My posts on sustainability will invariably be based on life cycle thinking. Life cycle thinking is a way of looking at the environmental
and social impacts of a product, service, or activity that tries to be
holistic. Rather than just focusing on one aspect of a product or service, such
as waste in food packaging, life cycling thinking looks at the bigger picture;
for example, all the environmental impacts of a food product, including its
packaging, from raw material extraction for the creation of the product all the
way to waste processing at product end-of-life.
Life cycle assessment (LCA) is the mathematical tool, methodology, or model
used to analyze products and services in this way. LCA can be used to discover
the environmental hotspots of a product or service. For example, in the life
cycle of doing a load of laundry, the biggest impact comes from the energy use
of the electric clothes dryer. This information can be used to decide where
efforts are best made to improve the environmental impact of a product,
service, or activity. Another use of life cycle assessment is for product
comparison. When comparing two functionally equivalent products using LCA, one
might be able to discover which has lesser environmental impact. Equally
important, product comparisons allow for the discovery of trade-offs. For
example, bio-plastics can have large impacts to the environment from farming,
but hydrocarbon-based plastics can have more significant end-of-life issues. Ultimately, though, LCA is used to help inform product/process design, consumer buying choices, and sustainability policy.
I will mainly be using life cycle thinking in this blog to
inform my suggestions to readers, do product comparisons, and challenge “green” product claims. I will try not
to use too many technical terms, because I don’t want people to have to do a
bunch of research to understand me, but for those who want to know more about
LCA, I plan to create another blog post on the subject.
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