10 Reasons to Track a Corporate Carbon Footprint
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In this article, we’ll explain what a corporate carbon footprint is, why it’s important, how it is measured, and reasons why your company should track it too.
ESG / CSR
Industries
MEASURE
ACT
COMFORM
Our Top 5 Life Cycle Assessment Software
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Key Topics You’ll Learn About in This Article
- What life cycle assessment (LCA) software is and how it works
- The benefits and growing importance of using LCA tools
- A breakdown of our top 5 LCA software solutions for companies
These days, there are several components that companies must remain mindful of if they want to implement sustainability and reduce their carbon footprint – such as ensuring they comply with environmental regulations, seeking the use of a carbon accounting company, and also conducting an LCA with life cycle assessment software.
Going green shouldn’t be a struggle, and that’s why at Greenly – we’re here to make your transition to ecological sustainability easier, and we’ve started by rounding up our top 5 life cycle assessment software.
In this article, we’ll recap what a life cycle assessment is, what the benefits are, and share our favorite life cycle assessment software.
What is a Life Cycle Assessment?
A Life Cycle Assessment, often referred to as an LCA, is a way to assess the current environmental impact of a product – and this analysis encompasses the entire life of the product, from manufacturing to when it is thrown away by the consumer itself.
A life cycle impact assessment can help companies to better understand their life cycle inventory analysis, further reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and aid in the fight against global warming.
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How is an Environmental Impact Calculated with LCA?
The following is often taken into consideration during a Life Cycle Assessment:
- Energy used by the product
- The toxic substances associated with the product
- How natural resources are used in conjunction with the creation and usage of the product
Why Is Calculating Your Entire Life Cycle Impact Useful For Your Business?
LCA software tools can help companies to improve their environmental footprint, data management, and discover new LCA solutions with the help of sustainability professionals and an environmental assessment thanks to LCA tools.
In addition to this, a Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) may help companies with Life Cycle Costing – which refers to the process of determining how much money will be spent over the course of a product's life. This demonstrates how analyzing data via life cycle stages and the use of software solutions can help companies to not only improve their sustainability performance or overall LCA – but ultimately their business model as a whole.
A Life Cycle Assessment will address the introduction, growth, maturity, and decline phase of a product – otherwise known as the four main stages of a product’s life cycle.
The timeline below will depict the four stages of a product's life cycle:
1. Raw Material Extraction
Resources like metals, water, or oil are pulled from the earth.
2. Manufacturing
Materials are processed and turned into a final product.
3. Use Phase
The product is used, consuming energy and generating emissions.
4. End of Life
Product is recycled, landfilled, or incinerated at disposal.
What is Life Cycle Assessment Software?
Life cycle assessment software is a tool meant to help companies measure the environmental impact of their products and services through each stage of the product’s life cycle.
Similar to other carbon footprint reduction mechanisms such as carbon accounting, conducting a life cycle assessment without any third party assistance can prove tricky – and that’s where life cycle assessment software comes in.
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According to the GHG Protocol, following a standard for a life cycle analysis and impact assessment can help companies to reduce their emissions to the greatest extent possible.
“ The Product Life Cycle Accounting and Reporting Standard can be used to understand the full life cycle emissions of a product and focus efforts on the greatest GHG reduction opportunities. –(GHG Protocol). ”
Life cycle assessment software is predominantly used to determine the current carbon footprint of consumer goods and services, often as an effort for a company to reduce their environmental impact and improve upon their own sustainability.
The great thing about life cycle assessment software is that there are many different types, each of which can be used to adhere to the specific parameters of your business.
The battle cards below will review some of the differences between the two main types of LCA assessments:
📊
Attributional LCA
Focuses on describing the current state of a product's life cycle.
It answers: "What is the environmental impact of producing this item today?"
Great for product labeling, carbon footprints, and internal benchmarking.
It answers: "What is the environmental impact of producing this item today?"
Great for product labeling, carbon footprints, and internal benchmarking.
🔄
Consequential LCA
Analyzes system-wide changes and future impacts based on decisions.
It answers: "What happens if we make this change?"
Ideal for policy planning, strategic shifts, or market change analysis.
It answers: "What happens if we make this change?"
Ideal for policy planning, strategic shifts, or market change analysis.
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Who Uses LCA Software For Carbon Footprint Management?
Life cycle assessment software is most commonly used by large companies that are subject to large carbon footprints, such as:
- Food & Packaging Companies
- Entities in the Agriculture Industry
- Construction Companies
- Enterprises which manufacture chemicals
However, it is important to remember that any company can seek the use of life cycle assessment software – and that an LCA is not limited to large enterprises.
