Life-Cycle Assessment Project “LCA”
The Life-Cycle Assessment (LCA), equally called “ecological balance”, is a method allowing the assessment of the environmental impact of a product, service, or a system in relation to a particular function, while observing all the stages of its life-cycle, i.e. from the extraction of the raw materials necessary to its production up until its final management as a waste, and including all the intermediary stages of transformation, production, transport, consumption, …etc.
The LCA allows turning the flows of materials and energy consumed and emitted at each stage of a product’s (or a service’s) life-cycle into potential environmental impacts.
If the LCA’s applications are numerous, all of them allow determining, when facing a given problem, the action priorities among a whole range of possible measures, while taking into account their environmental effectiveness, costs, and the constraints they entail at the economical level.
Thus, the LCA is generally applied to:
- Compare products, services, or industrial procedures;
- Improve product design and development;
- Bring the product to the international market and improve its economic competitiveness.
-Develop strategies and public/enterprise policies.
-The enterprise will have the possibility to communicate on its environmental performances, and to enhance its product’s value at different scales (business to business or business to consumer).
Besides, the LCA’s results could equally be used as an excellent tool to establish an environment management system EMS (ISO 14001, ISO 50001, etc.) and/or to maintain the enterprise’s environmental performance indicators if the EMS is already existing.
Finally, at the national scale, the LCA’s results could support the definition of the ecolabel’s technical and ecological criteria, and/or to fine-tune them in order to tailor them more closely to the Tunisian issues and context. They could also support the revision of the existing sectorial regulations and policies. Thus, the enterprise benefiting from an LCA for one of its products can anticipate regulatory changes and stay one decisive step ahead for the purpose of ecolabeling.
THE PROJECT’S PHASES
Phase 1 : DEFINITION OF THE OBJECTIVES AND THE SCOPE OF THE STUDY
The second phase comprises data collection to quantify the elementary flows associated to the processes linked to the preparation of the analyzed products. The following flows will especially be considered (non-exhaustive list):
- Energy consumption;
- Water consumption;
- Quantification of raw and auxiliary materials used;
- Quantification and qualification of the generated waste, and the information linked to its management (collection/treatment/recycling);
- Quantification and qualification of the materials/product transportation, and of the storage modes;
- Quantification and qualification of the packaging.
At this stage of the project, questionnaires will be prepared, and a visit should be planned within the enterprise in order to observe each component of the life-cycle of the object being studied.
phase 4 : INTERPRETATION OF FINDINGS AND RECOMMENDATIONS
Following each study, an LCA report and an information sheet specific to the sector will be provided to the enterprise.
- The LCA report will allow to draw up a reading of the impacts generated by the product, and its environmental performance, and to provide recommendations as to the improvement possibilities. The measured and interpreted impacts will be those on the human health, the quality of the ecosystems, the exhaustion of the resources, and climactic change (kg CO2-eq).
- The information sheet will suggest LCA result-inspired improvements to the concerned sector, and guide the enterprise towards valorization potential of these results.
Responsible staff: experts specialized in LCA.
Deliverables: - A technical report
- An action plan.
Implementation period: 12 months