Calculating your Product’s Footprint: Life Cycle Analysis

Interested in knowing what impact the products you use, or design, are having on the environment?

Yesterday I came across a great, easy tool for doing life cycle assessments for practically any product you can think of. The LCA Calculator takes into consideration the entire life cycle including:

1. Extraction

2. Manufacture

3. Transport

4. Use

5. Disposal

Once you’ve gone through the steps, the LCA emails you a PDF Analysis for your specific product, along with recommendations for changes materials, extraction methods, transportation, disposal, etc.

For example, here was my analysis for the Transport portion of my product. In just experimenting, I said my product was manufactured in North America, but shipped to Asia. As a result, the transport numbers came out HUGE, and it was recommended in my report that I look at reducing weight, size or transport method in order to reduce those numbers.

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Published:: June 25, 2008 / 2:19 pm

Category:: Uncategorized

Tags:: cradle to cradle, going green, life cycle analysis, product design

About

After attending school for Economics & Business, I was fortunate enough to hook up with several mentors willing to take me under their wing and open my eyes to a world of business, collaboration and game-changing innovation.

And while doing business in China, developing products for souks in Abu Dhabi and working on a startup right here in Toronto would be great additions for anybody’s resume, I am most grateful for the couple of CEOs and the one-of-a-kind Consultant who have shown & allowed me to think differently and make a real impact. The fact that I’ll likely never use that resume is my biggest indicator that I’m on the right path to an exciting and rewarding career.

The Kev Blog celebrates those principles: entrepreneurship, innovation, creativity, freedom, collaboration, and youth. A collection of articles for CEOs looking to keep ‘in the loop’, and for young renegades on a mission to show us the next disruptive company or technology that will change the world.

I believe there should be young people contributing and influencing decisions at the top of every organization, that age is a state of mind and that the most successful organizations in a game-changing world will be those which embrace youth and collaboration.

This is The Kev Blog – a collection of game-changing ideas.

-Kevin Morris

Email: kevin.paul.morris[at]gmail.com

Twitter: kmorr

Skype: kevinpaulmorris

Jabeen Quadir 7.10.08 / 1pm

This is a cool tool, however, life cycle assessment of environmental impacts covers way more than energy consumption and carbon emissions. True life cycle assessment is a systematic method for quantifying a range of environmental impact indicators over the full life cycle of a product. These can vary depending on whose tool is used, but some of the common ones are global warming potential, fossil fuel depletion, air pollution, water pollution, resource/material use, ozone depletion, eutrophication potential, etc., etc. A scientific LCA study is quite sophisticated and complex and the IDC tool cannot accurately quantify the overall impacts based on the simple inputs requested.

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Calculating your Product’s Footprint: Life Cycle Analysis

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