation for setting reduction targets, demonstrating compliance with regulations like CSRD, and meeting frameworks such as the Science Based Targets initiative (SBTi).

Effective carbon accounting covers three scopes of emissions. Scope 1 includes direct emissions from sources you own or control, such as company vehicles and on-site fuel combustion. Scope 2 covers indirect emissions from purchased energy like electricity and heating. Scope 3 encompasses all other indirect emissions in your value chain, from purchased goods and services to business travel and the use of sold products. Often representing the largest portion of your carbon footprint, Scope 3 is also the most challenging to measure accurately.

The true value of carbon accounting lies not in the numbers themselves, but in what you do with them. Data alone doesn't create change. Decisions do. Strategic carbon accounting reveals where your biggest opportunities for reduction lie, enabling you to make informed choices about operations, procurement, product development, and investment priorities that genuinely reduce your environmental impact.

Biodiversity

How and where does your value chain impact biodiversity and natural habitats? By combining land use data with our updated model on extinction risks for wildlife, we can pinpoint your impact on nature.

Social sustainability

How does your value chain affect people and communities? We offer a streamlined way to manage the social impact of your company by applying life cycle thinking to social due diligence.

Frequently asked questions

We understand that life cycle assessments can raise many questions, whether you're new to sustainability reporting or looking to refine your approach. Our FAQ section addresses the most common queries we receive about LCA methodologies, standards, timelines, and deliverables. If you can't find the answer you're looking for, you're always welcome to contact us at info@2-0-LCA.com.

What is a Life Cycle Assessment?

A life cycle assessment (LCA) is a systematic method for evaluating the environmental impacts of a product, service, or process throughout its entire life cycle, from raw material extraction through production, use, and end-of-life disposal or recycling. This comprehensive approach, often called a "cradle-to-grave" analysis, ensures that no stage is overlooked.

When organisations ask "what is a life cycle assessment?", they're usually seeking a way to understand the full environmental consequences of their decisions. Unlike narrow carbon calculators that focus on a single metric, LCA quantifies multiple environmental impacts including climate change, resource depletion, water use, biodiversity loss, and toxicity. This holistic view prevents burden shifting, where solving one environmental problem inadvertently creates another.

The strength of life cycle assessment lies in its ability to reveal hidden impacts across complex supply chains and identify where interventions will have the greatest effect. By understanding what a life cycle assessment can show you, you gain the insights needed to make decisions that genuinely reduce environmental harm rather than simply moving it elsewhere.

How we help you as your LCA consultant
(example of a typical project)

Every project follows four phases. We begin with Discovery and Goal & Scope Definition, where we sit down with you to understand your challenges and define the right questions. Then comes Life Cycle Inventory, where we work alongside you to collect high-quality data through structured templates, training, and on-site support when needed. In the Life Cycle Impact Assessment phase, we translate your data into actionable insights through hotspot identification, sensitivity analysis, and scenario comparison. Finally, in Reporting and Application, we deliver results designed for decision-making and provide presentations, workshops, and consultations to ensure you can use what you've learned.

We don't rush through projects to maximise volume. We take the time to understand your system, collect the right data, and deliver insights you can actually use. Whether you're exploring LCA for the first time or looking to deepen your existing practices, we guide you through every step with the rigour and attention to detail your decisions deserve.

Which LCA standard should I choose?

The reporting standards for sustainability assessment are constantly evolving and can be difficult to navigate. All our assessments follow the ISO 14040 and 14044 standards for life cycle assessment. If you require an LCA that also complies with a specific product category rule or country-specific guideline— such as EPD, PEF, ISO, GHG, or PCR—we deliver. However, we recommend conducting a consequential LCA to gain the full sustainability picture and avoid burden shifting.

CONCITO

“2-0 LCA has been a key partner on CONCITO’s publications and projects on consumption-based emissions and other LCA-related activities. When we had the opportunity to develop the Big Climate Database, showing the climate impact of more than 500 food products, it was only natural to choose 2-0 as our LCA data partner. We are very satisfied with the result and the widespread use of the database in the Danish food service sector, and excited to see that 2-0 LCA is expanding the tool to other countries.”

Michael Minter

Program director, Concito

Maersk

"Our fruitful collaboration with 2-0 LCA allows Maersk to make the most informed transition towards lower-impact fuels. The LCA tool that 2-0 LCA has delivered has been instrumental in showing some of the trade-offs of biofuels – for example, the impacts on land-use changes and biodiversity – and will enable a more sustainable energy transition in the future. This way, we have the right information at hand to minimise unintended consequences and avoid carbon tunnel vision."

Ingrid Marie Andersen

Head of Energy Transition Sustainability, Maersk

Arla Foods

“To realise Arla Foods' very ambitious sustainability strategy, we need solid data, detailed and transparent reporting, and collaborations with talented partners. We've been partnering with 2-0 LCA for more than 10 years and in that time, with 2-0 LCA's expertise in life cycle assessment, we have developed our tool for calculating the carbon footprint from dairy farming — evolving from an Excel-based solution covering a few hundred farms to a fully integrated LCA tool covering almost 8,000 farms across seven different countries.”

Hanne Bang Bligaard

Director of Agri Sustainability, Arla Foods

Proctor & Gamble

“LCA data is complex, with LCA studies often limited by data availability. 2-0 LCA has really helped us close the gap on end-of-life data for chemicals used in cleaning products, providing information that can be trusted for corporate GHG emissions reporting and more. Collaboration with 2-0 on this topic was truly a joy, with their experts speaking up and applying their scientific know-how to educate us, while also listening with respect for our company’s unique context and requirements.”