ELife Cycle Analysis (LCA) is a methodological tool that serves to measure the environmental impact of a product, process or system throughout its life cycle (from the moment raw materials are obtained until end of its life). It relies on the collection and analysis of system inputs and outputs for results that show its potential environmental impacts, with the aim of being able to determine strategies for the reduction of them.
The main feature of this tool is its holistic approach, that is, it is based on the idea that all the properties of a system cannot be determined or explained individually by its constituent parts.
Complete integration of all aspects involved is necessary; hence the concept of taking into account the entire lifecycle of the system. The LCA of a product should include all the inputs/outputs of the processes involved throughout its life cycle: the extraction of raw materials and the processing of the necessary materials for the manufacture of components, the use of the product and, finally, its recycling and/or final management. Transport, storage, distribution, and other intermediate activities between the lifecycle phases are also included when they are of sufficient relevance. This type of life cycle is commonly referred to as “from the cradle to the grave”.
Los elementos que se tienen en cuenta dentro del ACV, comúnmente se conocen como inputs/outputs (entradas/salidas):
- Inputs/entradas: Uso de recursos y materias primas, partes y productos, transporte, electricidad, energía… etc, que se tienen en cuenta en cada proceso/fase del sistema.
- Outputs/salidas: Emisiones al aire, al agua y al suelo, así como los residuos y los subproductos que se tienen en cuenta en cada proceso/fase del sistema.
The role of LCA in eco-design
The companies, in order to include the environment as one more factor in the design of their products and services and thus improve their environmental performance, need environmental data to help guide their decisions (the choice of one material or another depending on its environmental impact, the viability or otherwise of a production process...). To facilitate this environmental assessment, Ihobe has developed different technical guides and simplified calculation tools. All of them serve for the environmental evaluation of products and/or services with a lifecycle approach and a multi-category approach of environmental impact.
Environmental assessment methods of products and services
There are two main ways to be able to assess the environmental impact of a product/service. Qualitatively, if it provides information based on subjective and non-quantifiable criteria, or quantitatively, if it provides information based on detailed objective and quantifiable criteria, obtained as a result of a calculation process.
These concepts will be directly related to two other key aspects of an environmental analysis, such as the degree of difficulty in putting it into practice and the quality of the results obtained with the analysis process.
With this, Ihobe has developed three different methods to answer to these requirements, all of which are included in a series of associated technical guides.
The following table collects these characteristics for the environmental analysis methods that have been identified as those of greater applicability during the process of elaboration of these guides, such as environmental analysis matrices, environmental indicators and life cycle analysis.
Environmental Information Sheets
Environmental information sheets are predefined numerical factors calculated by Ihobe, which represent the impact towards different categories of environmental impact of the unitary use of different environmental aspects associated with the Life Cycle of a product or service. They cover aspects such as the unit consumption of different types of raw materials (expressed in environmental impact per kilogram of consumption of that material), energy consumption (expressed in environmental impact per KWh of energy from different sources of generation, including the mix), the transport travelled (expressed in environmental impact per tonne and kilometer travelled in different means of transport) or the destination of each material at its end of life (expressed in environmental impact per kg of material treated depending on the different end of life scenarios).
The environmental information sheets prepared by Ihobe and present in a specific application are based on life cycle inventories present in international databases, adapted to the reality of the Basque industrial network to represent the environmental impacts of the materials, processes, energies, transport and end-of-life treatments used in the design and manufacture of their products.
All the information and access to environmental information sheets is available at the following link: https://www.ihobe.eus/fichas-informacion-ambiental-2
Environmental Footprint Calculator of Products and Services
In addition to the technical guides and environmental information sheets, Ihobe provides companies with a simplified computerized assessment tool of the environmental performance of products and services with a life cycle approach and a multicategory approach of environmental impact.
This tool is an improved and expanded version of the previous ECO-it tool that Ihobe made available to companies more than 15 years ago.
This new tool incorporates more than 25 categories of environmental impact, described in the following section (in the section on environmental indicators).
This new tool is available free of charge for all those entities with their own access profile to the ihobe website.
