Life cycle assessment

Aerial view of green trees in Iasi, Romania

Every decision has a consequence on the environment, often in ways that aren't immediately visible. Life Cycle Assessment offers a structured and science-based way to evaluate these impacts.

Life cycle assessment (LCA) is the backbone of our services. It examines the entire journey from cradle to grave and quantifies a wide variety of environmental impacts. By evaluating the entire life cycle, LCA avoids cherry-picking only parts of your impact along the value chain.

By mapping out each stage, LCA provides valuable insights that support more responsible choices and help organizations meet both operational and stakeholder expectations. Remember that everything you do is a choice with consequences. Even doing nothing is a choice.

Why LCA Matters: 3 Key Benefits

An LCA study will provide you with detailed insights into the supply chain of your product or service, and its overall environmental footprint. This makes LCA particularly good for documentation, decision-making and building Trust in your company.

  • A tool for Decision-Making 
    A LCA can improve product design by revealing the impact of different choices before they're made. Raw materials, production methods, and recycling potential can significantly affect your product's overall footprint. LCA identifies where environmental impacts are largest throughout a product's life cycle, and can provide recommendations for reducing them, and supports better decision-making.
  • Transparent Documentation
    LCA can be used to document your environmental impacts and demonstrate compliance with the coming EU legislation. With LCA, you stand on solid ground to avoid any accusation of greenwashing. Additionally, LCA helps future-proof your product by having the documentation requirements that may come from customers, investors, or regulatory bodies down the line.
  • Trust Builder
    By publishing a high-quality and transparent LCA study can you improve trust in your brand. By being open about your environmental impacts and how you handle them makes your company stand out as trustworthy and ambitious.

Why most LCAs answer the wrong questions

Life Cycle Assessment is the gold standard for quantifying sustainability impacts. By taking a life cycle perspective and a holistic view, LCA lets us compare options at the system level and link impacts to the actual function of products and services. Used well, it helps us choose the most sustainable way to reach our goals.

But the value of LCA is not only to describe the past. It should guide better decisions about the future. Our studies need to support decision‑makers in reducing environmental impacts going forward.

To serve this purpose, our models must emphasize causality and understanding the links between choices and effects. Because real‑world relationships are complex and often unintuitive, our methods must be able to represent that complexity. Only then can we build a full picture before making choices that shape the future.

Too often, current LCAs fall short. Many focus on mapping past emissions and isolate product systems from their context through normative methodological choices. These retrospective studies can be informative, but they often fail to give decision‑makers the insight they need to anticipate the consequences of change. When used as guidance, such backward‑looking models risk answering the wrong questions: they describe the past instead of guiding the future.

How we help you answer the right question through LCA

All LCAs start with a Goal and scope definition: Clearly define the purpose of the study, the product system to be assessed, the functional unit (the reference unit for comparison), system boundaries, and the environmental impacts to be evaluated.

Whether you are exploring LCA for the first time or looking to deepen your existing practices, We guide you through every step and ensure that your LCA follows the standards and methods most appropriate for your needs, so you end up with the right data to make the most effective decisions.

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How to use LCA for decision-making

An LCA is only valuable if it's used to drive real change. Once the study is complete, we help you translate the insights into concrete improvements to your system. Based on your product's unique profile, we deliver tailored advice that identifies the most effective ways to reduce your environmental impact.

We always aim to deliver reports that are directly applicable to decision-making. To ensure you fully understand what your LCA tells you, we offer support through on-site presentations, webinars, or 1-1 consultations. We guide you through all aspects of the system and are happy to help measure and document the tangible difference your actions make.

Sustainability consulting

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.

Product footprint

We deliver life cycle assessments that give you robust, transparent, and science-based insight into the full impact of your products.

Product sustainability

Corporate footprint

A corporate footprint quantifies the sustainability performance of your company's operations and products, providing a 360-degree view of your impact on the planet and a benchmark for your reduction commitments.

Corporate sustainability

Carbon accounting

Know the total greenhouse gas emissions of all your activities and what to do about them with a complete picture of your scope 1, 2, and 3 emissions — including hotspot analysis and mitigation proposals.

Carbon accounting

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.

Biodiversity 

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.

Social sustainability

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. 

LCA quality assurance

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.

Jonas Eliassen
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Jonas Eliassen
Life Cycle Specialist
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