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 quantify-ing 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.