The drop down sections below will provide examples of how life cycle assessment software can benefit small companies in various sectors:
👗 Fashion Industry
▶
LCA software helps fashion brands calculate emissions from textile sourcing, dyeing, and transportation — promoting greener production cycles and informed material choices.
🚀 Start-Ups
▶
New businesses can benchmark their carbon footprint early on, allowing them to build sustainable strategies from the ground up — a huge plus for eco-conscious investors.
🎶 Concert Venues
▶
Venues can track environmental impacts from stage setup, power use, travel emissions, and waste — using this data to plan greener events with minimal disruption.
✈️ Airline Companies
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LCA software allows airlines to analyze the full lifecycle emissions of aircraft fleets — encouraging lower-carbon fuels, optimised flight paths, and more transparent reporting.
How Improved Environmental Management Standards with LCA Helps Companies
Beyond traditional environmental metrics, comprehensive LCA assessments can incorporate social life cycle assessment methodologies to evaluate broader sustainability impacts. Therefore, when companies invest in collecting primary data specific to their business operations, they're bound to acquire more accurate insights into the potential human health risks of their product or service.
According to the Environmental Protection Agency, this can allow for long-term, informed decisions regarding the materials and processes – and how current environmental management standards could impact both workers and consumers.
“ LCA studies identify key materials and processes within the products' life cycles that are likely to pose the greatest impacts, including occupational and public toxicity impacts. These assessments allow businesses to make product improvements through environmentally sound process, material, and design choices. – (Environmental Protection Agency). ”
Many life cycle assessment software are offered free of charge, but for the full-experience – companies will often need to commit to paying a fee to ensure the insight received from a life cycle assessment software is sufficient and personalised to their business needs.
Ultimately, life cycle assessment software is used by a wide-variety businesses – regardless of size or sector, to ensure they continue to provide the most ecologically sound products and services possible.
How Does Life Cycle Assessment Software Work?
Life cycle assessment software often works by using various databases that coincide with both eco-design, collecting input and output data, and the current circular economy. However, efficient life cycle assessment software will do more than pull numbers from a database.
Here is a breakdown and LCA software overview of how life cycle assessment software usually works:
- Preliminary Steps – Prior to conducting a Life Cycle Assessment, a company should determine what their goals are before undergoing this process. These goals might include seeking to reduce emissions or to comply with new environmental regulations.
- Collecting Data – You can’t know how to get better unless you know your starting point. In order to analyze the environmental impact of your company’s product or service, life cycle assessment software refers to various databases to collect information regarding your product – such as the raw materials used, how the product is transported, and how the consumer typically discards the item.
- Analysis – Once all of this data is collected, your life cycle assessment software of choice will determine the current ecological impact of your product or service.
- Visualisation of Data – After the data has been synthesised, life cycle assessment software will usually provide visual graphs or reports to help the owner of the product or service understand their current environmental impact. This information is then used by stakeholders and business owners to make adjustments accordingly.
- Seek Improvement – Once the data collected and illustrated by the life cycle assessment software has been well comprehended, companies can then work together with their expertise of choice on how to implement viable action plans to improve their current environmental impact. This is often done by presenting the company with various scenarios, where the company can then choose their desired path for improvement.
It is important that users of life cycle assessment software do not seek it as one-and-done mechanism to rectify their environmental impact, but rather – to use life cycle assessment software as an opportunity for continuous improvement.
The summary cards will reveal additional environmental aspects, impact categories, and sustainability initiatives that companies should remain mindful of in addition to a life cycle impact assessment:
🚛
Supply Chain
Beyond product design, companies must monitor the environmental impact of logistics, sourcing practices, and third-party suppliers throughout the supply chain.
📚
Employee Training
Ensuring staff understand sustainability goals, reporting tools, and eco-conscious behavior is essential for implementing impactful change across operations.
🧼
Greenwashing
Companies must avoid vague or misleading environmental claims by backing up statements with data, third-party verification, and clear reporting on real progress.
What are the Benefits of Using Life Cycle Assessment Software?
By this point, we all know why it’s a good idea to conduct a Life Cycle Assessment – but why should the use of life cycle assessment software be on your company’s radar?
Well, conducting a Life Cycle Assessment without third party assistance can prove difficult and time consuming – but with the use of life cycle assessment software, a wide-variety of options and solutions become available without the need to think it through.
The flip cards (move cursor over the card to flip) will reveal just a few of the benefits of using LCA software:
🥽 Transparency
LCA software improves transparency by backing environmental claims with data — reducing the risk of greenwashing and building consumer trust.
🚛 Supply Chain Optimization
Identify inefficiencies in sourcing, manufacturing, or transportation — enabling smarter decisions that cut emissions and cost.
