LCA-based impact modeling benefits

♻️ What exactly is a Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) — and why should your business care? As a sustainability consultant, I often meet companies that want to reduce their impact but aren’t sure where to start.One of the most powerful yet underused tools is LCA (or ACV in French). 🌍 A Life Cycle Assessment measures the environmental footprint of a product, service, or process — from raw materials to end-of-life. It gives a full picture: carbon emissions, water use, resource depletion, toxicity, and more. 🔍 It helps you: - Spot hidden hotspots in your supply chain - Compare design or material options with real data - Structure eco-design strategies with credibility - Align with regulations like RE2020, CSRD, EU Taxonomy, HQE, and more 🧱 And when formalized through tools like: => FDES (for construction products) => PEP ecopassport® (for electrical/electronic equipment) These assessments become valuable assets for tenders, certifications, and client trust. 📘 Some key methodologies: - ISO 14040 / 14044 (global standards) - EN 15804 (Europe, construction sector) - Product Environmental Footprint (PEF) – EU-wide approach 🧠 As a consultant, I see LCA as an essential tool — not just for compliance, but for informed, credible, and future-ready sustainability strategies. 💬 Are LCA, FDES or PEP already part of your sustainability approach? If not yet — what’s holding it back? #Sustainability #LCA #ACV #EcoDesign #CircularEconomy #CSRD #GreenBuilding #FDES #PEP #Consulting #ClimateStrategy

How to turn LCA results into design insights Many companies run an LCA, get the carbon footprint and stop there. The report goes into a slide deck and the product moves on unchanged. But LCA is a goldmine for product innovation. Let me show you how. Case study: “Consumer Electronics Product” Objective: Reduce carbon footprint without compromising performance. Baseline impact: • Carbon footprint: 14.1 kg CO₂e per unit • Hotspots: virgin plastic housing, large PCB, air-freight logistics Design changes based on LCA insights: Switched to 75% recycled ABS → 22% CO₂e reduction → Cost: +6-8% increase in material, partially offset at scale Reduced PCB size by 15% → 6% CO₂e reduction → Cost: unchanged (smaller PCB=less material, but minor redesign cost) Shifted from air to sea freight → 10% CO₂e reduction → Cost: Lower, but trade-off in lead time Overall result: • Carbon footprint reduced by ~38% • Cost impact: +2-3% per unit after optimization • Payback achieved within 12 months through logistics savings and volume pricing If you're sitting on LCA data and unsure what to do with it, that's where the real opportunity begins. 💡 I help teams translate sustainability data into smart design decisions. Curious what this could look like for your product? Let’s connect! #ecodesign

Using Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) to Evaluate Dairy Diet Efficiency Achieving precision in dairy nutrition requires accurately predicting the metabolizable methionine (Met) and lysine (Lys) available to each cow. Reliable measurement techniques are essential to assess nitrogen and amino acid utilization effectively. Understanding the rumen protection rate and intestinal availability of rumen-protected amino acids (RP-AAs) helps determine the primary amino acids available to the animal. When diets are formulated with the right RP-Met and RP-Lys, in line with the latest nutritional insights, nitrogen efficiency improves, and animal performance increases. Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) is a valuable tool for measuring the environmental impact of different feeding strategies. A recent study compared a control diet without RP-AAs to two diets incorporating RP-Met and RP-Lys. The control and one of the test diets contained soybean meal, while the other did not. Both experimental diets had lower crude protein levels but still met the animals’ metabolizable protein (MP) requirements. The LCA showed over 7% improved nitrogen efficiency, a more than 10% reduction in nitrous oxide emissions, and over 10% lower CO₂-equivalent emissions per kilogram of dry matter compared to the control. Importantly, these benefits were achieved without increasing feed costs. Balancing for individual amino acids rather than relying on excess crude protein presents a significant opportunity to enhance dairy herd profitability. With rising feed costs, formulating lower-protein diets while meeting amino acid requirements can improve MP utilization, cow productivity, and overall health. At the same time, it reduces nitrogen excretion and the environmental footprint of dairy production. Are you ready for the future? #SustainableDairy #AminoAcidBalancing #FeedEfficiency

