Life Cycle Assessment
What is a Life Cycle Assessment?
When evaluating a product’s impact on the environment, it's no longer enough to only look at how much energy it uses during operation. To understand the real environmental footprint, we must consider its entire life cycle — from raw material extraction through manufacturing and use, all the way to its disposal.
This is where Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) comes in. LCA is a complex calculation method that quantifies the environmental impacts of a product throughout its full life cycle. The aim of an LCA is to give a clear and complete picture of how different stages — like production — contribute to greenhouse gas emissions, water pollution, or resource depletion.
LCA is mainly used to support environmental decision-making. It helps identify which phase of a product’s life causes the most environmental harm, so steps can be taken to reduce that impact. It’s useful in product development, comparing environmentally friendly technologies, or when preparing sustainability reports or meeting regulatory requirements.
Main Steps of a Life Cycle Assessment
An LCA typically covers the following five main stages:
Raw Material Extraction: This stage looks at the environmental effects of extracting the raw materials needed for the product. This might include the impacts of mining or logging operations.
Manufacturing and Processing: Once the raw materials are extracted, they must be processed and turned into the final product. This often requires a lot of energy and generates emissions, waste, and wastewater — all of which must be considered.
Transportation and Distribution: Transporting the finished product from the factory to the end user uses energy and releases pollutants. The LCA also takes into account the type of transportation and the distance travelled.
Use Phase: This is one of the most important stages, especially for long-lasting or energy-intensive products like appliances, vehicles, or solar systems. Here, energy consumption, materials needed for maintenance, and repair efforts are assessed.
End-of-Life Management: What happens when the product is no longer in use? Whether it’s thrown away or recycled, this phase can still have a big environmental impact. LCA checks how much of the product can be recycled and what effects the disposal has on the environment.
Example: Life Cycle of a Solar Panel
Let’s look at how these steps apply in the case of a solar panel:
Raw Material Extraction: One of the main components of solar panels is silicon (Si), which is extracted from quartz sand. Mining quartz is energy-intensive and causes dust, noise, and land disruption. Solar panels also need aluminium (for the frame), glass (for protection), and small amounts of rare metals like silver, gallium, or iridium — all of which also have environmental impacts during mining.
Manufacturing and Processing: Turning quartz sand into usable silicon and then forming it into mono- or polycrystalline cells requires a large amount of energy. Assembling these cells into panels adds even more energy use, often from fossil fuel sources.
Transportation and Distribution: Finished solar panels are often shipped over long distances — for example, from China to Europe — mainly by sea, then by road. While sea transport is relatively efficient per unit, it still results in significant CO₂ emissions.
Use Phase: A typical solar panel lasts about 25-30 years. During this time, it produces clean, renewable energy, often several times more than what was needed to make it. It releases almost no direct emissions while in use, although maintenance (like cleaning or replacing parts) does slightly increase material and energy use.
End-of-Life Management: At the end of their life, many parts of a solar panel — like the aluminium frame, the glass, and some of the silicon — can be recycled. However, recycling systems aren’t yet efficient or widely available everywhere, so many panels still end up in landfills.
Even though the early stages of making a solar panel have a strong environmental impact, the long-term clean energy they produce more than makes up for it. When we look at the entire life cycle, the ecological footprint of solar panels is much lower than that of fossil fuel-based energy.
Thanks to digital technologies and artificial intelligence (AI), life cycle assessments are becoming faster and more accurate. This gives companies the chance to include environmental thinking right from the planning phase of their projects.
Still, to get the full benefit of LCA, it’s important that we also make progress in applying circular economy principles in practice, especially recycling. That way, LCA won’t just be a planning tool, but a practical guide toward a more sustainable future.