Reasons to ecodesign
Ecodesign, also known as designing for the environment, is a methodology that considers the environmental variable as a further criterion in the process to design industrial products, alongside other earlier factors such as economic costs or the quality. The final aim is to improve the environmental performance of products throughout their life cycle.
Ecodesign has become a necessary practice to address the growing consumption of products in the industrial sector.
The main reasons to ecodesign are:
- Steady growth of the global amount of products consumed. The increased purchasing power of people implies greater consumption of products and, therefore, of raw materials, which creates a greater volume of waste generated at the end of the useful life of the products.
- Increased variety of products and services. A single product can have many versions (e.g. plasma, liquid crystal television screens, etc.), which implies a range of technologies that require different management systems. This means an added complication in the final process of the useful life of those products.
- Ongoing innovation in the products Modifying and updating the technological characteristics and features of the products that increasingly shorten their useful cycle.
- Greater energy consumption in the use phase The increase of products on the markets has meant a progressive and steady rise of the total amount of energy consumed.
- Global marketing. The single market and the multilateral reduction of trade barriers and to investment have helped to create a global economy, generating an increasingly greater environmental impact associated to the transport sector.
- Product complexity. Knowledge of the design and development of a product increasingly falls more on the entities or corporations that produce and market them.
- Intervention of a greater number of stakeholders. The complexity and globalisation processes of the products lead to the involvement of a greater number of stakeholders intervening in the life cycle of those products.
Ecodesign Certifications
UNE-EN ISO 14006:2011 Ecodesign:
The StandardUNE-EN ISO 14006 - Environmental Management System of the product and service design and development process (Ecodesign)is a tool for the identification of those companies which add these environmental principles to their way of working.
In the early 2000s, companies began to show interest in developing a standard describing the eco-design management system, with the aim of facilitating the integration of the environmental variable in product design and the possibility that the management system could be audited by an independent third party for external recognition.
In this context, the UNE 150301 Standard of "Environmental management of the design and development process was developed. Ecodesign”, which describes the ecodesign system, compatible with other ISO 9001 and ISO 14001 systems commonly used by the companies.
In 2008, the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) began the process of creating a new International Standard for eco-design based on the Spanish Standard UNE 150301. Thus, the ISO/TC 207/SC1/WG4 Committee is created, in which the public company Ihobe participates, and resulting in the definitive creation of the second Spanish standard (UNE) that becomes international, the UNE-EN ISO 14006:2011 standard.
In the Basque Country there are approximately 70 certified companies according to the Ecodesign Management Standard UNE-EN ISO 14006, which represents 54% of the total number of certified companies in Spain.
Eco-labelling systems:
Traditionally, the environmental performance of products has not been one of the values demanded by consumers when exercising the purchase option on a given product. This was a feature that was limited to the legal compliance with the different existing regulations. However, in recent years, the growing awareness of consumers as well as the realization of the environmental effects that human beings are exerting on the planet, is leading to the emergence of a new consumer increasingly sensitive to this problem, a consumer who begins to demand information on the environmental performance of the products he consumes and the services he uses.
In order to differentiate those products that incorporate environmental improvements in their design, in the last 30 years different environmental labelling systems have emerged. There are nearly 400 different environmental labelling systems around the world nowadays, making it challenging for companies to identify the most appropriate system for their products.
To try to help companies in this task, Ihobe has developed two technical publications that describe the different existing types of eco-labelling systems, their main characteristics and the competitive advantages that each of them provides. The guide also comprises the description and linkage of the main existing systems within one of the identified categories.
Product Environmental Statement:
Product Environmental Statements (PESs) are a transparent and comparable environmental product information system based on specific standards common to all products in the same category.
Due to their very nature, these types of systems are suitable for exchanges of information between companies and their customers, and not for the standard end consumer, as the information contained in the PES is very technical and detailed.
These eco-labelling systems are part of the type III eco-labelling systems - Product Environmental Statement (PES) regulated by the Standard ISO 14025.
Its difference from the other two systems regulated by the ISO 14020 family of standards is that here no environmental requirements or minimum values to be met are defined, but those parameters or environmental features which need to be reported to provide an image of environmental performance are identified.
