What is a Life-Cycle Assessment (LCA)?
A Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) is a method used to measure a product or service's environmental impact throughout its lifecycle. This method looks at every stage of a product’s life including the resources used to make it, the manufacturing process, the distribution, its use and its disposal.
The International Organization for Standardization (ISO) has standardised the basic methodology to conduct LCAs in the ISO 14040 and 14044 series. These series provide a framework for determining the impact of each stage on several environmental factors. These factors do not only focus on climate change, but also include ecosystem destruction, pollution, human health damage and resource depletion, amongst others.
Conducting an LCA for a pair of cotton socks, for example, starts with the cultivation of the cotton itself, its water requirements and the use of fertilisers or pesticides. The assessment then follows the transformation of raw cotton into finished socks, covering fibre spinning, knitting and dyeing, as well as the energy and chemical inputs involved. Packaging and transportation are considered next, including the materials used and distances traveled. The use phase examines washing and drying habits, focusing on energy and water consumption over the socks’ lifetime. Finally, end-of-life pathways such as reuse, recycling or disposal are evaluated. Bringing all this data together reveals the environmental impacts across the sock’s entire life cycle including water pollution linked to cotton cultivation and potential human health effects from chemical dyes.
By looking at each stage, we can see where the biggest impacts occur and where improvements matter most.
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