LCA and Verification
In a world that is rapidly warming up, and as a response to legal and social pressures, businesses need to develop innovative and cost-effective ways to limit their adverse effects to climate change. In order to be able to make environmental claims and avoid accusations of green washing it is absolutely necessary to make claims under correct frameworks and have them verified. CSE has expertise in international best practices for conducting an LCA, which includes the GHG Protocol, PAS 2050; 2008, and ISO 14040:2006. Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) is a methodology for assessing the environmental aspects associated with a product over its life cycle. The most important application is the analysis of the contribution of the life cycle stages to the overall environmental load, usually with the aim of prioritizing improvements on products.
Conducting an LCA means being able to communicate the environmental impact of specific products, materials, and/or business processes.
An LCA study based on the CSE methodology consists of four steps:
- Defining the goal and scope of the study
- Making a model of the product life cycle with all environmental inputs and outputs. The data collection effort is usually referred to as the life cycle inventory (LCI) stage
- Understanding the environmental relevance of all the inputs and outputs. This is referred to as the life cycle impact assessment (LCIA) phase
- The interpretation of the study