📜 Regulatory Compliance
With evolving climate regulations, LCA tools help businesses stay compliant and ahead of reporting requirements with accurate emissions data.
This is because companies who seek the use of life cycle assessment software can not only sit back and let the experts do the math, but they can also enjoy specialised expertise, ideas, and solutions on how to improve their products and services moving forward.
How is a Data Analysis from LCA Software Beneficial?
Life cycle assessment software often provides exclusive tools that could help your company to improve upon your product or service’s existing environmental impact, such as by providing different scenarios on the product or service’s sustainability if various mechanisms were to be implemented.
Therefore, the use of life cycle assessment software helps to ensure a company’s continuous improvement and growth regarding the environmental impact of their products and services.
“ LCA is a powerful tool when used right. – (BuildingGreen). ”
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In addition to ensuring continuous ecological refinement of their products and services, companies that choose to work with a life cycle assessment software are bound to reap the following benefits:
- Save Money – Seeing as a Life Cycle Assessment often reveals the ways in which a company can improve their energy efficiency, working with a life cycle assessment software will often result in reduced utility bills over time.
- Attract New Customers – Conducting a Life Cycle Assessment isn’t going to just be good for the planet, but also for your company’s wallet – as seeking to improve the ecological footprint of a company's products and services is likely to appeal to new and existing customers. Therefore, a Life Cycle Assessment also serves as a viable investment plan for your business.
- Newfound Creative Inspiration – Once a company gets the results from their Life Cycle Assessment, creativity will often be paramount in coming up with ways to reduce the current environmental impact of the product – such as getting innovative with how to package the product or how to source more sustainable materials for manufacturing. As a result, consistent Life Cycle Assessments are likely to inspire companies to get more imaginative for future designs – which could elicit the birth of new products or services that otherwise would have never come to fruition.
The table below will breakdown the benefits of using LCA software:
| Benefit | Description |
|---|---|
| Save Time | Using LCA software reduces the time and effort needed to conduct a Life Cycle Assessment by automating calculations and providing a user-friendly interface for data input and analysis. |
| Expertise and Solutions | Companies benefit from the specialised expertise and solutions provided by LCA software, which offer insights into improving the environmental impact of their products and services. |
| Exclusive Tools | LCA software often includes exclusive tools that help companies analyze different scenarios to enhance product sustainability and environmental performance. |
| Ensure Continuous Improvement | LCA software helps companies ensure continuous improvement and growth regarding the environmental impact of their products and services by regularly updating and refining their practices. |
| Save Money | By identifying ways to improve energy efficiency and reduce waste, LCA software can help companies save on utility bills and operational costs over time. |
| Attract New Customers | Improving the ecological footprint of products and services appeals to environmentally conscious consumers, thereby attracting new customers and retaining existing ones. |
| Newfound Creative Inspiration | The insights gained from LCA software can inspire companies to innovate and create more sustainable products and services, fostering creativity and potentially leading to new market opportunities. |
Our Top 5 Picks for Life Cycle Assessment Software
If your company has been in the market for new life cycle assessment software to keep track off your environmental data and improve your LCA process, look no further – we at Greenly have compiled a list of our top 5 life cycle assessment software.
Greenly
At Greenly, we offer our own life cycle assessment software – which works in four concrete steps: defining your goals, taking data inventory, conducting the actual assessment, and then communicating your results and methods to improve your product’s current environmental standing.
“ Our focus is to help businesses measure, track, and reduce their environmental impact using methodologies aligned with the Greenhouse Gas Protocol and verified by third-party auditors. – (Greenly). ”
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Key Features of Greenly:
- User-Friendly Interface: Our platform is designed to be easy to navigate to allow businesses to seamlessly track emissions, draft reports, and monitor progress toward their sustainability goals. This also helps to engage stakeholders across your business.
- Expertise in Materiality: Life cycle assessments often go hand-in-hand with materiality and double materiality assessments, both of which Greenly has ample knowledge on in addition to our CSRD services.
- Emissions Tracking: We can help you understand the emissions created during each stage of your product's life cycle, as we provide automated data collection for scope 1, 2, and 3 emissions.
Our experts are waiting to hear from you!
Why Choose Greenly: At Greenly, we've been known to provide personalised expertise to help guide you every step of the way through your climate journey. Our verified methodologies, advanced reporting tools, and user-friendly interface can help your business to build trust with stakeholders and improve LCA performance.
One Click LCA
Specialising in life cycle assessment software for companies that partake in construction of buildings and other infrastructure, OneClick LCA is best for businesses looking to assess the environmental impact of their construction projects.
