By Sustainability team
26th June 2009.
13:51

Why you shouldn’t compare LCA results

LCA or Life Cycle Assessments are used to determine the environmental impact of products and services. The whole life cycle shall be taken into consideration and there are standards on how to do a LCA but even so different studies are not directly comparable without a great deal of insight. Selection of system boundries and assumptions influence results of the LCA. I have heard from a person doing LCA as a profession that “LCA is not a science it is an art” and I agree.

In a couple of places there has been comparisons between the C901 GreenHeart and competitor phones. In one article the C901 GreenHeart presented significantly lower CO2 footprint (which in this case definetly is true and flattering) the comparisons is however still not relevant. There are significant differencies in system boundries between these two studies. As soon as you start to present numbers people start to compare and this is one example of risk of presenting numbers from a LCA but at the same time these numbers are crucial for the scale and proportion of the environmental impact of the product.

Independent of the risks LCA is the ultimate tool to focus on right things in your strive to improve from sustainability point of view (environmental side of sustainability). Also bearing limitiations in mind LCA is also marvelous to compare different activities such mobile phone with a trip in your car or drinking water from the tap with water fron a bottle trnsported from far away.

Finally comparing results between two LCA conducted in same database with same scope and assumptions is also a very precise way of preseneting improvements in the way that we have been doing with the GreenHeart phone. Our LCA show that the total impact of a mobile phone is equal to 0.08% of the average person’s CO2, i.e., less than 0.1% of your personal CO2 impact (compared to global average person) comes from your mobile phone. This will be true independent of how your system boundires are selected. Note that in our study it includes materials extraction, production, transport, charging/usage, and waste handling of the phone and accessories inlcuded in the box.