What Your LCA Is Actually For

11:00 EDT | 15:00 GMT | 16:00 CET

Whether you’re building evidence for a sustainability marketing claim, providing footprint data to customers or redesigning a product to reduce its impact, you’ll need a life-cycle assessment (LCA), and each purpose comes with different practical requirements. The challenge is making sure your approach is fit for purpose, neither over- nor under-baked. That’s where life-cycle intelligence starts to earn its keep.

An LCA is a tool, not an end product. The footprint was never the destination – it’s the evidence behind a better decision. Getting the right LCA starts with one question: “What do we need this assessment to enable us to do?”

An LCA designed to substantiate a marketing claim may need to look very different from one designed to provide product carbon data to a customer, support Scope 3 decision-making, or identify opportunities for product innovation. In this session, Anthesis experts will explore three of the most common ways businesses are putting LCA to work today:

Green claims – What evidence do you need to make and substantiate an environmental claim? How should the intended claim shape the assessment from the outset, rather than being bolted on at the end?

Scope 3 and customer carbon data – What does good product carbon footprint (PCF) information look like when customers ask you for data, or when you ask your own suppliers? What level of consistency, transparency and assurance makes that information usable?

Sustainable product innovation – What kind of LCA can help you design a better, more sustainable product that strengthens customer value and supports credible sustainability communications at the same time?

Rather than dwelling on LCA theory, we’ll focus on the practical choices in front of you: what analysis is appropriate, what evidence is needed, where common approaches fall short, and how to design an LCA around the outcome you need. Life-cycle intelligence is only useful once it’s made actionable.

What you’ll learn:

• Why the business objective should determine how an LCA or PCF is designed
• What changes when the objective is green-claim substantiation
• How to approach product carbon data for Scope 3 and customer requirements
• How to use LCA to identify and prioritise the product improvements that actually move the needle
• How to avoid producing technically sound analysis that doesn’t serve the decision you need to make

Who should attend?

• Sustainability, product and marketing leaders who need their environmental claims, and the numbers behind them, to hold up under scrutiny
• Scope 3 and procurement teams who want product carbon footprints from their suppliers and need to know what “good” looks like
• Sales and client managers who need to give customers credible product footprints that fit the bill
• Product and design leads working to create more sustainable products

This session is designed for organisations that have commissioned an assessment and are unsure how to apply its findings, as well as those preparing to commission one who wish to avoid that situation from the outset.