Environmental control of the activities of companies and organisations is an essential challenge to meet in the face of climate issues. The Carbon Footprint (Bilan Carbone) and product Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) are among the tools that allow companies to measure the impact of their activities on the environment, with the aim of implementing actions to reduce their overall carbon footprint.
Do these tools share the same objectives? Do they address the same players and are they interchangeable? The Carbon Footprint and product LCA are two distinct protocols, and it is important to clearly discern their respective scopes, analysis criteria and interpretation methods.
Definitions of the Carbon Footprint and product LCA
What is the Carbon Footprint?
A diagnostic tool developed by the French ecological transition agency (ADEME) and made mandatory for certain organisations by the Grenelle de l'environnement, the Carbon Footprint is a protocol for measuring the GHG (greenhouse gas) emissions of a product, service or activity. The accounting takes into account direct and indirect CO2 emissions, but also other greenhouse gases: methane, hydrofluorocarbons, nitrous oxide, sulphur hexafluoride and perfluorocarbons are converted into carbon equivalent (CO2 eq.) to enable an overall assessment.
The scope of the Carbon Footprint is threefold. It breaks down into scopes 1, 2 and 3 from the international GHG Protocol methodology. These scopes distinguish direct GHG emissions (scope 1) from indirect GHG emissions, respectively linked to energy consumption (scope 2) and to all indirect emissions related to the company's activity (scope 3), both upstream and downstream of the value chain: from raw material purchases to delivery, use and end of life of products.
What is product LCA?
Product Life Cycle Assessment, abbreviated LCA, is a complete procedure that relies on the ISO 14040 and ISO 14044 standards and offers standardised steps for evaluating the environmental impact of a product or service from its creation to its end of life. The field of study is broad, and can therefore include greenhouse gas emissions as well as the impact on natural resources, toxicity to living organisms or harmfulness to soils and oceans. The LCA assessment method, recognised and standardised since the mid-1990s, quantifies impacts at all stages of a product's life cycle, from raw material extraction to the recovery or treatment of waste at end of life, including the manufacture of the product and its packaging, transport, distribution and use by the consumer.
The major differences between the Carbon Footprint and product Life Cycle Assessment lie, on the one hand, in the scope evaluated and, on the other, in the criteria studied.
What distinguishes the Carbon Footprint from LCA?
Scopes of the two methods
The scope of the Carbon Footprint is twofold, both operational (with different emission sources) and organisational (across different sites and facilities of the same company or organisation).
Life Cycle Assessment, for its part, focuses on the value chain of a product or service, from inputs to outputs, including manufacturing.
Criteria studied by each protocol
The Carbon Footprint method is considered single-criterion, since it measures only the carbon footprint of the company's activities.
The product LCA protocol, on the other hand, takes the form of a multi-criteria analysis, including CO2 emissions but also water use and soil impact, for example.
Carbon Footprint and product Life Cycle Assessment: shared objectives
The Carbon Footprint and product LCA share the common objective of enabling companies to quantify their environmental impact, within a global context of ecological transition of society and the economy. Both tools provide precise data on the climate and environmental impacts of an activity. Companies can therefore develop, on the basis of their results, an improvement approach and an informed sustainable development policy.
Quantifying one's impact is also a way for companies subject (or not) to the Carbon Footprint to meet regulatory obligations or anticipate them: extra-financial reporting legislation regularly broadens its scope and new requirements are set to come into force.
Finally, both approaches are performance levers in a rapidly changing market, as environmental criteria weigh more and more in the choices of consumers and partners. Both the Carbon Footprint and product Life Cycle Assessment allow companies to communicate about their impact-reduction efforts, without suspicion of greenwashing.
Carbon Footprint and LCA, two complementary tools
Given their differences in scope and approach (single-criterion and multi-criteria), the Carbon Footprint and product Life Cycle Assessment are two complementary and non-interchangeable tools for measuring the environmental repercussions of a company's activities and taking concrete reduction measures.
The Carbon Footprint first appears as the quickest and simplest tool for measuring the ecological impact of a product or activity as a whole, in order to implement actions to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. But because the method only concerns GHG emissions, and not water resource use or potential soil pollution, there is a risk that the measures taken lead to a transfer of environmental impact rather than a reduction of it. Reducing the Carbon Footprint can therefore, in some cases, imply an increase in the organisation's overall environmental impact.
As a complement to the Carbon Footprint, the multi-criteria LCA protocol allows a very detailed level of analysis of a product's environmental impact, across the entire value chain and on different environmental criteria. It thus serves as a basis for other actions, including comparing the life cycles of different products from the same company, changing suppliers or seeking alternative materials with an eco-design objective.