Life Cycle Assessment as an analytical tool for the environmental impact of products, companies and services
In our globalised world, we are increasingly confronted with the fact that the use of a product in this country can lead to environmental problems in other places due to previous production and delivery. According to experts, there is a reliable solution for assessing the overall impact of selected processes, operations, products or services on the environment: an ecological balance sheet. We are at your disposal with our standardised procedures!
A Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) takes quantitative account of emissions and resource consumption over the entire life cycle and evaluates these using scientifically established assessment methods. The results can then be linked with economic indicators to form eco-efficiency indicators. On this basis and with the broad scientific background of our employees, we develop environmentally optimized solutions for customers from a wide variety of industries. Carbotech AG uses a modular, standardized procedure to first tackle a problem with a simple life cycle assessment. Subsequently, we optionally supplement these with further modules if more detailed analyses and calculations are necessary.
Life Cycle Assessment: BasicLCA, AdvancedLCA and CustomLCA
As an experienced specialist for environmental projects and consulting, we offer you various methods for preparing your life cycle assessment. Our BasicLCA can be seen as a cost-effective entry module and serves as a rough analysis of already existing data. The approach takes place in two different ways:
- LCAcompare: Comparison of two products or processes with regard to their environmental impact
- LCAnalysis: Analysis of a process or product with regard to its relevant, polluting source and other factors.
The AdvancedLCA is an extension to the BasicLCA, with which we can also answer more complex questions within the framework of independent data collection. Furthermore, it is ideal if the data of your life cycle assessments are to be published. Like the BasicLCA, we also offer you the AdvancedLCA in the two variants already mentioned.
Since we are regularly asked questions that cannot be answered or only to a limited extent with the existing data bases or methods, we have developed the CustomLCA for customer-specific studies for such cases. Based on these, we meet our customers’ requirements with innovative, pragmatic approaches to solutions and also carry out detailed data surveys – you can find further information on this page in the corresponding section. In this context, we recommend that you also take a look at our “Ecodesign” category.
Individual carbon footprint calculations
If you want to plan sustainably with your company and identify ecological opportunities and risks in order to define and elaborate a long-term climate strategy, an analysis of the carbon footprint will help. This can be created for the whole company, for a product or for an event. The sum of all climate-relevant gases emitted by a product over its entire life cycle is calculated. Depending on the question, we use different standards to determine a carbon footprint – in any case, you can look forward to professional support from setting the target to data collection and implementation! If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to contact us by e-mail or phone.
Contact persons
Mischa Zschokke
+41 44 444 20 15E-Mail
Thomas Kägi
+41 44 444 20 17E-Mail
Philipp Bolt
+41 44 552 43 20E-Mail
The extraction of raw materials, which is largely carried out in emerging and developing countries, is often associated not only with environmental impacts but also with negative social impacts. In recent years, these have increasingly become the focus of public attention and thus the interest to extend the environmental life cycle analysis / footprint with social effects. The following aspects are covered:
We use the SOCA process database. This links the ecoinvent database with the PSILCA database, which is an economic input/output database containing 37 social indicators on 15’000 sectors from over 189 countries in addition to the corresponding cash flows. Based on the country-specific information from the PSILCA database, the corresponding social indicators for the process inventories from ecoinvent v3.3 were compiled in the SOCA database. The SOCA database is based on the UNEP Guidelines for social life cycle assessment of products and The Methodological Sheets for Sub-categories in Social Life Cycle Assessment (S-LCA).
To determine the relevance of the different social impacts, we standardise them with the global social impact flows. This shows how the effects of the system examined affect society as a whole. The result of standardization is dimensionless quantities. The normalized indicators are aggregated to a final value using a weighting set (based on Manik et al. 2013). To make it easier to understand, we have introduced the term “Social Burden Points – SBP” for the final score.
This procedure allows us to combine the abundance of 37 indicator statements into one parameter and make the results more comprehensible.
Projects
Social LCA Stiftung SENS
Stiftung SENSSocial LCA of aluminium recycling
IGORAGardening in a sahelian zone (Niger)
ADN (ehem. Partner von HEKS)Nachhaltigkeitsanalyse von Getränkeverpackungen aus Aluminium
IGORA in Zusammenarbeit mit EMPA und IBFWeighting and Normalisation in Social LCA
All projects connected to this service