The Go-To Place for Life Cycle literacy
Science-based understanding of potential socio-economic & environmental impacts
of products, processes, services, organizations, or systems throughout the life cycle
Who are we?
CRPG is a think tank working in the areas of Governance, Development, Inclusion, and Sustainability through a range of interventions including capacity building, research, advocacy, consultancy, strategy formulation, project design and implementation.
What is CRPG’s LCA hub?
A knowledge hub about impact assessments using life cycle approaches – LCT/M/A (Life Cycle Thinking/Management/Assessment), led and powered by a group of dedicated professionals from academia, industry & policy working in the areas of LCA and sustainable developmen
Who will find the hub useful?
- Students learning about sustainability and LCA fundamentals
- Professionals looking for basic understanding about life cycle approaches
- Anyone curious about how social & environmental impacts can be assessed more scientifically
Why life cycle approaches?
“ …. what if we could seamlessly calculate the full lifetime effect of our actions on the earth and on our bodies? Not just carbon footprints but social and biological footprints as well? What if we could think ecologically? That’s what psychologist Daniel Goleman describes in his forthcoming book, Ecological Intelligence. Using a young science called industrial ecology, businesses and green activists alike are beginning to compile the environmental and biological impact of our every decision — and delivering that information to consumers in a user-friendly way. That’s thinking ecologically — understanding the global environmental consequences of our local choices. “We can know the causes of what we’re doing, and we can know the impact of what we’re doing,” says Goleman, who wrote the 1995 best seller Emotional Intelligence. “It’s going to have a radical impact on the way we do business.”
Over the past couple of decades, industrial ecologists have been using a method called life-cycle assessment (LCA) to break down that web of connection. The concept of the carbon footprint comes from LCA, but a deep analysis looks at far more. The manufacture and sale of a simple glass bottle requires input from dozens of suppliers; for high-tech items, it can include many times more.”
From the 23 March 2009 (Annual) issue of the Time magazine (https://content.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,1884779_1884782_1884776,00.html).
Over the years understanding around life cycle approaches has grown immensely and methoologies for assesing impacts have gone beyond ecology to include social and economic impacts as well. Today there is a growing community of LCA practitioners which comes together at various LCA/LCM conferences around the world and LCA is bread and butter for many of them. However, till date there are clear challenges in adopting life cycle approaches because the quantitative measurement of impacts remains riddled with debates around data quality and other methodological issues. While the 17 years since publication of the Time magazine article have seen significant advances in the field, it remains a niche area that only experts seem to be talking about. Life cycle approaches are really simple to understand, yet remain shrouded in mystery due to the complexity attributed to operationalizing them. We at CRPG’s LCA hub believe that shying away from trying to understand a profound yet simple idea because it is difficult to operationalize at this point in time isn’t the best way to deal with it.
Backed by experts, our mission is to enhance access to basic understanding of life cycle approaches enabling better-informed choices vis-à-vis the planet as well as our socio-economic milieu. We do this by offering curious minds an easy and affordable way to demystify the world of LCA practitioners, whether it is to make a career in the field or simply to understand how to live better from a sustainability perspective.
If you are curious about LCA – CRPG’ LCA hub is for you.