Integrating LCA into Design

Key Steps for Integrating LCA into Design

When developing PackageSmart there were five issues that EarthShift felt were critical to the eventual success of a simplified tool that could accurately integrate LCA into design.

Support the Creative Process

First, it should support a designer’s creative process. If someone tells a designer that the recycled PE is worse environmentally than the recycled HDPE, she wants to know why. And if she can’t get the answer, she feels lost. Therefore PackageSmart allows users to dig back through the data and answer “why?”— because solving problems and creating new ideas requires understanding details.

Speak the Designer’s Language

The need to understand details means an LCA is not easy, and typically a lot of training is needed. A tool for non-LCA experts should thus simplify, but also integrate an LCA practitioners’ knowledge, because if you don’t have the knowledge you could mess up the methodological details and your results. Most LCA tools on the market today are not user friendly and the terminology they use is very technical. So we built a tool that speaks “LCA” in a designer’s language.

Involve LCA from the Beginning

Thirdly you may ask why it is important that the designer begin the LCA process. Couldn’t you have the LCA practitioner do it later? Well for the past 10 years EarthShift has been consulting and training in-house LCA teams. And what we have learned is that to affect real change these experts need to be at the beginning stages of design, where the creative process begins. Plus as a product goes from ideation, concept design, prototype, detailed design, pre production and finally production the environmental impacts get locked in. Turning around is expensive and time consuming. So we designed a tool that aids in making environmental decisions early.

Ensure Flexibility and Scale

And with the designer beginning the LCA early in the design process, leverage is created because design freedom is still high and the cost of change is still low. But this brings about point four and five, we now needed a way to make sure the LCA methodology was applied consistently and accurately throughout the company and we needed to leverage the iterative nature of product development and LCA so that later on when a LCA practitioner is ready to step in everyone is already on the same page.

Therefore we have created the only tool on the market where a declared manager can choose her own Life Cycle Inventory (LCI) and her own Life Cycle Impact Assessment Method (LCIA) , thus keeping consistency across the company. By doing this we have created a simplified tool that can grow with the knowledge base of your company. A tool that expert LCA consultants or internal gurus can feed knowledge and methodological choices into such that when the final product is in production, the LCA is nearly done and done correctly.

"I was not experienced in LCAs before PackageSmart, yet I was creating full cradle to grave models in the first week."  Dan Robinette, Director of Sustainability, The Robinette Company