“ One Click LCA is intuitive, cloud-based software, with AI powering LCA and EPDs at scale. – (One Click LCA). ”
Key Features of One Click LCA
- LCA Database: Making use of an extensive database for building materials, OneClick can help companies determine the current ecological footprint of their building projects and offer insight on how to ameliorate them in the future.
- Compliance Standards: One Click LCA offers over 80 compliance standards, allowing your company to avoid legal fines from failing to comply with various environmental regulations.
- EPD Output: This allows for automatic verification, quality checks, and more to make sure your business has clear and approved information to communicate.
This niche life cycle assessment software is likely to become imperative as we seek to improve the climate resiliency of buildings in the midst of natural disasters caused by climate change.
Why Choose OneClick LCA: This LCA software is best for companies that work in construction or create an ecological footprint through their infrastructure projects, and want to effectively reduce the CA impact of future construction projects.
EcoChain
Ecochain’s life cycle assessment software called Mobius is known for its easy-to-use interference, which makes it easy for first-time users to determine the environmental impact of their product.
“ Fast, accurate and scalable LCA automation software built for the business user. – (Ecochain). ”
Key Features of EcoChain
- Timely Assistance: Companies that choose EcoChain will be given actionable advice shortly after the data from their Cycle Assessment has been analyzed.
- Regulatory Compliance: EcoChain offers assistance to ensure clients comply with numerous regulatory requirements, such as with EPDs, PCFs, CSRD, and CBAM.
Why Choose EcoChain: Ideal for businesses seeking a simplified LCA solution, as EcoChain is known for being business user friendly.
openLCA
Known as the only free and globally available LCA software, openLCA is a free life cycle assessment software that can be used for both business and personal life cycle assessments.
“ openLCA is versatile and able to meet needs of different user groups. – (openLCA). ”
Key Features of openLCA
- Transparency & Connectivity: As openLCA allows users to share the models and software created on their platform, it allows for greater connectivity to collobroate on LCA-based projects.
- Calculate Various Environmental Impacts: In addition to this, openLCA can be used to calculate your carbon footprint, production declaration, and to determine your water usage.
- Low Cost: Operating as a free professional LCA software, this life cycle assessment software is a good place to start if you want to be environmentally conscious, but don’t want to break the bank.
Why Choose openLCA: Ideal for businesses looking for affordable LCA software, as openLCA is known for its user-friendly interface and reliability.
GaBi Sphera
Sphera is also known for having reputable life cycle assessment software called GaBi – as they combine the use of reliable software and modeling to help their clients understand their product’s ecological footprint.
In fact, Sphera has access to over 20 databases – meaning the information they retrieve will be specific according to the sector of your business.
“ Designed to streamline sustainability, reduce carbon emissions, and achieve regulatory compliance. – (Sphera). ”
Key Features of GaBi Sphera
- Extensive Database: Sphera provides a large database for its LCA users, which can allow for sector-specific resources to effectively reduce your LCA impact.
- Long-Time Expertise: As Sphera has helped clients for over 30 years, they have established themselves as a valuable source to make informed business decisions.
- Compare Packing Materials: LCA involves reviewing the environmental impact created by your product every step of the way, including packaging. Sphera has made it easy to analyze the environmental impact of your current packaging materials.
Why Choose GaBi Sphera: Optimal for companies seeking a wide variety of networking and resources for LCA, as Sphera is known for its large database.
Overall, the use of life cycle assessment software can allow your company to adapt its products and services in a world battling against climate change – and it’s never too late to start, especially when our personalised experts are awaiting your call.
What About Greenly?
If reading this article about life cycle assessment software has made you interested in reducing your carbon emissions to further fight against climate change – Greenly can help you!
It can be overwhelming to figure out how to conduct a life cycle assessment, but don’t worry – Greenly is here to help. Click here to see how Greenly can help you to conduct a life cycle assessment and improve the current environmental impact of your products and services.
Greenly can help you make an environmental change for the better, starting with a carbon footprint assessment to know how much carbon emissions your company produces.
Sources
GHG Protocol https://ghgprotocol.org/product-standard
Environmental Protection Agency https://archive.epa.gov/epa/saferchoice/design-environment-life-cycle-assessments.html
BuildingGreen https://www.buildinggreen.com/op-ed/life-cycle-assessment-powerful-tool-when-used-right
LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/3-hidden-ways-how-lca-can-make-your-company-more-marc-marsidi
One Click LCA https://oneclicklca.com/
EcoChain https://ecochain.com/mobius/
openLCA https://www.openlca.org/
Sphera https://sphera.com/solutions/product-stewardship/life-cycle-assessment-software-and-data/
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