Life Cycle Assessment for environmental awareness: an ecological business card
We live in an ever-changing world, a planet that lives and breaths, full of inestimable natural riches, from which our own survival depends. An infinitely complex system which is greatly affected, more and more, by the actions of us humans, which leave heavy footprints on the environment and on the planet. Unfortunately, it’s easy to forget that in world so densely interconnected as ours, our everyday actions have a tangible effect, and this effect can be measured in some way.
Did it ever occur to you to ask yourself what’s the impact of your everyday choices on the environment? Buying a new dress, eating chicken breast or stir-fried vegetables, taking your car and going on a trip…all of these actions have potential and direct effects that cascade through economical processes and that, in their own small ways, change the world bit by bit.
In fact, we regularly hear someone talking about “environmental impacts”: for example we know that taking the train is a more eco-sustainable choice than our car, that the meat industry causes the deterioration of water resources, but how can we measure the specific impact of one of our own choice, of a product we buy, or of a service? Science’s answer to this question is called LCA: life cycle assessment.
A way to measure the environmental impact of our choices
“Life Cycle Assessment” is an ecological business card that tracks all the activities that take to the creation of a certain product, its use and also, in the end, its disposal. Imagine having a pair of special glasses that allow you to see the environmental footprint of everything. With these glasses, whenever you look at a bootle of water, you don’t see only the water. You see the energy used by the bottling facility, the plastic used for the bottle, the fuel burned to take it to the supermarket, and the waste generated when you throw it away: that is the vision offered by the LCA.
It’s a holistic kind of vision, that wants to take in account all the matter and energy flows that going building the product, thanks to a protocol set by two ISO standards developed since the 90s (ISO 14040/14044), that are needed to ensure the reliability of the mathematical method used by LCA.
How does LCA work?
This method retraces the chain formed by all the commercial processes; each one needs a certain number of inputs, which are outputs of other business processes. By summing up all the environmental impacts that accumulate along this trade chain, and spreading it over all the end products in the chain, the product’s ecological footprint is calculated, divided into a number of categories, each of which represents a “potential harm” to the environment, i.e., ecological processes such as global warming, water acidification, natural resource depletion, loss of biodiversity, air respiration, etc.
How can it help us?
We can use it in a more targeted way, specifically for the territory where the economic activity happens, or focusing on a more specific productive technology, without limiting ourselves to the analysis of the territory where it is put into practice.
Life Cycle Assessment is versatile enough to allow a wide-ranging view of the life cycle of a product or service, for a variety of categories of environmental impact, and at the same time to identify what are the most critical individual processes, in determining the potential damages that are most feared in a specific territory. LCA is an increasingly important tool for companies and governments, committed to directing investments in the ecological transition.
So what can the LCA method say to all of us citizens and consumers? It shows us that our choices are important, because they have actual effects, to some extents even quantifiable. It also gives us a measure of how important correct information is in making those choices.
The water bottles example
Some seemingly environmentally friendly choices are not so much so: a recycled plastic water bottle has a marginally inferior impact than a virgin plastic bottle, and involves a lot of emissions to be transported around the country and the world.
A glass bottle has potentially an even worse impact, especially if we throw it away after a single use. Let’s not be distracted by cheap commercial initiatives and choose filtered tap water, which can seriously cut down on environmental damage.
In MISTER we have a double mission of supporting the economic fabric of Emilia-Romagna for sustainable development in a circular sense, of energy and productive synergies, and, at the same time, of dissemination towards the citizenry and companies, to raise more and more awareness about the importance of this issue.
The energetic transition is a huge challenge, key to the future that awaits humanity on this planet: a future that will see important and indispensable changes to our way of life, to our cities, to the structure of our economic fabric. And since our future does not happen for trivial inertia, but it is built by us and by our actions, the transition to sustainable economy will be achieved by both private and public investments and by the initiative of individuals who want to be the firsts to enter this future, and beat the path for those who will follow.
In this context, LCA becomes an essential tool, that empowers the scientific community, entrepreneurship, governance, and even the most active citizens to accelerate the transition to a future of sustainability and harmony between man and environment.
