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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 now not helpful— every stage impacts the surroundings. Life Cycle Assessments, or LCAs, assist us estimate that affect and determine areas for enchancment all through a product’s life cycle.
LCAs assist companies perceive the environmental footprint of their merchandise, processes, or providers throughout each stage of their life cycle. From power use to water consumption, LCAs reveal important information that may drive extra sustainable selections.
What’s a Life Cycle Evaluation (LCA)?
A Life Cycle Evaluation evaluates your complete life cycle of a product, together with*:
- Uncooked materials extraction. One instance is sourcing minerals, metals, or pure fibers.
- Supplies and product manufacturing — corresponding to changing supplies into completed merchandise.
- Transportation and distribution — together with the journey to shops, warehouses, and clients.
- Utilization — corresponding to assets 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 affect 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 scale back their environmental affect.
* Notice, the examples listed above are usually not exhaustive and are supposed to be illustrative.
What do LCAs estimate?
LCAs transcend simply evaluating a product’s carbon footprint to incorporate matters corresponding to water consumption, power demand, useful resource depletion, waste era, and air pollution. Let’s take the instance of a seemingly easy T-shirt to discover an instance of what could 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 contemporary water is consumed throughout manufacturing and product use. For instance, producing sufficient cotton for a single T-shirt can require 1000’s of liters of water, with further water used for dyeing, washing, and cleansing the shirt over its lifetime.
Major Power Demand (Power consumption): LCAs consider the power assets used to provide, 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 doubtlessly pollute water sources, and the shirt itself might finally find yourself in a landfill.
Abiotic Depletion Potential (Useful resource depletion): LCAs estimate using finite assets 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 device for driving innovation and decreasing environmental affect.
They’ll supply tangible advantages for companies aiming to fulfill their sustainability targets. By figuring out probably the most resource-intensive phases of a product’s life, corporations can goal environmental “hotspots” and implement adjustments corresponding to utilizing renewable power to energy manufacturing websites or switching to extra sustainable supplies that cut back their total affect. These insights can drive innovation, enabling the design of merchandise which might be extra energy-efficient, sturdy, and round with diminished resource-intensiveness and environmental affect.
For instance, it’s estimated that over 80% of product-related environmental impacts are decided through the design section.1 LCAs might help evaluate alternate options and perceive trade-offs when deciding on elements, course of steps or disposal sorts. By integrating LCAs early within the design course of, corporations can enhance sustainability outcomes.
Publishing LCA outcomes helps to boost company transparency and help environmental reporting. Sharing these reviews builds belief with clients, staff, traders, and different stakeholders, whereas guaranteeing compliance with international sustainability requirements and reporting frameworks.
How are LCAs performed?
Conducting an LCA is a structured course of that entails gathering information throughout each section of the product lifecycle, assessing environmental impacts, and decoding the outcomes to help initiatives like net-zero targets and round product design.
LCAs observe globally accepted requirements, such because the Worldwide Group for Standardization’s (ISO) 14040 and 14044. There are different requirements which might be additionally primarily based on ISO’s framework.
Cisco’s method to Life Cycle Assessments
At Cisco, LCAs play a key function in our efforts to estimate and reduce the environmental affect of our merchandise.
Lately, we introduced that Cisco has made these assessments publicly obtainable, sharing LCAs for quite a few our merchandise on the Sustainability Assets part of our web site. Cisco has already accomplished 23 LCAs throughout 8 enterprise items prior to now two years and plans to publish further assessments throughout key product strains in 2025. Sharing these outcomes helps transparency and demonstrates our dedication to measurable progress.
Whereas many expertise corporations publish LCAs, Cisco is likely one of the first to provide them for networking tools, corresponding to Catalyst switches. Cisco’s Chief Sustainability Workplace and Provide Chain Sustainability groups proceed to accomplice with our colleagues throughout the corporate to provide these reviews, and we plan to proceed publishing them as they grow to be obtainable.
LCAs are a part of how we method sustainability holistically. LCA information helps our round design technique— to develop merchandise and assets which might be reused, repurposed, and stored in circulation for so long as attainable. By evaluating all the things from materials sourcing to end-of-life disposal, we achieve important insights that information our product design and innovation.
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