Sustainability & Life Cycle Assessment
Sustainability & LCA is the transverse process that quantifies a product’s environmental footprint across its full lifecycle — raw-material extraction, manufacturing, distribution, use, and end-of-life — and feeds the result back into design and sourcing decisions. ISO 14040 / 14044 codify the methodology; the EU CSRD, ESPR, and Digital Product Passport regulations now make it a market-access requirement, not a marketing nice-to-have.
Scope
- Goal & scope definition — functional unit, system boundaries, allocation rules, cut-off criteria.
- Life Cycle Inventory (LCI) — material, energy, and emissions data per BOM line, sourced from supplier disclosures and LCA databases.
- Life Cycle Impact Assessment (LCIA) — climate, water, eutrophication, toxicity, resource depletion, circularity scoring.
- Interpretation — sensitivity analysis, hotspot identification, design-for-environment (DfE) recommendations fed back to engineering.
- Compliance reporting — REACH SVHC declarations, RoHS exemptions, WEEE recycling rates, EU Digital Product Passport content, scope-3 carbon attribution.
- Circularity — recyclability targets, recycled-content thresholds, design-for-disassembly KPIs, take-back planning.
Relationships (see sidebar)
- Realizes Sustainability and Circularity, Regulatory Compliance, and TCO.
- Conforms to REACH, RoHS, and WEEE — the EU regulatory floor that an LCA process is expected to clear.
- Supported by Metadata Management (substance attributes per part), Classification Schema (material taxonomies), Product Analytics, and KPI Dashboard (carbon and circularity dashboards).
- Cuts across Concept Design (eco-design), Detailed Design (BOM-level LCA), Supplier Development (declarations), and End-of-Life (take-back).
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