Life cycle assessment software
If you want to understand your products embodied carbon, a life cycle inventory and assessment is the way to go. There are loads of tools available that can support you in this. A quick overview of some of the well-known LCA software solutions below.
Benefits for using a Life cycle assessment software solution
Using Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) software is a smart, forward-looking move. Especially when you integrate eco-design best practices into each product development phase. These software solutions enable a data-driven and efficient approach, providing deep insights into environmental impacts. This understanding not only fuels innovation and creativity but also distinguishes your offerings in a competitive marketplace. LCA software makes scaling up your green initiatives easier, making your work not just smarter, but also more impactful.
An overview of some LCA software solutions:
Ecochain
Ecochain is an LCA software company with one purpose: empowering companies to make an ongoing sustainable impact on our planet. With customers from 20+ countries and a broad range of industries, Ecochain is the go-to LCA software for businesses across the globe. Ecochain provides two solutions to empower businesses – Ecochain Mobius and Ecochain Helix. Ecochain Mobius fosters Ecodesign and helps product designers with little-to-no LCA knowledge to create LCAs with ease. Ecochain Helix enables businesses to create LCAs at a large scale for their production facilities and assess the environmental impact on a company, process, and product level.
Open LCA
openLCA is a free, professional Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) and Footprint software with a broad range of functions and available databases, created by GreenDelta. openLCA is an open source software, i.e. its source code is freely available and can be modified by anyone. Initially, the main application of openLCA was (environmental) life cycle assessment, LCA. Later on, openLCA was extended to enable also economic life cycle assessment models, especially in a combination with LCA, in the form of Life Cycle Costing. OpenLCA is a desktop application that works without internet access.
What is a life cycle assessment?
A life cylce assessment is a method to calculate and understand the environmental impact of product, service or process throughout its entire life cycle. This includes the extraction of raw materials, manufacturing, transportation, usage, and disposal or recycling. By assessing these stages, LCA helps in understanding the complete environmental impact of a product or process and identifies areas for improvement in terms of sustainability, it allows you to quantify the environmental impacts of products or services and find ways to reduce them.
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Is there a lower-carbon feedstock you could choose?
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Are you powering your production process via renewables? What is your electricityy, water and overall energy usage during production.
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Can you use a more sustainable material for your packaging?
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How can you optimise your logistics? Are you using an electric fleet?
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What is your by-product volume? Can you switch to compostable packaging or a more circulair product?
SimaPro
SimaPro helps you effectively apply your sustainability expertise to empower informed decision-making, change product life cycles for the better, and increase your company’s positive impact. Created in 1990, today SimaPro is among the leading LCA software – trusted by companies, consultancies, and universities in more than 80 countries.
Sphera
Sphera creates a safer, more sustainable and productive world. We are the leading provider of Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) performance and risk management software, data and consulting services focusing on Environment, Health, Safety & Sustainability (EHS&S), Operational Risk Management, Product Stewardship and Supply Chain Risk Management (SCRM). For more than 30 years, we have served over 7,000 customers and a million-plus users in 80 countries to optimize workflows and navigate the complex and dynamic global regulatory structure.
Our methodology to calculate your products footprint
Define the scope
Identify objectives, goals and define the LCA scope to understand your products footprint. What is already done, what is available. What do we want to measure and with what goal. Alignment on main objectives and outline this in a clear and simple plan of approach.
Flowchart
Visualize each step in the production process. From sourcing raw materials, production, transportation and waste handling. A flowchart helps us to have a systematic approach to assessing your products carbon footprint.
Data collection
The data collection process can be the most difficult and time consuming. We will engage with other departments, suppliers and stakeholders to get as much primairy data as possible.When primairy data isn’t available, our experts will use secondairy data.
Eco design - build out scenario’s
The Eco-design is where innovation starts and you can really achieve a return on investment. With the goal to reduce negative impact, we build out differenct scenario’s showing alternative ingredients or processes. This enables you to make data driven decisions in your product design process.
Insights and hotspots
Per element, the impact will be calculated and presented into a visualization. We will show high impact areas and hotspots. This will help you to understand overall impact and where the quick wins are. By understanding the most impactfull areas, we can now start the eco-design process.
Continuous Improvement
Implement best practices around continues improvement. Regularly review your earlier LCA’s and keep them up to date. For new innovations, join forces with universities and similar organizations to be on top of the newest trends and discoveries.
How we can help?
Susbscribing to one of these solution is one, using it is another. It can be complex and overwhelming and you need some expertise and know how to do it accurately.
We have LCA’s experts inhouse that can support you and get you on your way. Next to that, we have wide spread knowledge on these tools and how to use these. We understand which tool might work the best for your industrie and use case.
LCA experts inhouse
Familiar with these tools and understand pro’s and con’s depending on your use case
Industry specific know how on newest innovations that will enable you to reduce your footprint
