Life Cycle Assessment – From Circular Promise to Proof
As the foundation for numerous downstream applications, the chemical industry plays a crucial role in enabling sustainable solutions across sectors. Chemical products often involve complex production processes and diverse feedstock options, requiring comprehensive evaluation to identify the most sustainable pathways.
Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) provides the scientific foundation by calculating environmental impacts of products and services from raw material extraction through production, use, and disposal. The methodology helps demonstrate environmental advantages over alternatives and identify improvement opportunities during design phases or existing processes. To ensure reliable and comparable results, we follow the international standards ISO 14040/14044. Additionally, our LCA methodology adheres to the Together for Sustainability (TfS) framework, ensuring standardized and comparable environmental assessments across the chemical sector.
LCA can be conducted with different system boundaries depending on the assessment goals. Gate-to-gate analysis focuses on a single production step, cradle-to-gate covers impacts from raw material extraction to factory gate, while cradle-to-grave includes the entire product lifecycle including the use and end-of-life phase.
Comprehensive Impact Assessment
Environmental impact discussions often focus solely on Global Warming Potential (Product Carbon Footprint). However, comprehensive assessment requires evaluating additional impact categories affected by production processes and material choices. Our holistic approach ensures that environmental improvements in one area don't create unintended consequences in another. This provides a complete picture for sustainable decision-making and prevents shifting problems between impact categories.
LCA - The Reality Check for the Circular Economy
Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) delivers essential insights for circular economy transitions, enabling evidence-based decisions on circular feedstocks such as recycled waste-based, renewable, and CO2-based raw materials, as well as other innovative solutions. Assessing these innovative solutions presents unique methodological challenges: accounting for biogenic carbon in bio-based materials, evaluating renewable energy integration benefits, and determining environmental impacts of novel recycling processes.
We use two complementary calculation methods depending on the specific requirements. When innovation demands flexibility, our manual EcoPass methodology, a standardized, TÜV Rheinland reviewed LCA approach established by Covestro, enables detailed analysis of novel circular economy applications. When speed and scale are priorities, our automated LCA system Lifecycle+ processes environmental data for standard products across multiple impact categories, enabling rapid assessment and annual data updates.
We leverage LCA results internally to identify environmental hotspots in our production processes and supply chains. This analysis guides our decisions on raw material selection, process modification and supply chain optimization. For example, LCA data helps us evaluate alternative feedstocks with lower environmental impact than conventional raw materials, identify energy-intensive production steps for optimization and assess transport impacts across our supply network. This enables us to offer our clients solutions with carbon footprints below industry benchmarks and third-party certified environmental data, supporting them to achieve environmental targets and meet regulatory requirements.
Looking specifically for carbon footprint data? Explore our Product Carbon Footprint page for detailed CO2 insights!
