Life Cycle Assessment in Chemistry

A method that quantifies the environmental impacts of a product at all its stages, from raw materials to end of life (ISO 14040 and 14044).

Life cycle assessment (LCA) studies a product as a system: extraction and manufacture of raw materials, manufacture of the product, packaging, transport, use and final management of the product and its packaging. The ISO 14040 and ISO 14044 standards structure it in four phases: goal and scope definition, in which the functional unit and the system boundaries are set (for example, «cradle to gate» or «cradle to grave»); inventory analysis, which records the inputs of materials and energy and the emissions; impact assessment, which translates the inventory into categories such as climate change, acidification, eutrophication or ecotoxicity; and interpretation of the results.

For cleaning products, the functional unit usually refers to the service provided, for example one wash or one surface cleaned, and not to a kilo of product, because the use dose varies greatly between formulations. That is why an LCA of a detergent takes into account the dose, the use temperature, the packaging and the behaviour of the ingredients in wastewater. The results depend on the assumptions and data used, so two studies are only comparable if they share functional unit, boundaries and method.

LCA is the basis of other tools, such as the carbon footprint, which considers only the climate change category, and of the criteria for type I ecolabels, such as the EU Ecolabel, which are defined taking into account impacts throughout the life cycle.

More information: Carbon footprint of chemical products · EU Ecolabel · ISO 14001