𝗡𝗲𝘄 𝗿𝗲𝘀𝗲𝗮𝗿𝗰𝗵 𝗵𝗶𝗴𝗵𝗹𝗶𝗴𝗵𝘁𝘀 𝗵𝗼𝘄 𝗱𝗮𝘁𝗮 𝗰𝗲𝗻𝘁𝗲𝗿𝘀 𝗰𝗮𝗻 𝗹𝗼𝘄𝗲𝗿 𝘁𝗵𝗲𝗶𝗿 𝗰𝗮𝗿𝗯𝗼𝗻, 𝗲𝗻𝗲𝗿𝗴𝘆, 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝘄𝗮𝘁𝗲𝗿 𝗳𝗼𝗼𝘁𝗽𝗿𝗶𝗻𝘁𝘀 — 𝗳𝗿𝗼𝗺 𝗰𝗿𝗮𝗱𝗹𝗲 𝘁𝗼 𝗴𝗿𝗮𝘃𝗲. A new paper Nature Magazine from Microsoft researchers, (led by Husam Alissa and Teresa Nick), demonstrates the power of life cycle assessment (#LCA) to guide more sustainable data center design decisions — going beyond operational efficiency. 𝐊𝐞𝐲 𝐌𝐞𝐬𝐬𝐚𝐠𝐞:  While LCAs are often conducted after design and construction, this paper highlights the value of applying them much earlier. Integrated into early-stage design, LCAs help balance sustainability alongside feasibility and cost — leading to better trade-offs from the start. For example, the study found that switching from air cooling to cold plates that cool datacenter chips more directly – a newer technology that Microsoft is deploying in its datacenters – could: ▶️reduce GHG emissions and energy demand by ~15 % and ▶️reduce water consumption by ~30-50 % across the datacenters’ entire life spans. And this goes beyond cooling water. It includes water used in power generation, manufacturing, and across the entire value chain. As lead author Husam Alissa notes: "𝘞𝘦’𝘳𝘦 𝘢𝘥𝘷𝘰𝘤𝘢𝘵𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘧𝘰𝘳 𝘭𝘪𝘧𝘦 𝘤𝘺𝘤𝘭𝘦 𝘢𝘴𝘴𝘦𝘴𝘴𝘮𝘦𝘯𝘵 𝘵𝘰𝘰𝘭𝘴 𝘵𝘰 𝘨𝘶𝘪𝘥𝘦 𝘦𝘯𝘨𝘪𝘯𝘦𝘦𝘳𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘥𝘦𝘤𝘪𝘴𝘪𝘰𝘯𝘴 𝘦𝘢𝘳𝘭𝘺 𝘰𝘯 — 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘴𝘩𝘢𝘳𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘮 𝘸𝘪𝘥𝘦𝘭𝘺 𝘵𝘰 𝘮𝘢𝘬𝘦 𝘢𝘥𝘰𝘱𝘵𝘪𝘰𝘯 𝘦𝘢𝘴𝘪𝘦𝘳." To support broader adoption, the team is making the methodology open and available to the industry via an open research repository: https://lnkd.in/gC5jdkMs The work builds on Microsoft’s continued efforts to construct unified life cycle assessment methods and tools for cloud providers. (read more about this here: https://lnkd.in/gq24wMrA) 𝐑𝐞𝐚𝐝 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗳𝘂𝗹𝗹 𝗽𝗮𝗽𝗲𝗿 𝗵𝗲𝗿𝗲: 👉https://lnkd.in/gVm25zzh #sustainability #climateaction #innovation #sciencetoaction

🌿 🦋 NEW PAPER ON BIODIVERSITY FOOTPRINTING Key take-aways: ♻️ 🌎 Taking a whole lifecycle approach for assessing business biodiversity impacts is important, as substantial impacts can often be embedded within organisational value chains. 📅 ⛏️ 🪓 Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) is a powerful approach to help organisations understand the impacts of company activities on biodiversity, covering all stages of a product’s life cycle and capturing many pressures that impact biodiversity. ❓ 🌵 🐦 But how do the ‘biodiversity footprint’ estimates from these tools relate to biodiversity impacts on the ground? What are the major assumptions and sources of uncertainty in these approaches? And how do these uncertainties influence the design of strategies to mitigate impacts? 😕 ❓ Modelling complex value chains and impact pathways necessarily means big assumptions are made in assessments. This means LCAs carry substantial uncertainties, which are often poorly understood and communicated in results. These uncertainties arise from the structure of the models (such as which biodiversity threats are included), the quality and completeness of the underlying data, decisions made in assessments and the way results are presented. 🔀 If not fully appreciated, these uncertainties could influence user decision-making, potentially leading to misleading conclusions, and misallocated resources to address impacts when designing biodiversity strategies. 📃 🧭 So given these risks… how should organisations use LCAs to their full potential? In the paper we outline clear opportunities for businesses and researchers to reduce, better understand and navigate these uncertainties wherever possible. 🌳 🦁 We outline opportunities for the effective use of LCAs in biodiversity strategy design: 1) Risk screening & tracking progress: We suggest LCAs can be most effective for high-level risk screening, prioritising action, and tracking biodiversity impact reduction over time. 2) Complemented by other approaches: Once high-impact areas are identified, LCAs can be paired with more specific approaches to provide robust impact estimates and guide effective, location-specific mitigation action. 3) Cautious use & complementary metrics: LCA outputs should be interpreted carefully due to uncertainties and lack of specificity. Targets should use a basket of metrics, focusing on direct biodiversity measurements, pressure reductions, and clear conservation actions. Care should be taken when using absolute estimates of biodiversity impact from LCA’s in strategy design. If you’re interested, there is much more detail in the full paper. This was a great collaborative effort between Interdisciplinary Centre for Conservation Science, The Biodiversity Consultancy Ltd & The Leverhulme Centre for Nature Recovery. https://lnkd.in/eqFebWZk Please do get in touch if you’d like to discuss. We’d love to hear from you.