Episode 36: Deep Dive into LCA, EPD, and PCF with LCA Experts Nicole Meyer and Marquis Miller from Sustainable Solutions Corporation
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Life Cycle Assessments (LCA), Environmental Product Declarations (EPD), and Product Carbon Footprints (PCF) are essential to reducing your company’s carbon footprint, but many companies have unanswered questions about the process for completing them. In this episode, Tad and Julianna sit down with LCA experts Nicole Meyer and Marquis Miller from Sustainable Solutions Corporation to answer some of the most frequently asked questions they receive about LCA, EPD, and PCF. They discuss the data collection process, timelines, what to include in your LCA, relevant standards and frameworks, Product Category Rules, functional units, how LCA, EPD, and PCF relate to carbon footprint, and more.
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If you need an Environmental Product Declaration (EPD), when is it applicable? What is the other option if an EPD is not applicable?
“I get this question a lot. Companies will ask, “Do we need an EPD? Can we just do a LCA?” I would say it depends on where the request is coming from and how that information is going to be used by the customer. If it is a building product, typically you will be doing an EPD just within that industry. Especially if there is an existing product category rule, EPD is going to be your route. If you have non-building products or you are an upstream supplier, then just having that LCA for those core international standards, ISO 1440 and 1444, usually will suffice and then you can create what we call fact sheets. It is almost like an EPD, but for non-building products. It just has all the pertinent information, understanding the system boundary, the impacts, and then that can be used to communicate the information to people who are asking for it like your end customers.”
How are companies understanding their carbon footprint and how it relates back to Life Cycle Assessment (LCA)?
“This is obviously the topic everyone cares about. Carbon is the big key thing and it is directly tied to LCA. As we have talked about the inventory that you are going to build in that Life Cycle Inventory (LCI) you are going to take that and develop a model. The model is going to happen in one of your softwares for LCA. Some common ones are SimaPro, LCA for Experts, openLCA, and essentially what you are doing is tying in an ISO 1440 or 1444 compliant secondary data set that has been established through industry research, peer reviewed articles, etc… that represent some input or output. If it is steel, it is going to be a data set that represents steel. You are tying the inventory that you have for any material or input or output to that dataset. Once you have a built model that encompasses all of your life cycle stages, then you can use predetermined impact methodologies and there are a number of them out there. All of them for the carbon footprint aspect tie back to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) recommendations and guidelines on how to calculate carbon dioxide emissions. From there, you use an impact methodology to run your results, using all of these background frameworks, and then all those background frameworks essentially just tie high chemical characterization factors to different emissions and from that is where you receive a carbon footprint. Essentially a value for kilograms of carbon emitted for the functional unit of the product that you care about.”
Can you tell us more about Product Carbon Footprints (PCF) and how it relates to Life Cycle Assessments (LCA)?
One thing I do want to stress is that when we are talking about carbon footprint, it is carbon footprint equivalencies. It is more than just carbon dioxide. We are going to be looking at all of the greenhouse gasses, like methane, nitrous oxide, etc... All of those are culminating into one value of equivalencies which is leading to your carbon footprint or global warming potential. PCF is a newer evolution of LCA. It has an additional standard related to ISO 14067. It is really honing in specifically on carbon equivalencies for a product. I want to also mention when we are talking about decarbonization strategies, LCAs should be conducted in tandem with your corporate decarbonization goals. It is not in lieu of. There are different thresholds when we are thinking about the Greenhouse Gas Protocol, that can be more on a corporate level. Carbon reporting versus LCA, which is really specific to your products. So just understanding those differences that they are kind of working together for an overall sustainability decarbonization strategy.
Can you tell us more about the comparability between Life Cycle Assessments (LCA) and Environmental Product Declarations (EPD)?
“Prescriptively based on the ISO standards in language, EPDs and LCAs are not comparable. Of course everyone wants to compare them because as it becomes more of a decision-making factor, you want to make sure that you are using products with the lowest embodied carbon and the lowest impact. The reason that ISO dictates they are not comparable is because there is a lot of background secondary data that goes into making an LCA that can really affect the results of that LCA. Those background datasets could be different depending on the data that you are using in one software or even different softwares have different data sets. They can come from a number of places and comparing those is not always apples to apples. This is the same with the reference period, the technology of the production process, or even the background assumptions and proxies that the LCA practitioner makes. Some of those that are not prescriptively required by product category rule can have some impact on the results that would not really be highlighted in the EPD and would not give the full story. I think ultimately, it is intended as a reason to look into the information and not take just this one thing at face value or try to compare them and instead get deeper and understand how these numbers came to be.
There is a methodology that you can compare LCAs through ISO and that is what they call a comparative assertion LCA. It is essentially designed to do that exact thing. It looks at two products and two systems that are competing or have the same function to see which is better to some extent. The difference between a comparative assertion LCA and a regular LCA is that instead of a single critical reviewer, you have to go through a critical review panel of three people that includes LCA experts and industry experts who are going to take a hard look at all the assumptions, the background data sets, everything you've used to build this comparison, and they are the ones that get to determine whether you have built a model that truly is apples to apples and comparative numbers can be used for some type of public marketing claim. There is a way to get to that, the downside of it is a comparative assertion LCA does take a little bit more time. It is a little more stringent. You do have more data than in a regular LCA, but I certainly think it is a valid avenue especially for some of these companies or industries where they are innovating in a way to reduce their environmental footprint and if you are doing that, it is certainly worth looking into.”
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ABOUT Nicole Meyer, LCACP
Nicole is an Account Manager at SSC. She has experience in Life Cycle Assessments, Sustainable Operations Assessments, LEED certification, and Green Marketing. Since joining the team, Nicole has worked closely with clients to develop next generation sustainability goals and conduct industry specific technical reports. Nicole graduated from the University of Chapel Hill in North Carolina with a Bachelor of Science in Environmental Science and received a Master of Science degree in Sustainable Engineering from Villanova University.
ABOUT Marquis miller, EIT
Marquis is an Operations Manager at SSC. Marquis has experience working on Life Cycle Assessments, Material Ingredient Reporting, Sustainable Operations Assessments, Waste Diversion Assessments, Waste Characterizations, and LEED EB:OM certifications. Marquis graduated from Kings College with a Bachelor of Science degree in Chemistry with minors in Engineering and Mathematics, and received a Master of Science degree in Chemical Engineering from Drexel University.
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