You made an LCA, now what?

Hello Sustainability Managers!

I want to write this one for two people at once.

The first is whoever just got the LCA or PCF report back from a consultant, opened the PDF, felt a small wave of panic at how technical it looks and then quietly closed the laptop wondering what they’re actually supposed to do with it now that it exists.

The second is whoever hasn’t commissioned one yet and is trying to convince finance that this is worth a real budget line rather than a nice to have. If you’re either of those people, and if you’re a solo sustainability manager you’re probably both of them depending on the week, this issue is for you.

Quick bit of housekeeping before we get into it, since the title mixes two terms on purpose.

An LCA and a PCF are not the same deliverable, even though people use the acronyms almost interchangeably. A full LCA, governed by ISO 14040 and 14044, covers somewhere around sixteen or more impact categories, climate change yes, but also water use, land use, acidification, resource depletion and more. A PCF, governed by ISO 14067, is built on the same underlying methodology but narrows the lens to one thing, greenhouse gas emissions expressed in CO2 equivalent. In practice a PCF is an LCA with one impact category kept and the rest cut, which is exactly why it’s usually faster and cheaper to produce. That distinction matters for everything below, because a couple of the six uses only need a PCF and a couple genuinely need the full multi category picture, so knowing which one you’re sitting on changes what you can do with it immediately versus what needs a second commission later.

On the price tag question, since I know that’s the real reason some of you are still stuck at the “should we even do this” stage. Numbers vary wildly by consultant, region and product complexity, so treat these as ballparks rather than quotes, but a simplified or screening LCA typically lands somewhere between 5.000 and 10.000 euros, while a comprehensive one with full data collection across the supply chain can run 15.000 to 20.000 euros or more for a genuinely complex product. A PCF alone is usually a fraction of that, especially if you’re using software rather than a fully bespoke consultant engagement, since a lot of the newer platforms price per product or per subscription tier rather than per project.

The most successful pitch to whoever controls your budget isn’t “this is cheap/useful/the right thing to do”. It’s that the study can be reused in six different ways, so the real cost per use drops fast and at least one of those uses, which I’ll get to, makes your next piece of paperwork noticeably cheaper too.

Here’s the list, not ranked by importance, ranked by how naturally one leads into the next.

1) Find your hotspot before you redesign anything

This is the first thing to actually do with the report and it’s the one that get undervalued because they jump straight to communicating results instead of using them internally first. Somewhere in that data is the one lifecycle stage or material driving the majority of your impact and it’s very often not where people assume. I’ve seen packaging teams assume the plastic tub was the problem when the actual hotspot was a single high mileage ingredient shipped by air. Once you know where the weight actually sits, every future material swap, supplier change or packaging redesign has an actual target instead of a guess dressed up as intuition. If you only have a PCF rather than a full LCA, you can still do this, you’re just hunting for the carbon hotspot specifically rather than seeing whether you’re accidentally trading a carbon win for a water use loss somewhere else, which is exactly the kind of blind spot a full LCA catches and a PCF alone can’t. Plus, for the product developers, this could be an opportunity to defend a design choice by its impact.

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2) Turn it into an EPD if your buyers need something (somewhat) comparable

If you sell into construction, building materials or increasingly any B2B category where procurement teams score suppliers, a raw LCA report usually isn’t the deliverable they want, a verified EPD is. The genuinely good news here and this is worth putting directly in front of finance, is that the LCA is normally the single most expensive component of building an EPD, so if you’ve already got one, your next EPD is meaningfully cheaper than it would be starting from zero. Typical EPD costs run anywhere from around 8.000 to >20.000 euros depending on product complexity and which program operator you go through, with the LCA work itself usually eating the largest share of that. Walking in with existing LCA data doesn’t just save money, it also cuts the timeline, since a lot of that three to six month process is data collection you’ve already done.

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3) Answer buyer and retailer questionnaires without starting from scratch every time

If you’ve ever had a retailer or a B2B customer send over a sustainability questionnaire or an RFP asking for product level carbon data, you know how much time gets burned scrambling to produce a number under a two week deadline. Once you have a PCF or LCA sitting in a structured format, that becomes a five minute pull instead of a 5 weeks project. This is also where it’s worth knowing the WBCSD’s PACT and Pathfinder framework exists, since it’s becoming the standard way enterprise buyers expect product carbon data to be exchanged, especially for their own Scope 3 reporting. Getting your data into that format once means you stop being the bottleneck every time a new customer asks the same question in a slightly different spreadsheet.

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4) Back up your marketing claims instead of guessing at them (from 27 September)

Any comparative environmental claim, lower carbon than our previous version, more sustainable packaging, reduced footprint, needs actual substantiation from 27 September, not just under the EU’s Green Claims Directive but under general anti-greenwashing enforcement that’s picking up pace well beyond Europe too. Your LCA or PCF is the evidence file sitting behind whatever your marketing team wants to say. The distinction from earlier matters again here, a narrow carbon claim can usually lean on a PCF alone, but a broader claim like “more sustainable overall” really needs the full multi category LCA behind it, otherwise you risk making a claim that’s true on carbon and quietly false on something like water use, which is exactly the kind of thing that gets a claim challenged.

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5) Feed it straight into your Digital Product Passport

If you’ve been reading the last few issues, this one connects directly. The carbon footprint data required inside a DPP, especially for batteries where the deadline is already fixed for February 2027, isn’t a separate calculation you do from scratch, it’s built from the same underlying LCA or PCF work you’ve already commissioned. This is the clearest illustration of the reuse argument for whoever’s still asking why the upfront cost is worth it, the study you pay for once becomes the raw material behind a compliance requirement that’s landing on a fixed regulatory timeline regardless of whether you were ready for it.

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+1) Bonus: use it to prove your own function’s value

Here’s one use case that can help your career advancement, especially if you’re the only sustainability person in the building. Run the same LCA or PCF again after a material change, a supplier switch or a redesign and you now have an actual “before and after” number instead of a claim that things got better. That’s the difference between telling leadership “we made progress” and showing them a number that moved. If you’re a solo manager trying to justify your own role’s existence at renewal time, this is genuinely one of the strongest internal tools you have, because it turns your work from a cost center into something with a measurable delta attached to it.

That’s the six.

If you’re still building the case to commission your first one, my honest advice is to start with a PCF rather than a full LCA if budget is the blocker, since it unlocks four of the six uses above on its own, and upgrade to a full LCA once you know you need the EPD or the broader marketing claim specifically. If you’ve already got one sitting in a folder somewhere, go pull it back out this week, because the report doing nothing is the expensive version of this, not the report itself.

See you next Wednesday,

Gianluca