Life Cycle Assessment (LCA)
LCA stands for Life Cycle Assessment and it is commonly used in the context of sustainability. A Life Cycle Assessment is a systematic and ISO-standardized method for evaluating the environmental impacts of a product throughout its entire life cycle. The life cycle typically includes stages such as raw material extraction, manufacturing, use, transportation, disposal and often recycling or reuse.
An LCA examines various environmental aspects across a total of 16 impact categories. These include not only CO2 emissions but also factors such as water consumption, air pollution and soil erosion. Therefore, an LCA encompasses more aspects than, for example, a Product Carbon Footprint but is also more complex and time-consuming to create. Conducting LCAs enables companies to identify, quantify and assess the environmental impact of their products and use this information to improve the environmental performance. They are thus an essential component of a company's sustainability efforts.
For some of our lubricant esters we have already conducted LCAs in collaboration with an external institute to accurately capture the products' environmental impacts. Recently, we conducted a comparative analysis for a biobased lubricant ester from our LIGALUB series and a fossil-based lubricant ester. This analysis was additionally reviewed by an external panel which concluded that the biobased lubricant ester allows significant reductions in CO2 emissions.
