Moving the dial
The current landscape and future of Life Cycle Assessments
When it comes to understanding the environmental footprint of products and services, organisations often turn to Life Cycle Assessments (LCAs) – a rigorous method that examines every stage of a product’s lifecycle, from raw material extraction, processing and manufacturing, to transportation, use and end-of-life considerations.
This cradle-to-grave approach can also be narrowed to a cradle-to-gate analysis, which looks only at impacts up to the end of manufacturing. By accounting for the resources consumed and emissions released into the air, water and soil, LCA measures a wide range of potential environmental impacts, including climate change, water use and acidification.
Companies are also increasingly discovering that LCAs can unlock opportunities well beyond compliance. They are a catalyst for smarter strategic decisions and improved sustainability performance within an organisation.
Life Cycle Assessments guide more sustainable choices such as switching to lower-impact materials, evaluating processes to cut energy use, rethinking transport routes, or even evaluating new suppliers. It is a practical way to pinpoint where change will help reduce impacts on the environment.
Engaging in a LCA turns the spotlight on the supply chain. Collecting the necessary data sparks collaboration with suppliers, revealing the largest environmental impacts. From this understanding, businesses can work with suppliers to make improvements, or identify alternative solutions that align with their sustainability goals. They can also feed directly into product design, helping teams create products or services with potentially lower environmental footprints.
Just as important, LCA results provide credible, transparent evidence that can be shared with clients, investors, policymakers and the public. In a crowded marketplace, this kind of verified information strengthens trust and positions a business as forward thinking and environmentally responsible.
LCAs are increasingly a prerequisite for bids and tenders, where environmental assessments are now part of the scoring. They also prepare companies for tightening regulations and support the development of Environmental Product Declarations (EPDs), which are standardised documents where the impacts of products can be compared within the same category.
When LCA is combined with Life Cycle Costing, the relationship between the potential environmental impact and total ownership costs of a product can be analysed.
In short, conducting an LCA is not just about measurement, it is about transformation. It helps businesses cut costs, build resilience, stay competitive and prove they are serious about sustainability in a way that is both credible and actionable.
Exact figures are hard to pin down, but the uptake of LCAs worldwide is rapidly accelerating, particularly in supporting EPDs.
Did you know?
Around 1,000 publications in 2014 aligned to the EN 15804 standard for Environmental Product Declarations (EPDs). This increased to more than 23,000 in 2024.
Across more standards, it is now estimated that over 120,000 EPDs have been published globally, indicating the increasing momentum behind standardised environmental reporting.
Source: Eco Platform
Building the framework
To ensure consistency and credibility, LCAs are guided by international standards, most notably ISO 14040 and ISO 14044, which set out the core principles, framework and requirements.
There are many other sector- and impact-specific standards, like ISO 14067 and the GHG Protocol’s Product Standard – which focuses on carbon footprint analysis (see box-out opposite).
Meanwhile, the EU’s Product Environmental Footprint (PEF) framework provides a harmonised method for broader environmental impact assessments. This science-based methodology, incorporating a wide range of impact categories, can be applied consistently across industries and countries within the EU. Standardisation helps companies benchmark performance and reduce impacts along the supply chain.
In the construction industry, standards such as ISO 21930 and EN 15804 are widely applied, alongside product category rules that define requirements for EPDs.
Unlike LCAs, Product Carbon Footprints focus only on greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and their contribution to climate change, as opposed to all environmental impacts.
Power in procurement
Regulations are rapidly embedding LCA or associated methods into the rules of global trade and procurement. The NHS Net Zero Supplier Roadmap will require suppliers to provide carbon footprints for products delivered to the NHS by 2028, placing LCA directly into supply chain considerations.
ISO and GHG Protocol merge greenhouse gas standards
The International Organization for Standardization (ISO) and Greenhouse Gas (GHG) Protocol will blend existing standards.The partnership intends to enable users to rely on a coherent framework and reduce potential confusion in the market.
The bodies will also co-develop new standards for emissions reporting, in addition to blending existing ones.
ISO says that GHG standards have previously been developed separately with varying scopes and verification guidance. The partnership intends to produce a common language for emissions accounting to accelerate progress towards decarbonisation.
This includes standards from the ISO1406X family of standards, alongside the GHG Protocol Corporate Accounting and reporting of Scope 2 and Scope 3 standards.
Additionally, the organisations will jointly develop a product carbon-footprint standard, to reflect the increase in companies seeking more granular data from across their value chain, to guide decarbonisation decisions.
ISO claims the harmonised portfolio will simplify processes for companies, increase consistency for policymakers, and reduce measurement and reporting burdens for all users.
It says this agreement aligns with recent calls for harmonisation by the B7 community (which consolidates interests of business and develops recommendations for the G7), and the International Sustainability Standards Board’s global baseline for sustainability-related disclosures.
Across Europe and the UK, more recent updates to the Construction Products Regulation (CPR) are making EPDs a requirement for some building materials, while the Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM) is forcing importers to disclose the embedded carbon in goods entering the EU.
At the same time, broader frameworks are taking shape. The EU’s Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation (ESPR) is set to expand reporting of product environmental performance. As part of the ESPR, digital product passports are expected to arrive in some sectors as early as 2026-27, and will make detailed product data, including environmental performance, a standard expectation across value chains.
For businesses, these developments carry very practical consequences. Robust LCA data is quickly becoming a valuable resource to tender for contracts, sell into regulated markets and enhance brand reputation.
Life Cycle Assessment is shifting from a nice-to-have, to a critical tool to support strategic organisational decisions. Companies that prepare now, by embedding it into product development, procurement, reduction planning and reporting, can gain a competitive edge.
Cost and complexity
While LCAs can be a powerful tool, they are not without challenges and barriers, especially for small and medium sized enterprises. One of the biggest barriers to LCA is cost.
A full ISO-compliant LCA can be time intensive and methodologically complex, costing thousands to tens-of-thousands of pounds, or even more for comparative assessments of intricate product systems involving multiple stakeholders. For many businesses, this can feel like a steep entry point.
However, there are ways to manage this. Some companies opt for streamlined studies that focus on key elements within the ISO framework, while others adopt a staged approach, breaking the process into manageable phases to spread out costs.
What is critical though is that speed and savings never come at the expense of quality or transparency. Cutting corners can compromise data integrity, leading to flawed results, or increase the risk of greenwashing if findings are shared publicly.
Digital innovation can help. New software platforms and artificial intelligence are making data collection, modelling and reporting faster and more efficient, helping to lower costs without undermining objectivity or credibility.
Beyond cost and complexity, there are other challenges to navigate. Data availability and quality can vary widely. Methodological choices and assumptions must be carefully justified.
Finally, results can be misinterpreted or misused once they enter the public domain. Practitioners must clearly document the advantages, limitations and impacts of the approaches they take.
These barriers are not insurmountable. By adhering to core principles such as transparency, completeness, scientific rigour and consistency, LCA practitioners can ensure their studies remain credible and actionable.
Acknowledging limitations and openly communicating the effects of assumptions is a critical part of any LCA and helps build trust in the results.
The LCA landscape is evolving at speed, but its purpose remains clear – to drive genuine reductions in environmental impact.
We must make LCA and related methods accessible to a wide range of businesses from small to large, while ensuring the analysis conducted is robust, transparent and reproducible.
As sustainability moves from aspiration to expectation, companies that embrace LCA will be better equipped to design smarter products, meet regulatory demands and prove their commitments with credibility.
If you care about your company, product or service and the environment, LCAs are critical for environmental impact reduction.
