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Life cycle assessment and ecodesign in a day - Lessons learned from a series of LCA clinics for start-ups and small and medium enterprises (SMEs)

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Life cycle assessment and ecodesign in a day - Lessons learned from a series of LCA clinics for start-ups and small and medium enterprises (SMEs)

In recent years, life cycle assessment (LCA) has become one of the main tools for quantifying environmental sustainability of products and services. The main advantage of LCA is that several environmental impacts are assessed simultaneously over the entire life cycle of a product or a service, across its whole value chain. Its holistic nature makes LCA a laborious and expensive method, less accessible to start-ups and small and medium enterprises (SMEs). However, as most of Finnish companies are of those sizes there is a clear need for a more simple, yet robust, solution. To tackle the challenge, we have developed a concept called the LCA clinic. Our idea is to streamline LCA and make it affordable for SMEs and start-ups. In this report we present the conceptual idea and illustrate its application on a series of trials with real companies. The outcomes of the LCA clinic trials show that it is applicable in practice. Moreover, they provide a valuable feedback for further development of the concept. The trials also proved that LCA clinics have a potential to stimulate life cycle thinking (LCT) in the participating companies.

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