Life Cycle Assessment

Gunthorp Farm Shoutout

This guide will give you an overview of how life cycle assessment works, what all the data is for and how to get started using LCA results to improve sustainability.

What is a life cycle assessment (LCA)?

Life cycle assessment (LCA) is the factual analysis of a product’s entire life cycle in terms of sustainability. Every part of a product’s life cycle – from the inputs used in production, the production of the product itself, the consumption of the product, and any waste streams generated from its consumption – can have an impact on the environment in many ways. With LCA, you can evaluate the environmental impacts of a product; consumers can learn how sustainable a product is.

Four steps of life cycle assessment

1. Goal and scope definition

2. Inventory analysis

3. Impact assessment

4. Interpretation

Step 1. LCA goal & scope definition

The goal & scope definition step ensures that your LCA is performed consistently and has appropriate bounds.

An LCA models a product's life cycle. A model is a simplification of a complex reality and as with all simplifications, this means that the reality will be distorted in some way. The challenge for an LCA practitioner is to make sure the simplification and distortions do not influence the results too much. The best way to do this is to carefully define the goal and scope of the LCA study.

The goal and scope describe the most important choices, which are often subjective. For instance, the reason for executing the LCA, a precise definition of the product and its life cycle and a description of the system boundaries.

Step 2. Inventory analysis of extractions and emissions

In the inventory analysis, you look at all the environmental inputs and outputs associated with a product. An example of an environmental input – something you take out of the environment to put into the product’s life cycle – is the use of raw materials and energy. Environmental outputs – which your product’s life cycle puts out into the environment – include the emission of pollutants and the waste streams. Together, this gives you the complete picture.

Step 3. Life cycle impact assessment (LCIA)

In the life cycle impact assessment (LCIA), you classify the environmental impacts, evaluate them by what is most important to your analysis, and translate them into environmental themes such as "global warming" or "human health".

The most important choice you have to make is how integrated you want the results to be. Would you like a single score to show how sustainable your product is? Or to be able to see whether your new product improves on CO₂ emissions and keeps land use change at least the same? This usually depends on how you would like to address your audience and the ability of your audience to understand detailed results.

Step 4. Interpretation

During the interpretation phase, you check that your conclusions are well-substantiated.

Some examples of Broiler Chicken Life Cycle Assessments (LCA)

"Streamlined" LCA - General Example

There are many variants of the matrix approach, differing in the impact categories of the rows and the life (or other) categories of the columns. The method’s benefits include that it is flexible, easily adapted to a variety of products, carries a low overhead in time and effort, and—in the hands of practitioners of great experience—can take the subtleties of emissions and their impacts into account. It has the drawback that it relies heavily on experience and judgment.

Using a "Streamlined" LCA to Evaluate Poultry Operations at Miller Poultry

Note - we are novices at poultry operations and LCAs so I would not expect a polished output at this juncture.

Guiding Questions:

• What is our scope?

• What life phases are we most interested in? (feed production?, hatchery?, on-farm infrastructure? growth?, transportation?, slaughtering? waste streams?)

• What impacts are we most interested in? (energy use? global warming potential? water quality? human health?)