Life Cycle Assessment
Assessing the relative impacts of alternative product or process designs is multifaceted, impacts can be site-specific, and the optimal solution is not always clear. Life cycle assessment (LCA) plays an important role in product development and modifications by helping us to:
- Better understand the environmental and health impacts associated with our products throughout our supply chain and provide our customers with valuable information for their own decision-making and sustainability performance.
- Identify better opportunities to reduce impacts through innovative solutions.
To date, we have completed LCAs for several product lines, allowing us to make significant improvements in packaging.
- Our LCA comparing single-use items to reusable stainless steel revealed that single-use products use 175% less water than stainless steel because they don’t require cleaning, and can reduce greenhouse gas emissions as well.
- We used the results of another LCA to deliver an overall 55% impact reduction by eliminating excess packaging, with a 36% corresponding reduction in greenhouse gas impacts
- We also applied LCA findings to guide development of a new product take-back program offering a waste-to-energy solution for our single-use units.
Through our Design for Sustainability program, we provide these findings to our designers to drive an ongoing cycle of sustainable product solutions.