LCA at Scale applies the principles of Life Cycle Assessment to evaluate the environmental impact of individual products efficiently and at high volumes. Unlike traditional LCAs, which rely on resource-intensive, manual analyses, LCA at Scale leverages automation, standardized frameworks, and integrated data systems to streamline the process. This enables businesses to assess hundreds or thousands of products across their entire life cycles—from raw materials to disposal—in a cost-effective and scalable manner.
The key to LCA at Scale lies in its focus on efficiency without compromising precision and Carbon Maps’ approach simplifies data requirements and focuses on high-impact areas in a product’s life cycle. This is particularly advantageous for companies with complex supply chains, where obtaining detailed, supplier-specific data can be a significant challenge.
As told to Carbon Maps by the CSR Purchasing Manager of large supermarket chain, Lidl, “Our suppliers face the same problem as we do: most of them are having difficulties in collecting data from their own suppliers.” This remark about data collection was echoed by several more F&B professionals in a recent white paper we published about effective strategies for collaboration between CSR and Procurement teams.
So, you might be asking, what is even the point of LCA at Scale when primary data is lacking? Carbon Maps recognizes this challenge and has developed LCA at Scale as a dynamic solution, enabling companies to extract meaningful insights by focusing on data that you have, regardless of its granularity.
Carbon Maps has developed a methodology that automates Life Cycle Assessments across extensive product portfolios, offering a scalable and adaptable solution tailored to the food industry. Inspired by the Ecobalyse method and declared compliant with ISO standards 14040, 14044, and 14067, this approach combines scientific rigor with operational practicality.
You can achieve different objectives with varying levels of precision and differentiation depending on the data you have. In particular, the difference between these levels lies in the types of emissions factors (EF) used for ingredients and raw materials.
This objective focuses on understanding the environmental footprint of your products and eco-designing recipes with lower environmental impacts. Carbon Maps leverages general product information to establish a broad baseline and uses our vast reference EF database to intelligently fill data gaps, ensuring auditable results even with minimal input.
If you’re aiming to refine your baseline and address supplier-specific impacts, Carbon Maps’ employs a hybrid approach where you can combine emission factors from national databases with supplier-specific data where available.
This is one of the standout features of Carbon Maps’ methodology: the ability to customize LCAs using actual company data. You can refine the granularity of your products’ environmental impact assessments by applying primary data when available to different life cycle stages. Some examples are transport and logistics data, energy consumption data, packaging data (material compositions and recycling rates), and supplier practices information such as specific farming methods or energy efficiency.
This enables companies to differentiate between suppliers, evaluate their performance, and engage them in improving practices.
If your objective is to improve sustainability at the source—such as farming practices or raw material production—Carbon Maps supports the creation of custom emission factors based on collected primary data from on-farm activities. This enables a detailed understanding of the environmental impacts and supports targeted improvements.
Emissions factors (EFs) are used to quantify the emissions of substances or pollutants associated with the different stages in the complete life cycle of a product. When applied to GHG emissions, they are typically expressed as kilograms of CO₂ equivalent (kg CO₂e) per unit of activity or product.
For example:
The beauty of EFs lies in their ability to account for the entire life cycle of a product or activity. By incorporating emissions from all these stages, EFs offer a comprehensive view of a product's environmental impact. These EFs are also based on scientific and technical information, often compiled in specialized databases such as Agribalyse (France), EcoInvent (global), World Food LCA Database (WFLDB) and Sphera (energy, transport, chemicals, packaging). The Carbon Maps database leverages access to all these specialized databases, expanding our own database of over ~12,000 EFs, making its assessments more comprehensive and robust for evaluating environmental impacts.
EFs are invaluable for simplifying carbon footprinting by providing average values that eliminate the need for complex, stage-by-stage measurements. They enable consistent comparisons across products, activities, and regions, supporting decision-making for both local and global contexts.
Applicable across diverse sectors like agriculture, manufacturing, and transportation, EFs align with frameworks such as the Greenhouse Gas Protocol, aiding organizations in tracking Scope 1, 2 and 3 emissions. Additionally, there is also the possibility of regional customization, which ensures accuracy by reflecting differences in factors like energy sources, making EFs a versatile tool for emissions assessment.
Granularity in life cycle stages: EFs generally include emissions data for each stage of a product's life cycle, a level of detail that allows users to pinpoint emissions hotspots. Agribalyse specifically also covers data on processing, packaging, transport and distribution for 2,500 products ready for consumption.
Tailored Emissions Data: Specialized databases like Agribalyse include life cycle inventories (LCI) for over 200 agricultural products, covering stages from input to farm gate. This specificity allows for more accurate and actionable insights.
Pre-Compiled Data: Specialized databases provide ready-to-use, high-quality data, eliminating the need for businesses or researchers to collect life cycle emissions data independently. This saves resources while maintaining reliability and granularity. The World Food LCA Database (WFLDB) provides 2,600+ datasets and 2,300+ sub-datasets covering productions in 150 countries.
Supports Compliance and Reporting: As these specialized databases maintain methodological consistency (ISO 14040 and 14044), they also align with global standards like the GHG Protocol as well as with reporting requirements by CSRD and SBTi.
It’s important to understand that these EFs make it possible to carry out product LCA at Scale however, it’s just as important to understand that there are limitations that generally revolve around issues of transparency and specificity.
Lack of transparency: The methodology behind how EFs are derived is not always fully transparent or easy to access, making it difficult to verify the data.
Lack of context specificity: Emission factors in databases are often based on averages, which may not accurately reflect specific contexts, practices, or technologies. This can lead to over- or under-estimation of emissions for unique operations or regions, making the results less insightful for localized decision-making.
💡 To address these challenges, Carbon Maps has developed a methodology that leverages your actual product data to perform more granular LCAs. Instead of relying on generic product categories, Carbon Maps can model your product carbon footprints using your unique recipe and packaging information.
To illustrate, imagine one of your products is a 4 cheese pizza. While Agribalyse provides an emission factor for this product, it is based on an average value for a generic 4 cheese pizza. Such databases typically offer broad category averages, which don’t consider the specific ingredients or production methods unique to your product. Carbon Maps takes a different approach by breaking down your recipe and packaging and applying high-precision emission factors to each ingredient and packaging material. This results in a more tailored assessment, exceeding the precision of generic database values. You can see how we’ve applied this methodology to Foodles recipes.
There is so much more to this methodology than we can explain in an article so please do not hesitate to get in touch with our team to learn more about how you can carry out more granular LCAs on your products.
So, while it’s true that collecting data is a major challenge when it comes to carrying out granular environmental impact assessments, a modern solution like LCA at Scale from Carbon Maps demonstrates that rapid, comprehensive and high-precision assessments are achievable through the integration of emission factors from multiple specialized databases. Moreover, Carbon Maps LCA at Scale offers a dynamic solution, allowing assessments to become progressively precise as additional data is gathered, ensuring continuous updates and revealing more actionable insights.
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