The Environment and Resources Standards Committee organised a Standards Exchange on Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) on 12 October 2021 with 75 attendees from 40 organisations.
Due to an increasingly environmental-conscious consumer base and stricter regulations by authorities, many corporations are starting to recognise the importance of assessing the environmental impacts of their products and have begun to incorporate environmental aspects into their product design and development processes as ways to better position and market their products. This requires identification of key environmental issues related to the product throughout its entire life cycle, which the ISO LCA standards are able to help with.
Besides covering the anchor ISO LCA standards, namely ISO 14040 and ISO 14044, an interactive panel discussion with invited guest, CEO and Co-Founder of Alpha Biofuels, showcased the drivers and challenges in the organisation’s journey of implementing LCA for biofuels derived from waste cooking oil.
While SS ISO 14040 “Environmental management — Life cycle assessment — Principles and framework” describes the principles and framework for LCA, ISO 14044 “Environmental management — Life cycle assessment — Requirements and guidelines” specifies the requirements and provides guidelines for LCA.
Both standards cover various aspects of LCA including:
- Definition of the goal and scope of the LCA
- Life cycle inventory analysis (LCI) phase
- Life cycle impact assessment (LCIA) phase
- Life cycle interpretation phase
- Reporting and critical review of the LCA
- Limitations of the LCA
- The relationship between the LCA phases
- Conditions for use of value choices and optional elements
ISO LCA standards are useful for the following applications:
- Identify opportunities to improve the environmental performance of products at various points in their life cycle
- Inform decision-makers in industry, government or non-government organisations (e.g. for the purpose of strategic planning, priority setting, product or process design or redesign)
- Select relevant indicators of environmental performance, including measurement techniques
- Market product and services (e.g., implementing an eco-labelling scheme)
The overview and key highlights of the ERSC Standards Exchange on LCA can be downloaded via:
https://scic.sg/index.php/en/component/rseventspro/event/370
