Is it Sustainable? Quantifying Footprint Through Life Cycle Approaches

Environment, Business, Science, Technology
 
 
By Daniel Vlahek

Article Summary

  • Though biofuels were once hailed as a sustainable solution, they brought about unintended consequences like deforestation, food insecurity, and complex trade-offs in the name of sustainability.
  • Life Cycle Analysis (LCA) emerged as a critical tool to assess a product’s true environmental footprint—from raw materials to disposal.
  • Adopting Life Cycle Thinking helps businesses and policymakers make more informed, circular decisions in a complex and interconnected world.

When introduced to the European Union (EU) in the early 2000s, biofuels were touted as being the more ‘sustainable’ option for transportation fuel as the sector accounted for more than 30% of total energy consumption.

Highlighted in their biofuels directive to address growing CO2 emissions, the European Parliament noted that “greater use of biofuels for transport forms a part of the package of measures needed to comply with the Kyoto Protocol, and of any policy package to meet further commitments in this respect”.

Introduced in 2003, a target was set for 5.75% usage of biofuels in member states' relative transportation sectors by 2010.

Yet guidelines were relatively limited; the only limitations being imposed were on the conversion of direct land use change in biodiverse areas to ensure food and feed crops were the main fuel source.

So, what was the result of this implementation?

Europe experienced a significant rise in demand for crops, which led to indirect land-use changes (ILUC). This shift contributed to deforestation, carbon loss from soils, and exacerbated food insecurity.

As farmers redirected food crops for fuel production, prices surged, further impacting global food availability.

 
 
 

Informed Decision-Making Through LCA

At a glance, turning plants into fuel does sound inherently sustainable. Biofuels are, after all, not something new.

Various communities have practiced transforming organic material (called biomass) into various fuel sources since the 19th century.

Yet environmental consequences as noted in the Biofuel directive - including a raft of previously publicised issues like ozone depletion and toxic waste disposal - saw an increased awareness from consumers on how the economy was impacting the environment.

Naturally, this social change began influencing companies to better understand the environmental impacts that their processes and products had, particularly within a comparative context (which is better? A or B?).

Through this exploration, Life Cycle Analysis (LCA) was born. A structured (and highly comprehensive) method, its use lies in assessing potential environmental impacts associated with a product or services life cycle, from extraction of its raw materials to its end of life.

LCA is data driven, and can support multiple models to better inform decision making. Initially used by the food and beverage industry, LCA soon found its way into other industries, from developing low-carbon solutions for tourist hotspots to improving resource efficiency in textiles.

The EU, as a consequence of their biofuels policy, began placing greater emphasis on LCA to inform future policy revisions.

Whilst LCA is a bonafide way of measuring environmental impacts to a company's supply chain, it is at the best of times, complicated.

Datasets make up the backbone of any life cycle analysis and require trained experts to critique the quality of data.

Even then, adequately assessing data sets takes years of practice and the end result may leave the interested parties with more questions than answers.

For small-to-medium enterprises and organisations, this can be seen as a barrier to finding out whether their services or products are environmentally damaging. But this does not have to be the case.

Although the field is relatively new, our LCA knowledge bank has grown significantly, including our ability to understand and think more systematically about how our products and services may impact our planet and society at large.

 

Adopting a Life Cycle Approach

Thinking in systems is not something that we’re readily taught.

Western culture values a reductive approach, where we break individual parts of a system into manageable pieces instead of seeing how individual aspects interact with each other.

This framing is coined Life Cycle Thinking as we observe the economic, environmental and social consequences of a given process or product.

This includes its relations with adjacent systems and institutions, which is something that is of increasing importance as we try to shift our economy from linearity to circularity.

Some rules of thumb to assist in adopting life cycle thinking include:

  • Acknowledge material circulation: everything comes from, and returns to nature. Irrespective of material origin, there has to be clear guidelines to how that product will recirculate back into nature and regenerate the planet.
  • Avoid end of life bias: waste tends to get a lot of attention as it is a key output from any product usage. However, waste can have the least amount of impact in some instances, so focusing upstream can net bigger wins.
  • Appreciate complexity: society is highly complex which has led to non-linear interactions with products or processes (such as the EU biofuels policy). Be prepared for new behaviours to emerge through interaction.
  • We do not have all the answers: despite decades of respective data and research across multiple industries, we still do not have all the answers on how our products will impact our environment and society at large.

It should be noted that life cycle analysis or thinking can at times be an oversimplification of ‘reality’ due to its inherent bias towards environmental factors.

Although new methods have been developed to critique social elements of services and products via the ‘social life cycle assessment’ (S-LCA), context will always be key due to the plethora of factors involved.

Regardless, whenever you are starting your journey in developing a new circular product or simply wanting to embed sustainable principles in your operations, adopting a life cycle approach (thinking and/or analysis) better informs us of the choices we make.

Despite our limitations, LCA uncovers some of the trade-offs we could encounter, so that we have a greater appreciation of the impact on the environment, the economy, and society at large.