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.
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 data precision and differentiation. 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.
To carry out LCAs, emissions factors (EFs) are necessary to quantify the emissions of substances or pollutants associated with the different stages in the complete life cycle of a product. When applied specifially 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 or 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 LCAs by providing average values that eliminate the need for complex, stage-by-stage measurements. They enable consistent comparisons across products and activities, and also allow the possibility of regional customization, which can reflect differences in factors like energy sources, making EFs a versatile tool for emissions assessment.
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. Agribalyse also include life cycle inventories (LCI) for over 200 agricultural products, covering stages from input to farm gate unlocking more actionable insights.
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.
As these specialized databases maintain methodological consistency (ISO 14040 and 14044), and where carbon emissions are concerned, they also align with global standards like the GHG Protocol as well as with reporting requirements such as Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD) and Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM).
EFs from specialized databases make it possible to carry out product LCA at Scale and therefore allow for the comparison of the environmental performance of different products and identification of hotspots for targeted reductions. With that said, they can be broad estimates derived from market averages that may not reflect the specifics of a specific production process.
As they must account for wide variations, EFs are inherently conservative and less precise. Replacing them with primary data provides more accurate calculations, often revealing lower emissions and enabling more targeted reduction efforts. By using data specific to the product, “hotspots” can be pinpointed and addressed effectively, such as by substituting raw materials or improving process efficiency.
💡 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 environmental 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.
While collecting primary data poses a significant challenge for conducting detailed environmental impact assessments, Carbon Maps' LCA at Scale offers a comprehensive and efficient way to establish a robust baseline. This baseline can be progressively refined as additional primary data is gathered, enabling increasingly precise assessments and uncovering actionable insights to drive meaningful impact reductions.
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