Life Cycle Approaches
Life cycle approaches refer to a set of science-based frameworks and methodologies for quantifying and understanding the environmental, social and economic impacts of a product, material, process or services throughout its life cycle. Life cycle approaches include life cycle assessment (LCA), social LCA and life cycle costing (LCC).
Life cycle approaches consider everything from raw material extraction to manufacturing, distribution, and use, to end-of-life disposal, recycling, or reuse.
LCAs can support organisations in identifying potential environmental risks and enabling tangible differences to minimising the use of resources, pollutants, emissions and waste. They can support organisations to spot problems early and enable a cycle of continuous improvements to products and services.
Anthesis’ Strategic LCA Framework
Anthesis are global leaders in delivering LCAs for organisations across sectors with experts such as Jim Fava, leading on industry approaches to LCA. We have experience with all major LCA methodologies and software systems and can support organizations with comprehensive and complete LCA frameworks bespoke to their organisiational circumstances.
Oftentimes, we find that LCAs are used as precursors to larger sustainability projects and can therefore be seen as a suitable introductory approach to aligning your brand with modern, essential sustainability criteria. Determining the goal and scope is one of the most critical parts of an LCA.
Why Conduct a LCA?
LCAs have emerged as an essential and widely recognized science-based framework for better understanding your organizational environmental impacts. The growth of this has been combined with a surge of legislation across the globe, designed to improve compliance, efficiency and management of products. Now more than ever, an LCA can support your organization with aligning with the new global sustainability criteria. Completing an LCA can also help to inform strategic decision-making and create business value.
LCAs can support your organisation with:
- Deepening the knowledge of your products
- Understand the trade-offs between different environmental attributes (e.g., environmental effects of plastic in the ocean vs. climate change)
- Stimulate innovation by enhancing product development and helping to develop more sustainable products – supporting sustainable choices (design, development, manufacture)
- Integrating circular economy thinking into your processes
- Aiding in stakeholder communication and helping to satisfy investors, customers & stakeholders
- Reporting performance and progress
- Complying with regulation and demonstrating environmental credentials
- Understanding and aligning these impacts across the supply chain
- Understanding the trade-offs between different environmental attributes (e.g., environmental effects of plastic in the ocean vs. climate change)
Podcast Episode 24 : Driving Impact with Life Cycle Assessments
Join Anthesis experts as they discuss the business value of Life Cycle Assessments.
Listen Now
Discover the 10 Golden Rules for Applying Life Cycle Information to Create a Sustainable Business
Our Expertise
Providing LCA services for organisations across sectors and geographies
Anthesis’ LCA services
Anthesis is a global leader in the delivery and strategic implementation of life cycle systems. With LCA experts across the world, we have experience in delivering solutions for organisations across sectors and geographies. We can support you in profiling and modelling how products, materials and systems will perform and ultimately how to improve this performance.
Our Life Cycle Assessments align with internationally accredited compliance and regulatory processes, including ISO 14040 and 14044.
Types of LCA covered:
- Streamlined LCA
- DETAILED ISO-COMPLIANT LCA
- Product Environmental Footprints (PEF)
- lca tools
- Social LCA
- Total Organisational LCA
- CARBON FOOTPRINTS
- WATER FOOTPRINTS
Additional services:
- SUSTAINABILITY REPORTING
- EDUCATION & TRAINING
- SUSTAINABILITY STRATEGIES
- WASTE DECLARATIONS
- ENVIRONMENTAL PRODUCT DECLARATIONS (epd)
- Embedding LCA/LCT into business practices
- Building capacity to use LCA/LTC
Testimonials
Being part of the ECAP [European Clothing Action Plan] project has increased our understanding of our fibre footprint, and helped us set clear goals and start tracking against them. We have a much clearer picture about what we need to do to convert unsustainable materials into better options.
Sustainability and Quality Manager
It’s FIRA’s aim to make carbon accounting as easy as possible so that others can concentrate on reducing their footprint. No more spreadsheets or struggling to find conversion factors, the Furniture Footprinter™ tool [developed by Anthesis] provides a full web-based solution backed up by the experience of Europe’s leading footprint specialists.
Consultant, FIRA
Anthesis has been instrumental in helping us quantify our carbon footprint and understand where our biggest opportunities lie over the years. This long-term support has allowed us to reach carbon neutrality and maintain our status as the UK’s most ethical water brand – an essential part of what Belu stands for.
Head of Operations, Belu Water
Our chemical strategy will be one of the most comprehensive in the U.S. retail industry, including all Target-owned and national brand products and operations, not just formulated products.
Former VP of Corporate Responsibility, Target
The challenge with this type of project [materiality assessment] is to find the right partner that instinctively understands what is needed, and can deliver efficiently against the project brief. Anthesis’ way of working and communicating enabled us to execute the project on time, on budget, and to an excellent standard.
Sustainability Manager
Life Cycle Assessment Tools
We use a suite of LCA assessment software tools to maximise data quality and efficiency, ranging from excel templates and web applications through to big data scripted workflow analysis. Our team use a number of in-house tools including Footprinter and MarineShift360, alongside partner tools such as GaBi, OpenLCA, and are licensed distributors of SimaPro software. Additionally we can build custom tools to suit a client’s needs.
Create powerful management dashboards that visualise your sustainability performance at an operational, product or business unit level. This could include analysis of elements such as carbon, water, waste, food waste, energy and packaging.
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Anthesis has offices in the U.S., Canada, UK, France, the Netherlands, Belgium, South Africa, Ireland, Italy, Germany, Sweden, Spain, Portugal, Andorra, Finland, Colombia, Brazil, China, the Philippines and the Middle East.