These programmes are set up in accordance with the requirements laid down for them in ISO 14025, and develop working rules or procedures contained in documents called 'Product Category Rules' (PCR).
Ecodesign in the Basque Country
Since 1999, the boost for ecodesign in the Basque Country has been constant. In this period, an important knowledge on the subject has been generated and support tools have been created in order to position the Basque industry and its companies as benchmarks of eco-design on an international scale.
The development of eco-design in the Basque Country has resulted in the generation of knowledge and support tools, the enabling of market tools and the development of public support programs.
Methodological guides for Ecodesign
All this work began with the publication in 2000 of the first “Practical Handbook of Ecodesign. 7-step implementation operational ", which describes the seven stages necessary to eco-design a product.
The manual teaches companies how to integrate environmental criteria in the design of their products and provides simple tools that allow them to start acting in this sense. For this, it uses the example of a company throughout the manual, showing as an example the monitoring of the methodology by such company, as well as the use of the different proposed tools.
After the successive application of this methodology in different sectors of activity of the Basque industry, different sector guides were published, in particular for the automotive, tool machine, construction materials, interior furniture, urban furniture, packing and packaging, electric-electronic and textile sectors.
Guide about eco-design of packing and packaging
Given its special significance and the great application that ecodesign presents in the packaging sector, in 2017 Ihobe together with Ecoembes developed the reference guide for the application of ecodesign in lightweight packaging.
This packaging eco-design guide is intended to offer help and guidance to apply eco-design to all those companies that place packaged products on the market. To ensure a practical approach, the guide has three real experiences of application, approaching the project from three different perspectives: a packaging manufacturer, a packaging company and a distribution company of packaged products.
20 years of application of Ecodesign in the Basque Country
After more than 20 years promoting Ecodesign in the Basque Country, today many Basque companies are already integrating it into the day-to-day routine of their product development. To show visible examples of this work, in 2021 the catalogue "20 years of ecodesign. Made in the Basque Country". This document, published in physical and digital format, is the first in Europe to gather a wide list of product categories from ten industrial sectors, in which lifecycle analysis methodologies have been applied that have substantially improved their environmental impact and which are an example for the entire European industrial sector.
This catalogue of circular products manufactured in the Basque Country compiles in technical data sheets the characteristics and main features of each circular product, dividing them into the following ten sectors: the chemical industry, the metal sector, furniture, automotive, food, production and consumption, machinery, transport, electric-electronics, and the construction materials sector.
Basque Ecodesign meetings: international meetings in Ecodesign
The Basque Ecodesign Meeting has been an international event on Ecodesign that has brought together every two years in Bilbao leading companies with extensive experience in the application of Ecodesign, the public administration as a dynamic agent of this methodology, the university and numerous specialists in this discipline.
Through its different editions have passed the main figures of the international scene and has been the meeting point of the professionals of Ecodesign in southern Europe.
TAll the documentation of its latest editions is available and constitutes an important documentary background on the trends in the field.
Since 2022, the Basque Ecodesign Meeting is integrated into the Basque Circular Summit, an event of greater depth which covers all aspects of Ecodesign within the framework of the Circular Economy.
Ecodesign and the Circular Economy
The incorporation of the life cycle perspective in the design of products allows the development of products with a lower unit consumption of raw materials, with the use of raw materials of recycled or renewable origin, with a lower need of consumables throughout their useful life, facilitating their maintenance and repairability (thus extending their useful life), and ensuring a better use at the time when the product has reached its end of life.
The Ecodesign even allows to design products more suitable to the establishment of new alternative business models in which the commercial transactions (and therefore the profit of the company) is not based on the manufacture and sale of its products but on the use made of it by its users or even on the result obtained from them.
All these are strategies that allow a more efficient use of the raw materials we need to be able to manufacture the products we consume or use.
Which is why eco-design is a key piece of the Circular Economy. In fact, the European Commission states this in its 2020 Action Plan on Circular Economy, one of the main elements of the European Green Deal.
This plan includes initiatives throughout the lifecycle of products, starting from their design, and aims to promote the generalization of circular economy processes, thereby promoting sustainable consumption and keeping the resources used in the EU economy for as long as possible.
