Life Cycle Assessment
While life cycle assessment studies can be time consuming and resource intensive, they are sometimes critical to meeting business objectives and/or stakeholder requests. A full cradle to grave third party verified LCA is only recommended in some cases. Sometimes a streamlined LCA can still meet the desired goal, while still adding business value. A few examples of a streamlined LCA approach may consider only a portion of the product life cycle, evaluate a more limited set of environmental impacts, rely primarily on secondary data, or include a succinct report format that communicates only the most critical results, implications, and study assumptions
JBE can support you along your journey, whether it be to collect and organize required life cycle assessment input data, obtain an Environmental Product Declaration, carry out an ISO 14040/44 or Product Category Rules (PCR) compliant LCA, conduct a streamlined LCA, compare environmental impact profiles for a specific operation, raw materials, product, etc, develop a simple environmental impact calculator tool, or estimate a product or Scope 3 carbon footprint.
JBE is proudly listed as a qualified LCA consultant through The International EDP System: https://www.environdec.com/Creating-EPDs/List-of-LCA-consultants/
There are two key factors that may differentiate our team among our peers:
Our delivery team possesses broad sector and specific project experience – This includes sustainability strategy and consulting services providing life cycle assessment, carbon footprinting, corporate sustainability strategy, waste management, energy efficiency and management, greenhouse gas emission inventory, and related methodology and tool development.
Our delivery team has deep experience and expertise providing environmental compliance support consulting services – While this experience is not part of the core talent required to deliver LCA-related services, it is extremely useful in carrying out life cycle assessments, carbon footprints, and related sustainability consulting work. We have experience developing complex compliance assurance programs, and supporting all stages of the environmental compliance from building EMS tools, to interpreting and implementing new and revised regulatory requirements, to reading meters for data collection to gathering data efficiently inside a plant. Learning new and complex manufacturing processes, interpreting new or revised regulations and applying the knowledge to help our client comply with the regulations, and building complex but effective data and information management tools are all skills that help enhance our capabilities for developing life cycle assessments and carbon footprints, building calculator tools, following study guidelines, and interpreting results.
Members of the JBE team have performed a significant number of life cycle and carbon footprint assessments across a variety of sectors, including manufacturing, oil and gas, transportation, food and beverage, specialty chemicals, healthcare, dairy, and agriculture.
Project Experience
Developed an Environmental Product Declaration EPD based on a life cycle assessment (LCA) performed by JBE for plywood building materials
https://www.plyboo.com/sites/all/files/downloads/Smith_Fong_Plyboo_EPD.pdfParticipated in the process to develop an environmental product declaration for Luxottica that was developed according to the (draft) PCR, as well as compiling the information into the EPD, and responding to questions and inquiries from the verifier.
Led efforts to obtain the Carbon Trust certification for Baxter Healthcare’s FLEXBUMIN medical product
Developed a greenhouse gas emission calculation methodology for a major airline
Performed a life cycle assessment study and the development of life cycle inventories for a confidential client who manufactures high pressure laminate and thermofused laminate surfaces
Performed a well to wheel carbon intensity analysis for a global integrated oil and gas company, focused upstream oil and gas operations. Study included significant work in Argonne National Laboratory’s GREET Transportation Fuel Model.
Developed a Scope 3 carbon footprint for two product categories, for a global consumer product manufacturer. The Scope 3 carbon footprint developed for the product categories was consistent with the WRI/WBCSD’s GHG Protocol: Corporate Value Chain (Scope 3) Accounting Standard.
Performed thirteen cradle to gate life cycle assessments for a global beverage company.
Performed comparative life cycle assessments for a specialty chemicals manufacturer.
Developed carbon footprint baselines for over ten dairy farms throughout the United States, as well as a milk processing plant.
Software Development Contributions
In the process of delivering LCA-related solutions for clients, JBE team members have contributed to the development of various software tools, which assisted clients with “what-if” analyses. These efforts have included:
Developing a comparative cradle to grave carbon footprint assessment tool for in-home versus clinic based healthcare treatment product;
Developing a comparative carbon and cost assessment tool for specific raw material ingredients for a global consumer manufacturing company, in order to inform supply chain purchasing decisions; and
Developing a cost and environmental impact tool that evaluated the impacts of various waste management alternatives for a manufacturing site within a multinational biotechnology company.
