A Beginner’s Guide to Life Cycle Assessment
- Life Cycle Assessment is a standardised method used to measure the environmental impacts of a product or service across its entire life cycle, from raw materials to end-of-life.
- LCA captures a wide range of impacts beyond climate change, including resource depletion, pollution, ecosystem damage, and effects on human health.
- The methodology follows a structured ISO framework, covering goal and scope definition, data collection, impact assessment, and interpretation of results.
- By analysing each life cycle stage, LCA helps identify where the largest environmental impacts occur and where improvements will be most effective.
- LCA supports better decision-making for businesses, more transparent environmental claims for regulators, and more informed choices for consumers.
- Starting small, using available data, and relying on dedicated LCA software makes the process accessible even for beginners while enabling continuous improvement over time.
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Every product has a story long before and after it reaches our hands. The beans in your morning coffee, the cotton in your socks and the metals in the laptop you’re reading this on, all go through stages of production, use, and disposal. Most of these impacts are invisible to us, yet they shape the environmental footprints of the things we rely on everyday.
If we want to reduce emissions and design products that have a lighter impact on the planet, we need to measure these hidden impacts. This is where Life Cycle Assessments (LCAs) come in.
Whether you’ve heard of LCAs and are curious where to begin, or you’ve never come across the term, this guide will walk you through the basics.
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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For consumers, LCA matters because it supports buying decisions. With so many products on the market, those with a lower footprint or a more transparent impact will have competitive advantage.
For businesses, LCA provides reliable data to support decisions. By understanding which materials or manufacturing steps drive the most emissions, companies can meet their sustainability goals.
For regulators, LCA brings transparency. It allows environmental claims to be backed by evidence and helps avoid misleading assumptions or greenwashing.
With the cotton socks example, an LCA might show that most impacts come from cotton farming. That insight matters to everyone: customers may prefer socks made from cotton that uses fewer chemicals; businesses can use this information to shift to organic cotton which reduces pollution and might cut costs; and regulators can rely on these findings to ensure that any sustainability claims the company makes are accurate and not misleading.
An LCA follows a structured process defined by ISO 14040/44. While the full methodology can get complex, the core steps are straightforward and easy to understand.
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Step 1 - Define Your Goal & Scope
Every LCA begins with a clear purpose. This step sets the direction for the entire study and ensures the results will actually support strategic decisions.
For cotton socks, the goal might be to compare different materials (like organic cotton vs. conventional cotton), or identify opportunities to reduce manufacturing impact and costs.
Once you know your goal, the next step is defining the scope of your assessment. This outlines what the study covers:
- Functional unit: This is the reference point for all calculations. For socks, it might be one pair of cotton socks worn for one year or one pair of socks from production to end-of-life.
- System boundaries: Decide which stages you’ll include.
- Assumptions and exclusions: LCAs can be complex so if it important to define a specific scope and boundary for the assessment. Criteria for exclusions should be clearly stated in the LCA study to ensure transparency, but it is completely normal to limit the scope of the study to a manageable size. For socks, getting information on the energy used for lighting of the stores where they are sold would be very difficult and would not have a large impact on the overall emissions in the lifecycle. This information can therefore be excluded and stated in the assessment.
A well-defined goal and scope keeps the analysis focused and avoids confusion later. It also ensures that decisions are made based on a consistent and meaningful comparison.
Step 2 - Gather the Data
The second step is to collect the data needed to understand the environmental inputs and outputs across the product’s life cycle. This stage is called the Life Cycle Inventory (LCI).
Environmental inputs are what you take out of the environment to put into the product’s life cycle. For socks this includes materials like cotton, water and fertilisers, chemicals such as dyes and detergents and energy. Environmental outputs are what the product’s life cycle puts out into the environment. For example, direct CO₂ emissions from farming, wastewater from washing and solid waste from packaging and worn-out socks.
Data can come from suppliers, internal production records, LCA databases, published studies, or reasonable assumptions when information is missing.
Step 3 - Quantify Impacts
Then, the data needs to be translated into environmental impacts. This is called Life Cycle Impact Assessment (LCIA). It helps you understand what the data actually means and how inputs and outputs affect the environment and people.
For cotton socks, common impact categories include global warming from emissions, damage to human health from pesticides and fertilizers, and resource depletion using large amounts of water in farming.
Most LCA softwares can calculate these impacts automatically once you input the inventory data. The level of detail in the assessment can vary. You can look at each impact separately or combine them into a single sustainability score.
Step 4 - Interpret Results
The final step of an LCA is interpretation. This is where you make sense of all the data and impacts collected in the previous steps. It helps you understand which stages of the product’s life cycle are most critical, and how the results can guide decisions. The ISO 14044 standard outlines several checks to ensure that the data and the procedures used support the conclusions.
For cotton socks, the interpretation might show hotspots in the farming stage and trade-offs like how switching to organic cotton reduces pesticide use but may increase water consumption. You might also find opportunities for improvements by using more efficient dyeing processes, or encouraging lower-temperature washing.
Getting started with LCA can feel overwhelming, but it doesn’t have to be.
Start small
Choose a single product or component, like a pair of cotton socks. Focus on a few key life cycle stages first, such as cotton farming, manufacturing, and washing. You can expand later as you gain confidence.
Use available data
Begin with readily available information such as supplier data, public LCA databases, or even estimates. Accuracy is important, but at this stage, a screening-level assessment is enough to identify major hotspots.
Leverage LCA software
Trying to do an LCA manually is unnecessarily complicated. Pilario's LCA software makes the process far more accessible. Our predefined industry models, verified databases, and scenario-building features make it easier to run calculations and explore design changes. Automated reporting, dashboards, and communication tools help turn results into clear insights that teams can use across the organisation.
For a beginner, this means you can focus on learning the basics while the software handles the technical heavy lifting.
Identify hotspots
Look at which stages or materials have the largest impacts as these are the areas where improvements will have the greatest effect.
Consult experts
If you’re unsure about data sources, assumptions, or interpreting results, speak with LCA professionals. A conversation with one of our experts can save time and clarify complex points.Pilario offers onboarding, training, and regular support, making it easier for beginners to move confidently from first steps to more advanced analysis.
Iterate and refine
LCA is an iterative methodology, meaning it develops and improves over multiple cycles. An initial analysis may reveal missing data, unclear assumptions, or the need to adjust the goal and scope. Learn from the first run, and refine your study over time. Each iteration improves your understanding and helps make better sustainability decisions.
Curious about how to begin? Talk to one of our LCA specialists and explore how Pilario can help simplify your first assessment. We use our expertise to meet you wherever you are on your sustainability journey and elevate your LCA knowledge until you gain a comprehensive view of your impacts.
Let us guide you on your path to sustainability.
