Life Cycle Assessment
LCA studio is an expert team from Czech Republic conducting Life Cycle Assessment studies, developing and verificating EPDs, calculating Carbon footprint and offering other services dealing with Industrial Ecology and craddle-to-grave caculations.
Our studies are fully in respect to international standards ISO 14040 and 14044 and ISO 14025 in the case of epds.
LCA studies are helpful for minimalizing of environmental impacts of production, products, servicies and organizations. Such studies are useful for customer comunication, PR, research and development.
The LCA method is designed for comparison of environmental interventions of products and services according to their entire life cycle, co called “from the cradle to the grave”. LCAs are not designed only for products, but also for more complex systems, like waste treatment facilities and infrastructures. The resources consumption and emissions into all environmental compartments from all processes involved in the life cycle of evaluated product/process are accounted. According to the complexity of product chains, even all important auxiliary processes like resources acquiring, material and energy of production of all important sub processes are accounted. As described in international standards EN ISO 14040 and EN ISO 14044, the LCA method consists of four principal steps: goal and scope definition, life cycle inventory, life cycle impact assessment and interpretation.
Four phases of LCA
Generally, life cycle assessment can be defined as a method that studies the environmental aspects and potential impacts of a product or system from raw material extraction through production, use and disposal. The general categories of environmental impacts to be considered include resources consumption, human health and ecological consequences. The result of the LCA is an environmental profile that expresses the performance of the total system life cycle and single life cycle stages. It has become a recognised tool in decision-making within industry and public administration. As a consequence, several international, national, industry branch and company specific LCA databases are established to provide data efficiently. Data on waste treatment processes and remediation and/or atenuation still tend to be missing or are of low quality.
The names of the ISO publications more or less reflect the main phases of LCA recommender in ISO guidelines. The phases are following: goal and scope definition, where the goal and scope of the study are defined; inventory analysis, which involves compilation and quantification of inputs and outputs, for a given life cycle system; impact assessment, which aims at understanding and evaluating the magnitude and significance of the potential environmental impact of a life cycle system and interpretation, in which the findings of either the inventory analysis or the impact assessment, or both, are combined consistent with the goal and scope in order to reach conclusions and recommendations.