A Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) is a tool that identifies the environmental impact of a product or organisation throughout its life cycle. LCA quantifies the impacts of greenhouse gas emissions, energy use, water consumption, acidification, and ozone layer depletion. An LCA is used to break down different inputs and outputs at each stage of a product’s life cycle including raw material extraction, producing and using a product, transport, and disposal or re-use (cradle to grave). For more information on why and how to conduct an LCA, you can visit our page on Life Cycle Assessment.

The results of an LCA can be used to identify the hotspots of your product in the value chain and to drive sustainability improvements. This supports businesses in their sustainability goals by helping establish environmental targets and improving decision-making for strategy development. The results can also be used to report the environmental impact of your product to stakeholders, make environmental claims, and improve product design. Additionally, LCA is a critical part of a sustainability strategy to support calculations such as a Carbon Footprint (CF), Environmental Product Declaration (EPD), or Product Environmental Footprint (PEF).

An Environmental Product Declaration (EPD) is a third-party verified document that is officially registered to show the environmental impact of a product or service. To construct the EPD, an LCA is used to calculate the impacts which will be included within the EPD according to specific standards (e.g. EN 15804). The finished document is then verified by an approved system operator and published on one of the publicly available online platforms. EPDs provide transparent and comparable information about a product. Further details on EPDs can be found on our page Environmental Product Declaration (EPD).

Certified EPDs are based on an LCA and follow ISO 14025 type III protocols. They are valid for use in compliance regulations and green building schemes (e.g. BREEAM, LEED).

A PEF study is an LCA study that complies with the Product Environmental Footprint (PEF) methodological framework developed by the European Commission’s science and knowledge service. This framework sets up specific rules for modelling the product’s life cycle, as well as for calculating and presenting the LCA results. For some product categories, PEF category rules (PEFCR) are available to complement the general method and provide more product-specific detailed technical guidance. Consequently, PEF studies provide a strong foundation for comparing the performance of different products and are likely to become the base for environmental performance labelling of products on the European market in the future. More information on this topic can be found on our page on Product Environmental Footprint (PEF).

LCA, EPD & PEF are all methods for calculating the footprint of a product, but what exactly is the difference between them, and when do you use each one? To summarise:

• LCA (Life Cycle Assessment) quantifies the environmental impact, such as greenhouse gas emissions, energy use, water consumption, and acidification, of a product or organisation throughout its life cycle.
• EPD (Environmental Product Declaration) is a document describing an LCA study, that is compliant to specific guidelines, reviewed by a third-party, and published on an online platform.
• PEF (Product Environmental Footprint) is a methodological framework with specific guidelines on how to perform an LCA; thus a PEF study is an LCA study compliant with the PEF framework.

LCA can be used for both internal decision-making and for communications to stakeholders and the public. For external communication an EPD is often appropriate and sometimes required.