2.0 Understanding Life Cycle Approaches

2.1 WHAT ARE LIFE CYCLE APPROACHES AND WHY ARE THEY NEEDED?

The NRT defines Life Cycle Approaches as a group of concepts, programs, tools, and data that involve identifying, understanding and reducing inputs (economic or environmental) and their associated impacts generated throughout the entire life cycle of a product, technology, or process.

Life Cycle Approaches are part of a toolkit for sustainable development. In making decisions, multiple complementary tools should be used to ensure a fully informed judgement. Traditionally, Life Cycle Approaches have focused on environmental inputs and impacts. However, economic and social inputs and impacts can also be examined to understand how a product, technology, or process addresses particular objectives. Figure 1 illustrates the main life cycle stages of a product. At every stage, environmental inputs such as raw materials and energy, economic inputs such as the cost of materials, and social inputs such as employment, may be required. A variety of impacts in the form of outputs may also be generated at each stage. These include environmental outputs such as carbon emissions and waste water, economic outputs such as profit and the cost of waste disposal, and social outputs such as the fair treatment of employees. For the purposes of this report, only environmental and economic inputs and impacts will be discussed.

FIGURE 1. PRODUCT LIFE CYCLE STAGES

Source: Adapted from United Nations Environment Programme No Date (a)

Life Cycle Approaches have the potential to inform policy and program decision making, as described in the text box below.

FIGURE 2. INTEGRATING LIFE CYCLE APPROACHES IN GOVERNMENT POLICY AND PROGRAM DEVELOPMENT

Step 3 – Policy Development and Step 4 – Policy Approval: The Government of Canada (GoC) has two existing tools at its disposal to generate better-informed decision making during the policy development stage – Strategic Environmental Assessments (SEAs) and Regulatory Impact Analysis Statements (RIAS). A RIAS is triggered during policy development that is regulatory in nature; a similar process could be undertaken for non-regulatory policy decision making as well. SEAs and RIAS are usually undertaken at different steps. In the context of policy development for Life Cycle Approaches, both the SEA and RIAS would be undertaken simultaneously, early in the process (Step 3). These two tools would be used to analyze the economic, environmental and social inputs needed for the policy to be implemented and would be used to predict the environmental, economic and social impacts that might result from its implementation. This would enable the Minister and Deputy Minister at Step 4 (Policy Approval) to have complete and relevant information before developing any new policy and taking it to Cabinet for approval.

Step 5 – Program Development and Step 6 – Policy Implementation: Performance measurement indicators need to be created to track the progress of policy implementation in the public sector. These indicators would measure the success of the policy in terms of economic, environmental, and social attributes unique to each policy initiative. These would be established during Step 3 (Policy Development) and would be dependent on various inputs and impacts as identified by the SEA and RIAS. The analysis from the earlier steps would inform later stages such as Step 5 (Program Development) and Step 6 (Policy Implementation). In the implementation phase, the initial policy goals (as set in the planning stages) would be reconciled with the realization of these goals. The four steps would be embedded in a comprehensive manner so the analysis, integration and performance measurement all interconnect.

The main strengths of Life Cycle Approaches are that they are based on a systems approach and provide the perspective of multiple indicators. Life Cycle Approaches help identify areas of focus to reduce inputs and impacts, and provide a basis through which governments and businesses can compare different options to achieve desired input and impact reductions. By including and considering multiple inputs and impacts over the life cycle, the holistic impact of a product, technology, or process can be better understood, thus enabling effective mitigation of the associated risks. This includes understanding the entirety of the risk and identifying the actors that are involved. Social and environmental impacts are often overlooked as they are harder to quantify than their economic counterparts; however, the use of Life Cycle Approaches facilitates their inclusion. Life Cycle Approaches enable governments and businesses to identify hot spots – that is, areas with the greatest impact – and thus target their efforts more efficiently. They also prevent organisations from making a decision that reduces the impact of one stage of the life cycle (e.g., manufacturing) while increasing the impact at another stage (e.g., disposal). Decision makers can use these approaches to increase their awareness of the potential impacts of their options by considering multiple impacts over the entire life cycle and thus make choices with better awareness of these trade-offs.

The scope of information – that is, the type of impacts or stages of the life cycle – included in the Life Cycle Approach can affect the strength of the result. The consideration of a single environmental impact, such as GHG emissions, nullifies the ability of Life Cycle Approaches to identify trade-offs related to different environmental impacts such as water use or electricity and, their cumulative impact.^§ This concern has been voiced about schemes that involve carbon footprinting.⁸ The consideration of only select aspects of the life cycle such as production or end-of-life is limiting, as it reduces the capacity to avoid unintentionally shifting the burden from one stage to another, which is a key objective of Life Cycle Approaches.⁹

The main strengths of Life Cycle Approaches are that they are based on a systems approach and provide the perspective of multiple indicators.

A broad range of concepts, programs, tools, and data and information described below have been created that can be used to incorporate Life Cycle Approaches into the decision-making process. Life Cycle Approaches can be applied at a variety of stages, including material, product, technology, project or service levels. The project level is important for improving the footprint of resource extraction, as is the case in the use of Life Cycle Assessment in the oil and gas and mining sectors. However, adding this perspective may be confusing if it is not done to consistent and accepted standards. The manner in which the findings or results of Life Cycle Approaches are used is also important.

[§] The benefit of only using one metric (e.g., carbon) is that it reduces the burden of information on companies and allows for easy comparison.

[8] Schmidt 2009

[9] Curran 2009.