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Each product has a narrative. From the uncooked supplies used to create it, to the power it consumes, to the place it finally ends up when it’s not helpful— every stage impacts the surroundings. Life Cycle Assessments, or LCAs, assist us estimate that impression and determine areas for enchancment all through a product’s life cycle.
LCAs assist companies perceive the environmental footprint of their merchandise, processes, or companies throughout each stage of their life cycle. From power use to water consumption, LCAs reveal important knowledge that may drive extra sustainable selections.
What’s a Life Cycle Evaluation (LCA)?
A Life Cycle Evaluation evaluates your entire life cycle of a product, together with*:
- Uncooked materials extraction. One instance is sourcing minerals, metals, or pure fibers.
- Supplies and product manufacturing — equivalent to changing supplies into completed merchandise.
- Transportation and distribution — together with the journey to shops, warehouses, and clients.
- Utilization — equivalent to sources consumed when a product is in use.
- Finish-of-life — what occurs to a product after use: as an illustration, recycling, reuse, or landfill disposal.
LCAs estimate the environmental impression at every stage, offering an image of a product’s footprint. Companies depend on LCAs to determine the place the best impacts happen and discover alternatives to cut back their environmental impression.
* Observe, the examples listed above will not be exhaustive and are supposed to be illustrative.
What do LCAs estimate?
LCAs transcend simply evaluating a product’s carbon footprint to incorporate matters equivalent to water consumption, power demand, useful resource depletion, waste technology, and air pollution. Let’s take the instance of a seemingly easy T-shirt to discover an instance of what might be measured:
World Warming Potential (GWP): LCAs estimate the greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide (CO₂) and methane (CH₄) that contribute to local weather change. For a T-shirt, these emissions happen at each stage—from producing cotton to powering factories and transporting the completed product.
Blue Water Consumption (Water utilization): LCAs estimate how a lot recent water is consumed throughout manufacturing and product use. For instance, producing sufficient cotton for a single T-shirt can require hundreds of liters of water, with extra water used for dyeing, washing, and cleansing the shirt over its lifetime.
Major Power Demand (Power consumption): LCAs consider the power sources used to supply, distribute, and energy a product. For a T-shirt, this contains working textile equipment in factories and transporting the shirt across the globe.
Ecotoxicity (Waste and air pollution): LCAs estimate pollution that have an effect on air, water, and land. In T-shirt manufacturing, chemical dyes and by merchandise can probably pollute water sources, and the shirt itself may finally find yourself in a landfill.
Abiotic Depletion Potential (Useful resource depletion): LCAs estimate using finite sources like metals, minerals, and fossil fuels. In our T-shirt instance, rising cotton depletes soil vitamins, whereas producing artificial fibers like polyester depends on fossil fuels.
By capturing this full vary of environmental impacts, LCAs empower companies to prioritize extra sustainable actions throughout their operations and product design.
Why LCAs matter for companies
LCAs generally is a highly effective instrument for driving innovation and lowering environmental impression.
They’ll supply tangible advantages for companies aiming to satisfy their sustainability objectives. By figuring out essentially the most resource-intensive phases of a product’s life, firms can goal environmental “hotspots” and implement adjustments equivalent to utilizing renewable power to energy manufacturing websites or switching to extra sustainable supplies that scale back their total impression. These insights can drive innovation, enabling the design of merchandise which are extra energy-efficient, sturdy, and round with lowered resource-intensiveness and environmental impression.
For instance, it’s estimated that over 80% of product-related environmental impacts are decided in the course of the design section.1 LCAs can assist examine options and perceive trade-offs when deciding on parts, course of steps or disposal sorts. By integrating LCAs early within the design course of, firms can enhance sustainability outcomes.
Publishing LCA outcomes helps to boost company transparency and help environmental reporting. Sharing these studies builds belief with clients, workers, traders, and different stakeholders, whereas guaranteeing compliance with world sustainability requirements and reporting frameworks.
How are LCAs performed?
Conducting an LCA is a structured course of that entails gathering knowledge throughout each section of the product lifecycle, assessing environmental impacts, and decoding the outcomes to help initiatives like net-zero objectives and round product design.
LCAs comply with globally accepted requirements, such because the Worldwide Group for Standardization’s (ISO) 14040 and 14044. There are different requirements which are additionally primarily based on ISO’s framework.
Cisco’s method to Life Cycle Assessments
At Cisco, LCAs play a key position in our efforts to estimate and reduce the environmental impression of our merchandise.
Lately, we introduced that Cisco has made these assessments publicly out there, sharing LCAs for quite a few our merchandise on the Sustainability Sources part of our web site. Cisco has already accomplished 23 LCAs throughout 8 enterprise items prior to now two years and plans to publish extra assessments throughout key product traces in 2025. Sharing these outcomes helps transparency and demonstrates our dedication to measurable progress.
Whereas many know-how firms publish LCAs, Cisco is without doubt one of the first to supply them for networking tools, equivalent to Catalyst switches. Cisco’s Chief Sustainability Workplace and Provide Chain Sustainability groups proceed to associate with our colleagues throughout the corporate to supply these studies, and we plan to proceed publishing them as they grow to be out there.
LCAs are a part of how we method sustainability holistically. LCA knowledge helps our round design technique— to develop merchandise and sources which are reused, repurposed, and saved in circulation for so long as potential. By evaluating the whole lot from materials sourcing to end-of-life disposal, we achieve important insights that information our product design and innovation.
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