Your packaging's family tree: tracing environmental impact with LCAs

Life cycle assessments (LCAs) are a bit like creating a family tree. Just like your family ancestry, an LCA traces the “ancestry” of your company’s packaging, from the “birth” of raw materials to its “final resting place” in disposal or recycling.

LCAs provide a comprehensive evaluation of the environmental impact of your packaging throughout its entire existence. This includes everything from raw material extraction to manufacturing, transportation, consumer use and disposal or recycling. By quantifying the environmental footprint at each stage, LCAs help identify high-impact areas for improvement. This leads to more sustainable choices that reduce your company’s environmental impact.

The benefits of an LCA:

The benefits of LCAs extend beyond just environmental responsibility. Increasingly, consumers are demanding transparency from brands about their sustainability efforts. An LCA can provide concrete data to back up your claims, demonstrating your commitment to environmental stewardship. This can be a powerful differentiator in today’s eco-conscious market. Additionally, many retailers, customers and regulatory bodies are beginning to require sustainability reporting, and LCAs can be a valuable tool for meeting these requirements.

Related: Sustainable packaging is the elephant in the room

LCAs are not about perfection but instead about progress. As sustainability is a continuous journey and improvement is the goal, even small changes can have lasting cumulative impacts. The insights gained can inform decisions about material choices, manufacturing processes and end-of-life scenarios. Maybe it reveals that switching to recycled content significantly reduces your carbon footprint. Or perhaps it highlights the need to optimize transportation to minimize emissions. An LCA can even help you evaluate the potential benefits and trade-offs of different end-of-life options, like composting versus traditional recycling.

As materials, technologies and regulations evolve, systematic reassessments ensure your packaging solutions remain aligned with the latest sustainability best practices and impact information. This commitment to continuous improvement demonstrates a genuine dedication to minimizing environmental impact.

How to start:

Conducting an LCA may feel intimidating due to your organization’s high volume of packaging SKUs, or the complexity of the supply chain and information access. An LCA can be a powerful tool, but it doesn’t have to be overly complex. Start by focusing on the areas where you can make the biggest impact (material type, dollar spent, space allocated) and begin by creating a single LCA for a single part. Apply the best practices from the learnings to other like parts and scale accordingly. Alternatively, you may consider partnering with LCA experts who can guide you through the process and help you interpret the results. Remember that the goal is understanding, which leads to asking about alternatives that can lead to improvement.

The takeaway:

To truly advance sustainability in packaging, organizations must be strategic, leveraging the best available information to drive impactful action. While LCAs offer a powerful lens for understanding environmental impact, they are most effective when integrated into a comprehensive sustainability strategy, which also includes optimizing packaging design for automation and utilizing advanced materials.

Are you seeing interesting developments regarding sustainability in the plastics and packaging industry? We want to hear about it! Contact Jesse Warnke at (336) 217-9102 or jesse.warnke@charlesaris.com.