Life Cycle Analysis (LCA) is a technique used to assess the environmental impacts associated with all of the stages of a product's life. generally, the product life cycle consists of five phases:

1. Raw Material Extraction

2. Manufacturing & Processing

3. Transportation

4. Usage & Retail

5. Waste Disposal

A life cycle analysis can identify the parts of the manufacturing and production process that can be adapted to be more sustainable and mitigate any waste from the process. This can be taken throughout the whole cycle and analysed to see how to ‘close the loop’.

Based on the stages you’re interested in or have data available on, you can choose to leave in or take out phases. There are usually 4 product life cycle models you can choose for your LCA.

• Cradle-to-grave - When you analyze a product’s impact along the 5 product lifecycle steps – this is called cradle-to-grave. Cradle being the inception of the product with the sourcing of the raw materials, grave being the disposal of the product. Transportation is mentioned as step 3, but can, in reality, occur in between all steps.

• Cradle-to-gate - Cradle-to-gate only assesses a product until it leaves the factory gates before it is transported to the consumer. This means cutting out the use and disposal phase. Cradle-to-gate analysis can significantly reduce the complexity of an LCA and thus create insights faster, especially about internal processes. Cradle-to-gate assessments are often used for environmental product declarations (EPD). EPDs are standardized certifications of a life cycle assessment, used mostly to verify impact data from business to business.

• Cradle-to-cradle - Cradle-to-cradle is a concept often referred to within the Circular Economy. It is a variation of cradle-to-grave, exchanging the waste stage with a recycling process that makes it reusable for another product, essentially “closing the loop”. This is why it is also referred to as closed-loop recycling.

• Gate-to-gate - Gate-to-gate is sometimes used in product life cycles with many value-adding processes in the middle.

• Well-To-Wheel - Well-to-wheel is used for the Life Cycle Assessment of transport fuels and vehicles. Because there are a lot of steps in between – the “Well-to-tank” and “Tank-to-wheels”, this approach is more precise in calculating and assigning greenhouse gas emissions and energy usage for the different stages.

• Environmental Impact Assessment - Environmental Impact Assessment is an analysis that is often conducted in the public sector, to look at the potential impact of a new construction project

Note that, besides defining the exact phase of the cycle the analysis applies to, you also need to determine what you are actually assessing. This could for instance be:

• Raw materials or resources (e.g. water or labour)

• Different types of energy (e.g. electricity)

• Emissions to air, land, or water by substance (e.g. CO2)

The concept of a circular economy requires designers to consider the subsequent use of materials, components and the embodied energy within the products they design. Designers need to ask themselves “how can this product be made to be made again”. The circular economy theory could be considered part of the ‘cradle-to-cradle’ design ethos. 

Cradle-to-cradle stands on the three pillars of ‘design thinking’, ‘design for disassembly’ and ‘design inspired by nature’ - which favours diversity and nothing is wasted. For a circular economy to thrive then innovative design techniques will have to be incorporated into products - shape memory polymer screws that self-disassemble components. Adhesives and circuit boards that dissolve. The use of screws or clips instead of permanent fixings to aid the ease of disassembly. 

Equally important is how a product's constituent materials are recovered, or how the materials are actually used. One step forward is to develop new business models where the user utilises a product through leasing rather than purchasing. This could offer interesting job opportunities to what we currently have - creating reverse supply chains, as well as material recovery and circular economy designers.