Why Life Cycle Assessment?
Wondering what a life cycle assessment actually is?
We have collected interesting information, standards and a quick overview with the basics to get you started.
Read it here →
Life Cycle Assessments are adopted broadly in the sustainability realm. For many sectors, ranging from building to farming to the energy sector, this is already applied. However, it has not been applied widely yet for the digital infrastructure industry. Therefore, efforts to make the industry more sustainable are difficult: we don’t have the data to improve.
Applying methodologies like LCA can give us great insights on the environmental impact of products and services. We believe that to measure is to know: the data used in an LCA can give us what we need to report on our environmental impact, and to improve our products, services, and therefore our businesses.
LCA also allows for comparison between different products and services, and can, for example, help us choose the most sustainable option. While it is a complex methodology, we believe it is also especially applicable to the digital infrastructure sector due to its complexity. It is able to cover many aspects of the value chain. There are standards which are the norms that define an LCA and its requirements. Part of this is a review process, where the results are reviewed by an independent party (see more about the relationship to standardization and labeling below).
LCA can support the pathway to a more environmentally sustainable digital transformation by pointing out environmental hotspots of ICT, by identifying environmental tradeoffs, by monitoring the environmental impacts of the digital transformation and by showing the sustainability potentials of substituting digital for non-digital technologies with high environmental impacts (Itten et al., 2020).
We want companies to be able to feel empowered to do these life cycle assessments themselves, and feel empowered to share this with their customers, improve, and create a more sustainable future together.