How to perform an LCA
The aim of this strategy is to give practical
advice on how to conduct an LCA study. The strategy is based on experiences from
ABB.
Life Cycle Assessment, LCA can be used in many applications, e.g. in product
development projects to identify significant environmental aspects. The LCA
results could then be used to provide a base line for decisions about product
improvements. The LCA results can also be used in marketing to communicate the
environmental benefits to customers, e.g through the LCA based communication
tool Environmental Product Declaration (EPD). 
LCA experts and R&D personnel are the main target groups for this example
of a strategy. R&D personnel, marketing & sales department as well as
customers benefit from the result of using this example.
In ABB there are two very different routes to conduct an LCA:
Screening LCA
The first type of LCAs, screening studies, are the most common type of LCA
studies in ABB and are conducted by people in the line organization on a more
"daily" basis, e.g. when comparing two different types of materials in
a product development project. These LCAs are conducted on a lower level of
detail than complete LCAs. Here you could use the WEB based LCALight Tool that
is easy to use but a little bit more restricted in its function than "full
scale" LCA tools. LCALight
is however sufficiently advanced and detailed to give the requested
information for a lot of "daily decisions".
Extensive LCA
The second type is extensive LCAs to be used in EPDs. It is however not
realistic or relevant to conduct a large number of extensive LCAs on a more
regular basis. Extensive LCAs are resource demanding and request a high level of
environmental competence, skill in using LCA tools as well as practical LCA
experiences. It could therefore be efficient to engage LCA specialist for
conducting these types of irregular LCA studies. Here we recommend using some
type of commercial LCA software tool, such as the EcoLab
or SimaPro
tools since these are designed for advanced and comprehensive LCA studies.
Working procedure
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