Everyone knows that most of the products that we buy and sell were designed for a single purpose; are made from a number of raw material components; utilized some kind of base material; used energy and likely water during manufacturing; are packaged when they arrive and most likely have been shipped some distance. These are all activities and elements that are hidden in the product when we purchase it and without further research we often have no idea exactly what it took to deliver that stick of lumber to the lumberyard shelf.

 

Life-cycle Analysis (LCA) was developed in the 1960s and early 1970s as society, businesses and governments began to see the future of rising populations and decreasing natural resources. The Coca-Cola Company was the first notable US based company to do an internal life-cycle analysis of its beverage containers. The comparative analysis determined which beverage container had the lowest releases to the environment, use of natural resources, and energy-use during manufacturing. 

 

Over the next two decades many companies performed their own life-cycle analysis. By 1991, LCA claims being made in marketing collateral by manufacturers were looking less credible based on the lack of an international standard for the analysis/assessment. At that time, the International Standards Organization (ISO) jumped into the fray and led the development of an LCA standard which is now referred to as the ISO 14000 series.

 

The real goal of LCA is to provide manufacturers with a comprehensive, credible, and transparent method to clearly com­municate to themselves and their customers all of the inputs that went into the product that is being sold, and to forecast that product's eventual destination after its initial use has been completed. The effort to provide manufacturers with such methods is on the rise in the green building industry. 

 

At this time, there are a number of programs that work to reach this goal, such as: Cradle-to-Cradle, the PHAROS project, and BEES 4.0. Some of these are certification programs while others are simply information portals from which customers can learn all there is to learn about a product's development and production.

 

Common elements that are analyzed by these LCA programs and others include: environmentally safe and healthy raw materials; product design implications as it pertains to raw material reutilization (recyclable, compostable, etc); use of renewable energy for manufacturing; energy and water efficient processing; measuring water quality of post production discharge; development of strategies for social responsibility; environment-resource; health-pollution; social-community; global warming (CO2, N20 CH4); acidification; eutrophication; fossil fuel depletion; indoor air quality; habitat alteration; criteria air pollutants; water intake, ozone depletion; smog; human health; ecological toxicity and economic performance. 

 

As you can see, the effort to analyze/assess, and communicate all of the real costs associated with a product's manufacturing, life-span and after-life include a wide variety of criteria. In the next column I will break down the above programs and provide a deeper understanding to how they operate and how they analyze/assess.